A/N: Some sexual situations, some bad language. Apologies to the real Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Boise City, Oklahoma.
Helena waited outside baggage claim. Myka had texted her that she would be picking her up in their rental car, so Helena had taken her bag, which contained the clothes she had worn in Kenosha and hadn't had time to launder, and picked a spot just outside the sliding doors. It was broiling, and the shadows thrown by the building weren't much cooler than the sunlight. But they were cooler, and they hid the t-shirt she had bought at a gift store, which was lavender and had 'Denver' written across the chest in purple metallic script. It was the most muted of the women's t-shirts on sale, and Helena desperately wanted to shed the top she had been wearing for the past 15 hours. So she had bought it and changed into it in the ladies room; all she needed were two tired, fretful children next to her, and she'd look like a mom desperately hoping that the family's summer vacation was over. She hadn't intended to look like a frumpy middle-aged mother when she saw Myka again after an almost two week absence, and she hadn't intended to see Myka at the Denver airport. The call had come in late the night before; she and Pete were booked on a 9:00 a.m. flight from Milwaukee the next day for home, but she learned she would be driving to Chicago and taking a flight to Denver instead. Claudia had said there was another instance of a replicated artefact, this time in western Oklahoma. Myka would be meeting her, and they would be driving down to Boise City. Wasn't the Boise City in Idaho enough, she had grumbled over the phone, couldn't the town's founders have come up with something more suggestive of the desolation of that part of the Great Plains and closer to what she actually felt, such as The Next Best Place to Hell? But she had reset her alarm for 4:00 a.m. Just in case she slept.
Once she had gotten to Chicago, her flight was cancelled because of mechanical problems, and she had been rebooked to Denver through Atlanta. Another delay, this time weather-related, and finally, several hours and two, maybe three, screwdrivers in coach later, she was walking up the jetway in Denver, wanting to crawl out of her clothes as quickly as possible. But the gift store sold only t-shirts and hats, not panties and pants. She could have walked down to the western wear store, where she could have picked up some boot-cut jeans. Yes, and she'd slip into them just before she went line dancing. Helena rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses.
Her head was already pounding, a combination of sleeplessness, the cramped confines of the airplane, and the three mixed drinks. She had bought a bottle of water in the gift store in addition to the t-shirt, and she drank from it as she looked for the economy car that Myka would be driving. It was a nearly five hour drive from Denver to Cimarron County, the westernmost county in the Panhandle, which would put them in Boise City around midnight. It would have been much shorter had they driven north from Amarillo, but it was cheaper to fly into Denver. Thanks to that spasm of DHS-inspired cost-consciousness, she was wearing a hideous lavender t-shirt and battling, unsuccessfully it seemed, a metaphoric screwdriver boring through her head.
A black SUV pulled in next to the curb, and Helena listlessly eyed it until she recognized the driver who had jumped out and was opening the back of the car. Yanking at her bag until it more or less wobbled obediently behind her, Helena hurried to the curb, aware that Myka was reading the design on her t-shirt and grinning. Helena expected a smart remark, a business-like "we're both agents here" hug, and the tossing of her suitcase into the SUV. And some of those elements did happen as expected, only in a different order, because first Myka grabbed her and held Helena tightly to her, leaving the suitcase to fall on its side and the bottle of water to drop to the concrete unnoticed. She stepped back but simply to reposition them so she could step in to Helena again and give her a decidedly "we're not just agents here" kiss. Myka broke the kiss long enough to whisper roughly next to her ear, "I've missed you so much." Then she resumed the kiss for a few seconds more before the shrill sound of an airport security whistle broke them apart, and Helena was left to dazedly touch her bottom lip as Myka pushed the suitcase between two others, still feeling the pressure of Myka's mouth as she had sucked that lip between her teeth. Taking the keys from a pocket of her shorts and walking backwards toward the driver's side of the SUV, Myka cocked her head and glanced at Helena's t-shirt, gaze zeroing in on the girlishly cursive 'Denver.' "Come to the big city for a good time, have you?"
"Are you going to give me one, or are you just going to tease me to death?" Helena challenged, but she knew that her ludicrously happy smile said she would take the teasing-to-death so long as Myka was her tormentor.
"Only teasing for now," Myka said, putting the SUV into gear as Helena buckled in and took off her sunglasses. Threading through the airport traffic, Myka shot her another grin, less broad but just as pleased. "How do you like the tank? With the kind of drive we have ahead of us, I wanted some leg room. And arm room. And, well, just room." Helena could have sworn Myka's cheeks were pinking, but she was sure it was only an accident of the sun, shining on. . . something. Jerking her head toward the back seat, Myka said, "I hope you don't mind that I want to push on. I picked you up a sandwich."
"Thank you." Helena unbuckled her seatbelt long enough to grab the bag from the seat. "I don't mean to sound like a whiny bitch, darling, but if you could have picked up some clean clothes for me, that would have been heavenly. Claudia gave me just enough advance notice to get to Chicago."
"That's what the extra suitcase has," Myka said smugly. The rare cocky smile she flashed at Helena grew more knowing. "Interesting collection of panties you have."
"Darling, don't act like you've never seen them."
"I've been too busy getting them off you to notice," Myka said. She changed lanes and increased the car's speed. "More lace than I'd expect for a former Warehouse agent and inventor."
Between bites of her sandwich, a smoked turkey and chutney concoction spicy enough to make her eyes water, Helena said, "If you'd had to wear knee-length cotton drawers for a good portion of your life, you'd appreciate something less. . . utilitarian. . . as well. But if it makes you feel better, I'm wearing a pair of pink grannies today."
"You are not," Myka said in disbelief.
"Pull over onto the shoulder, and I'll show you."
For a moment, Helena thought that Myka might take her up on her offer. There was a steadiness in how Myka held her gaze, a lift to her chin that suggested she might cross the several lanes of the interstate, and not only screech to a stop on the shoulder but also pull down Helena's pants herself. Helena found it difficult to swallow the mass of smoked turkey and chutney she had in her mouth for suddenly wanting Myka to do just that. The frustration of the waiting that had taken up most of her day, the headache, the awful t-shirt, all were gone in the visual Helena summoned of Myka pinning her between the seat and the door and easing down the zipper of her pants.
But Myka's eyes were back on the road. "As much as I'd like to, I can't see that causing a multi-car collision justifies it. For now, I'll take your word for it." Changing the subject, she said, "We've haven't talked since the first night you were in Kenosha. How did the retrieval go? Is Pete returning intact?"
Unbuckling her seatbelt again, Helena was examining the other treasures on the back seat: a 12-pack of water, from which she wrested a bottle; a stack of folders, which almost certainly detailed their newest retrieval and which Myka would foolishly expect her to read; and a scattering of maps and atlases. "In answer to your questions, we successfully acquired the artefact, which was not a replicated artefact, by the way, and Pete is, yes, intact, which is more a testament to my forbearance, I'll have you know, than to his behavior." The laughter bubbling in her voice undercut the severity of her tone.
Helena picked up a couple of the maps and resettled in her seat. The sun was beginning to set, but she could see the detail on the maps without needing to turn on the overhead light. They would take the exit for Highway 287, which held more interest for Myka than it did for her, as she let Myka's mini-lecture about the length of the highway, about where it began and where it ended, wash over her, following only the enthusiasm in Myka's voice. Helena looked at her, eyes almost stroking the long line of her legs, Myka's shorts having invitingly bunched up on her thighs. In her short-sleeved plaid blouse, the tangle of curls sweeping over the collar, Myka looked summery in the practical, no-nonsense, my shorts-are-stain-resistant-chinos way that she always wanted to present. Nothing could ruffle her, nothing could disturb her. But all Helena needed to do - well, she was pretty sure that it would be all she needed to do - was to stretch over and run her hand up a thigh, wriggle it under the shorts, and keep her fingers moving, and Myka's eyes would take on that slightly panicked look when someone, no, not someone, she called her bluff. Because Myka was never that in control, not on the inside, not when she was around. Helena had always sensed it but hadn't wanted to believe it, hadn't wanted to know she was responsible for making Myka feel as aching and hollowed-out as she felt. But things were different now -
"Don't do it," Myka said. "I know what you're thinking of doing. I'm driving, Helena. I need to focus." The note of warning was losing ground to a plaintiveness that surprised Helena. She was used to seeing Myka struggle harder against that loss of control, to give into it only if she could, paradoxically, limit it, restrict it. As she had the first time they had slept together, after their retrieval in New York, when Myka had invited Helena to come home with her with all the fire and passion of an offer to stay the night in her guest room, as if Helena were a friend passing through town. But the kiss at the airport earlier in the evening and now Myka, not admonishing or rebuking or refusing, but pleading with her, really, not to make her lose her concentration, drive them off into a ditch - although in a landscape this flat, where was the nearest ditch? - this was something new in their relationship. Helena wasn't sure whether she was more confused or aroused.
In the hopes of relaxing them both, she took a long breath and suggested, "Why don't I tell you about Kenosha and why it wasn't a retrieval of a replicated artefact. Then you can tell me about Boise City and why you and Claudia think this one is."
When she had lived in Boone, Helena had been only a couple of hours away, at most, from Kenosha but never had the occasion to go there. Having spent almost a week in the city, she saw no reason to return. It wasn't horrible, just unremarkable, a larger developed spot in an almost unbroken line of development trailing up the western shore of Lake Michigan from Chicago to Milwaukee. The only thing that was making Kenosha of interest to anyone besides a Kenoshan was the decidedly strange goings-on. At first it had been only a matter of a few people walking away from their jobs or homes in the middle of the day to sob hysterically or to sink into a depression so deep that they could barely be roused from it. Then had come the pile-ups on the interstate and drivers and passengers walking, sometimes crawling, away from the collisions laughing just as hysterically as others had cried, broken limbs and bloody cuts not even an afterthought. After a train derailment, when the engineer had been discovered wailing in the men's restroom, and a number of incidents involving small planes veering off runways, when the pilots were found breathless with laughter in their seats, the Warehouse became involved. There was no upside in letting the NTSB, which was investigating the accidents, stumble upon an artefact. Months before, Warehouse agents had been sent to Kenosha to retrieve an artefact, a red rubber nose that had belonged to Emmett Kelly, which caused the possessors to attempt the ham-handed magic tricks and clumsy acrobatics performed by circus clowns, actions which in and of themselves weren't harmful, except when the person was trying to 'disappear' a baby in a top hat or was on the verge of taking a swan dive off a tenth-floor apartment balcony. The fear, Claudia's and Jane Lattimer's, was that the nose had been replicated, with the same drifting of its properties that had afflicted the replicated artefacts in New York.
Helena and Pete had spent the better part of two days reinvestigating the previous retrieval, re-interviewing the people who had come into contact with the clown nose artefact, but there was no apparent connection between them and the people who were being affected by the new artefact, whatever it was. More significantly, none of the victims were suffering the fatal side effect of a replicated artefact, lapsing into unconsciousness and then slipping into an irreversible coma. The injuries suffered were the result of the falls, collisions, and traffic accidents that the hysterical crying and laughing caused. The third day of the retrieval had been spent talking to victims who could no longer remember what had led them to walk into the middle of busy intersections, crying so hard that they literally couldn't see the stoplight, or, conversely, had doubled them over with laughter as they drove their children not to but into school. At 10:00 that night Helena and Pete were staring grumpily at each other over their meals at a local bar and grill. Furthering souring her mood, because she was already unhappy that they were returning to their hotel rooms too late at night for her to do anything more than send limp texts to Myka on the order of 'Another long day. Miss you,' was her realization that she wanted Pete's burger, not her own 'lite' entree. There was a burst of laughter from the bar as a man, unsteadily waving his glass, was shouting predictions about the upcoming football season, insisting that the Packers were going to win the Super Bowl.
Pete had twisted his head to take in the scene at the bar. "Don't miss that. All the clowning around that no one thinks is funny, and you're too drunk to notice."
"I can assure you that your nonalcohol-induced clowning around isn't funny, and yet you remain blithely ignorant to -." Helena cut herself off and raised her eyebrows at Pete. In a completely different tone, she said, "The crying jags, the inappropriate laughter. . . . "
"The not-remembering afterward," Pete finished for her. "Like blackouts. It's as though they're on the worst bender of their lives." He groaned and rubbed his face. "We've been on the wrong track all this time. But we're in the heart of beer country - it could be almost anything."
But it wasn't. Going back for another series of interviews, they isolated the commonality among the victims - they all had commemorative beer mugs from the same brewery in Milwaukee, and each of the victims had used the mug the night before he or she descended helplessly into tears or, laughing all the while, plowed into the back wall of the garage. The beverages had run the gamut, from alcohol to chicken soup, which meant that it was the mug, and not what was in it, that was the issue. Spending their fourth and fifth days of the retrieval going through kitchen cupboards, man caves, and more than a few attics and dropping the mugs into their neutralizing bags, Helena reflected that this was yet another thing new Warehouse agents were never told - how much of their time would be spent sifting through all the things that ordinary families ordinarily accumulate in order to find that one extraordinary object that was the artefact: school photos, Mom's souvenir spoon collection, Dad's fishing lures. Most of the time the items held no significance to anyone but family members, and sometimes not even them. At other times, what the agents would find was grim. During an artefact retrieval during her first few months at 13, Helena had opened a shoebox stuffed in a dark corner of a teenager's closet to find Ziploc bags of prescription medicines he had been stealing from his parents. On occasion what turned up in their searches was heartbreaking. When she had been at 12, she and her partners had frequently found themselves picking through mementoes of children lost in infancy or to illnesses for which the nineteenth century had no cures. Helena had always closed her eyes when she discovered a rattle or a baby's hairbrush bound to bunches of dried flowers and yellowed expressions of sympathy, thanking chance, if nothing else, for sparing her a similar loss. Until she lost Christina, and then she would toss the mementoes aside in her search, as if they were so much garbage to be removed from the house.
On the sixth day of the retrieval, she and Pete had driven to Milwaukee to speak with the president of the brewery. It wasn't always clear why an object had become an artefact, and if the agent couldn't explain why, Caturanga had drummed it into her, he couldn't be certain that the threat had been completely neutralized. "Why only Kenosha?" Pete had wondered on the drive up. "Shouldn't we be seeing it in Milwaukee too?" "Multiple artefacts," Helena had muttered, barely listening to him, which was typical of a great many of their interactions, "but they don't feel like replicated artefacts." At which Pete had yelled, "'Feel like?' Did you hear yourself? You can deny it all you want, H.G., but partnering with me has taught you a few things. Like the importance of intuition -"
"And the centrality of fart jokes and so-called funny pictures of monkeys to bonding with you. Which is why, Peter, and you and I are never meant to be -"
"Lovers. I know, Mykes is kind of old-fashioned about things like fidelity. But we can long for each other from afar." The goofily lovelorn look he gave her, a crimped mouth, cross-eyed affair, had Helena laughing in spite of herself.
They hadn't found much to laugh at in the brewery's executive suite where they had found the president unhappily surveying the half-boxed contents of his office. The brewery, a family-owned enterprise, had been sold on the eve of the 145th anniversary of its founding, to a conglomerate whose best known products were cleaning products and TV dinners. The president had been attending a charity golf event in Kenosha when he had received a call from the chairman of the brewery's board informing him that the brewery had been sold and that his services would no longer be needed. The president had been carting around a sample case of the mugs in the trunk of his car; trying to decide whether mugs or pilsner glasses were the way to go for commemorative gifts to the employees. Well, screw that. After a few (or more) consoling drinks at the club house, he had taken the box from the trunk and handed out mugs to every golfer he saw until the box was empty.
"That was our grand mission in Kenosha, to neutralize an artefact created by a self-pitying executive, who no doubt will be in receipt of a handsome severance package," Helena grumped. Becoming more indignant, she said, "Claudia actually thought someone would want to replicate the properties of an Emmett Kelly artefact. What does recreating the ability to bobble a simple magic trick or take a pratfall get one?"
"I bet Pete said he would pay money to have a replicated clown artefact," Myka said with a smile in her voice.
"That just proves my point," Helena exclaimed. "Who with a shred of common sense would bother?"
"The artefact or artefacts we've been sent to Ellis to retrieve are a different matter entirely," Myka said soothingly. "I think if you open the glove compartment, you'll find a Heath bar."
"Are you trying to placate me? And did you just say Ellis? I thought we were going to Boise City."
"We're staying in Boise City, the artefact's in Ellis." Myka nodded toward the glove compartment. "C'mon, open it."
"Then why aren't we staying in Ellis? Is the Super 8 in Boise City more palatial?" Helena crossed her arms, peering at Myka in the deepening gloom of the car.
"Babe, eat your Heath bar. I'll explain it in a minute."
Helena tried to look miffed, but she was already opening the glove compartment. She did love toffee, she had suffered through an excruciating day, and she was wearing a horrid shirt. Moreover, she had just relived the six days - six full days - she spent in the company of Pete Lattimer. She deserved that toffee. She deserved to have Myka feed it to her, but she would settle for nibbling the candy bar in the dark. Tearing open the wrapper, she half-heartedly offered a part of the bar to Myka, who waved it away.
"You know how I feel about sugar." Myka had assumed a straight face, but her voice began to crack with laughter at her own absurdity. "Besides, I think it's the candy bar equivalent of butter brickle ice cream. It makes me feel like I'm dating my great-grandmother."
"Incest aside, I can imagine what a staid affair that would be," Helena said as she bit off a corner of the Heath bar. "Cautious, conscientious, observant of all the proprieties." Wriggling against the seatbelt so that she could turn toward Myka, Helena asked, "Is there anyone in your family tree who remotely approached being a free spirit?" She bit off another piece, letting the chocolate melt on her tongue.
"I believe most Berings thought a carriage was a conveyance, not a bedroom on wheels," Myka said dryly.
"If only they had been bedrooms on wheels," Helena said a little sadly. "They were cramped and smelled horribly for the most part, and a woman would spend most of the time she allotted for an assignation getting her skirts above her waist."
"Jesus, Helena," Myka said, the exhalation more sigh than laugh.
Taking a bigger bite of the bar and pushing the toffee momentarily to the side of her mouth in what she only belatedly realized was a Pete-like display of manners (or lack thereof), Helena said, "I told you that Christina was conceived in a carriage." After swallowing the toffee, she continued, "Considering the difficulties involved, how rare it was to consummate . . . at least to the woman's satisfaction, it was a minor miracle that her conception happened. Maybe Croydon sperm were exceptionally hardy, but I always thought that that tiny egg must have known who it was going to be." She paused. "It's about the only time in my life when I believed in a 'soul.' Because how else could such an indifferent coupling produce Christina unless she was only waiting to be born?" She felt Myka's fingers lightly touch her face and then, clearing her throat, Myka said, "About the artefact that might have been replicated. . . ."
Two Warehouse agents had been dispatched to Oklahoma City to investigate the source of the literally spellbinding oratory of a state representative. Never known as a magnetic public speaker, the representative would no sooner begin advocating a measure before the House than all the representatives would roar their unanimous approval. The senate had been able to block most of the bills, which were more radically conservative than they had the courage to pass, even in a conservative state. Bills to abolish the state income tax, to make morning prayer mandatory in the workplace, to roll back every environmental protection and regulation. The agents discovered that the representative would place a battered Bible on the table whenever he rose to speak. When they managed to substitute another Bible, equally battered, the representative would stammer and mumble and eventually trail off into incoherence.
"It was Aimee Semple McPherson's Bible," Myka said.
"Ah, yes, a televangelist before the term was coined," Helena mused. "Bit of a fraud though, wasn't she?" She felt rather than saw Myka's shrug.
"She has her detractors. But what no one can deny is that, for a while, she was enormously popular. She's also thought to be one of the first people to understand the power of the media to attract a following."
"At last, an artefact worth replicating." Helena looked out the window. With the exception of the twin cones of the SUV's headlights and those of a few other vehicles, there was no light. She couldn't remember the last time she had seen such unrelieved blackness, other than when she had been encased in bronze. That was an unsettling thought. Blocking it from her mind, she pulled her t-shirt away from her chest, convinced that she had dropped chocolate on it. The chocolate had probably already melted, and the next time Myka saw her in the light, she'd look like a superannuated five-year-old. How romantic. The chocolate stains would give her an excuse to throw the t-shirt away, although she felt the spangly 'Denver' would be written on her chest for days.
In the light from the dashboard, she could see that Myka was running her hand through her hair. "We can't enter Ellis because this new artefact, potentially replicated from McPherson's Bible, seems to have affected the whole town. The state police has blocked all access to it." A hard tug at the hair. The more Myka fiddled with her hair, the more difficult Helena could count on the retrieval being. She had been introduced to the Bering scale of retrieval difficulty soon after joining 13. A few passes of Myka's hand through her hair meant the retrieval presented only a moderate level of difficulty. Repeated tugging at her hair presaged a retrieval of significant danger. Then there was the retrieval when Myka had reputedly pulled at her hair so frequently that the curls stood out from her head at right angles. That was the retrieval when both she and Pete had ended up in the hospital. The New York retrieval had occasioned only a modest level of hair tugging, if Helena remembered correctly. Ellis, if Myka's early hair-tugging was any indication, was going to be a bad one.
"The few people who managed to escape the town describe everyone falling under a spell, gathering around a TV, a radio, a computer monitor, anything capable of broadcasting or displaying a signal. It didn't matter whether they were on, people were just as transfixed by a blank screen." Myka rubbed her shoulders against the back of the seat, trying to unknot muscles. "The ones who escaped were the ones already on their way out of town, a trucker, a rancher, the mailman starting his rural routes, and even they said it was almost impossible not to stay and join the rest."
"So, as far as anyone knows, everyone in Ellis is still grouped around a TV," Helena said musingly. "How long has it been?" A sign on the side of the highway flashed past them. Boise City was another 75 miles away.
"Long enough for the governor to shut down all media coverage - in the interest of the public good - and to discreetly contact various government agencies." Myka pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to smother a yawn. "Did I just see a sign saying Boise City was about an hour away?"
Helena risked drawing her fingers slowly up Myka's thigh, letting them linger at the hem of Myka's shorts. "If you think I'm going to let you sleep after not seeing you for an eternity, you're sadly mistaken. As soon as we check in to the Boise City Days Inn or whatever passes for five-star accommodations there, I'm going to. . . ." She strained against her seatbelt to put her lips against Myka's neck.
"Take pity on me," Myka groaned, more seriously than not. "Ever since I've been home, I've been sleeping in that damn tree house. Drew hardly leaves it. My first day back, we had to go out for air mattresses because he wanted to stay in the captain's cabin all night. He keeps spouting things like 'A captain has to stay with his ship.' I'm pretty sure he means a captain should go down with his ship, but I don't have the heart to tell him that a pirate captain probably wouldn't be so self-sacrificing." She didn't seem to notice that Helena's hand was inching upward. "It's a beautiful tree house, Helena, and I love you for building it for him, but you're going to stay out there with him next time."
Myka had said she loved her. Granted, it was the jokey kind of declaration someone makes when somebody buys her a frappuccino after a hard day, but Helena wasn't proud, not when it came to Myka anyway, she would take it. When Myka parted her legs to ease Helena's access, and her breathing became faster, more audible, Helena's jaws clamped so hard in surprise that she thought she might have cracked a tooth. With her other hand, she fumbled to release the seatbelt. Myka didn't object to that either. "It's all about the angle here, darling," Helena said softly. "And it helps to be unencumbered. I'll take my chances that you're not going to cross lanes." Sliding closer to Myka, she looked at the virtually empty stretch of highway in front of them. "And take out a jackrabbit or tumbleweed."
"If I don't want to fall asleep behind the wheel, it's either keep talking about Ellis . . . or this." Myka slumped against her eat, shifting her hips up and closer to Helena's hand. "And I have really, really missed you."
"Really, really missed? Is that a euphemism, darling, as opposed to having only missed me? Really, really suggesting this, of course." Helena's hand edged underneath the leg of Myka's panties. "A vast improvement over calling out states from license plates." She traced whorls of wiry hair and then, parting skin so soft that it seemed to sluice between her fingers, like water, she teased, "Why didn't we think of it years ago?"
Myka gasped out a laugh. "Come to think of it, we did do a lot of snacking on those road trips. Were we sublimating?"
Her forehead brushing against Myka's headrest, feeling the muscles in her jaw, her throat, swell in sympathy as her fingers stroked, Helena said, "I was fond of those chocolate snack cakes with the cream centers." She moved her head down to kiss the rim of Myka's ear peeping palely through her hair. "I'd break the cake in half to get at the center first, then scoop out the cream and lick it off my fingers."
"You did not," Myka objected breathily, but she freed a hand from the steering wheel to press Helena's hand harder against her.
"True, I didn't," Helena said just as breathily. "But it seemed an appropriate embellishment." With her other hand, she unbuttoned Myka's shorts and pulled down the zipper, trying not to jostle the steering wheel. "You pretended that you were satisfied with your Twizzlers, but I always found a snack cake missing." She lightly rubbed Myka's abdomen. She loved the sensation of soft skin undergirded by the smooth, hard plane of muscle, the tactile version of a sweet-salty combination. Or maybe she loved that it was Myka's skin and Myka's muscle.
Myka failed to bite back a groan. "It could have been Pete, you know."
"It could have been, but he didn't leave a chocolate cake crumb or two in the corners of his mouth." Aware of the precariousness of her balance, hands doing other things than supporting her, Helena leaned in and kissed the corner of Myka's mouth. "And if he had, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to lick it away, as I wanted to do with you."
"I couldn't have left crumbs because I didn't eat the cakes," Myka murmured, weakly, in protest. As Helena accelerated her stroking, her own breath catching, Myka moaned and shifted to allow her more access, then just as suddenly stopped. "I am not going to come like this. I'm a 43-year-old woman who is driving a tank down a US highway."
The words sounded more resolute than her voice, and Helena said, "I'm almost there myself, darling. I don't see the harm in allowing ourselves just a little bit more time."
"Helena." Said sternly, as the old, familiar but no less loveable Myka would.
"Should I zip up your shorts and rebutton them on my way out?" Helena asked sweetly.
"No." Myka sighed, albeit raggedly. "About Ellis."
"I believe you left off with the governor discreetly contacting various government agencies," Helena echoed Myka's sigh. "Unlike most, I can multi-function, you know."
"Yes, because you're a genius," Myka said as she awkwardly tried to zip up her shorts.
Even in the limited glow of the car's interior, it was painful to watch, and with a maternal cluck, Helena reached over and yanked up the zipper and pushed the button through the buttonhole. "All better now?" At Myka's exasperated hiss, Helena said, "I'm assuming one of those government agencies was the Department of Homeland Security."
"Ultimately, but he called the CDC before he called us. A team went in; they've yet to come out."
"And now the governor thinks it could be an act of domestic terrorism?" Helena said sarcastically.
"At least it won't sound quite as ridiculous when we say it this time," Myka said, lifting the hair at the back of her neck, leaving Helena to wonder what this signaled on the Bering hair scale.
"Again, I have to ask, as I did with Jonas Salk's lab coat and Nick the Greek's lucky dice, what makes you think Aimee Semple McPherson's Bible was replicated? I could name you any number of artefacts that put people under spells."
"I know," Myka conceded. "It may not be her Bible, but the state representative who had it? He's from Boise City. And before you ask, Jacqui's already researching any connections between him, our guys in New York, and Congressmen Jaffee and Perkins."
Taking the momentary silence as an occasion to sigh especially loudly, because she wanted Myka to know just how disgruntled she was that she was using her hands to stuff sandwich and candy bar wrappers in the sandwich bag, along with a pile of used napkins (and thank God Myka had thought to bring extra), rather than using them to their mutual benefit between Myka's thighs, Helena waited for Myka's reaction. Nothing. Myka had her eyes on the road, the picture – now – of an attentive, responsible driver. Helena preferred the other one, the one who had been on the verge of making US 287 a much more interesting highway. Helena leaned her head against the passenger window. There had to be some Boise City citizen watching a late night TV talk show or eating a midnight bowl of ice cream, there had to be a flicker of an electric light somewhere out there. Granted, people here were probably outnumbered by cows, but there had to be some evidence of human habitation. Where was the omnipresent sight of a McDonald's golden arches? Leave all hope behind, ye who enter here. She might not have gotten the quote right, but she thought Dante would have agreed with the spirit of her assessment.
She felt Myka's hand on her leg, on her knee, to be exact. She felt like a benchwarmer being subtly encouraged by her coach to do the team proud. When Myka said "We have a meeting with the Cimarron County sheriff tomorrow morning," she could almost hear Myka reminding Drew that he had school tomorrow.
She wasn't a child, more especially she wasn't Myka's child, and though she knew she should be thinking about the problem in Ellis, what remained of the night was theirs. It didn't belong to the Warehouse. "Not too early, I hope." She wanted Myka to feel the heat of her look, to feel as if they were in their hotel room now and Helena was undressing her with her teeth. Yes, it was an exaggeration because buttons would be hell on teeth, but she thought working Myka's panties down with her teeth was a possibility.
"Nine. You need to make sure you're sufficiently recovered by then." Myka had turned her head in Helena's direction, but her look, which Myka was undoubtedly hoping was burning its own hole through the darkness, was, Helena was sure, that of a senior Warehouse agent. At least Myka didn't have Artie's eyebrows. Yet.
"Darling, I can function quite well on precious little sleep. If, however, you set the meeting for nine because of the rigors of travel, although I'm fairly certain you weren't on your way to the airport at 4:30 in the morning -"
"Did you forget what you were boasting about just a few hours ago? I have my own plans for us, and they don't have us rolling out of bed until 8:30. So, Granny in your granny panties, you might want to rest up while you still can."
Just hearing Myka talk to her like that made her want to squirm - in an entirely pleasurable way. Helena smiled to herself. "You did steal snack cakes from me all those years ago, didn't you?"
Myka laughed. "Of course I did. I would scarf one down while you were in a gas station bathroom and then wonder why it didn't taste as good as it looked when you were eating it."
"How was there space in the car for you and me and Pete and what seems, now, the unfairly discredited whole of Freudian psychology?" Helena shook her head in mock disgust.
"Hmmm, and we're in a big car with plenty of room and a package of those snack cakes in my suitcase." Myka was suddenly very focused on her driving.
Helena sent her another look, one that was frankly admiring. "Have I told you lately that I love you?"
"No, but you will, many times."
Helena couldn't swear to it, because it was too dim to tell what kind of smile Myka had on her face, but she was pretty sure it had a cocky angle to it.
. . . . .
Myka had wisely set the alarm of the room's 1980s-era digital clock. Wisely, because when Helena opened her eyes for the first time since falling asleep, exhausted, shortly before dawn, it was only after the alarm had been beeping for several minutes. 8:35. Swallowing a groan, Helena parted Myka's hair to kiss her behind her ear and to rub her nose against the slight bulge of bone behind it. Was she so besotted that she thought even Myka's skull was adorable? She caressed Myka's hip and then the curve of her butt, which was glued to Helena's abdomen. "Darling, we have 25 minutes to get showered, dressed, and to the sheriff's office."
Somewhere beneath the tangle of her hair, Myka said, "It's a small town. Give me five more minutes."
"Shouldn't I be the one saying that?" Helena chuckled. "You're the early riser." Feeling her skin pull as she began to move away from Myka, she laughed softly again and said, "But then 'usual' wasn't operative for us last night, was it?"
"Next time remind me we're too old for that." Only Myka's hair was moving, a couple of stands stirring in the faint puff of air as she spoke.
"Never," Helena said, with another kiss and a slap of Myka's butt. "But I think we need to clean up in our respective bathrooms."
Myka raised her head and gave Helena a sleepy yet knowing look. "You don't trust me after last night?"
"I don't trust me, and, besides, aren't there people we have to de-Svengali?" Helena swung her legs over the bed and froze, seeing the motel room carpet. How had she allowed her bare feet to touch it last night? Silly question, of course she knew why she hadn't cared about the state of the carpet last night.
At first she had been too tired to care. There had been no lights of Boise City ahead of them, only a larger, darker mass that gradually began to separate into a cluster of homes, a post office, a bank, and, on the other side of town, their motel, The Cimarron. It, too, had been dark, the keys to their rooms in a manila envelope taped to the office door with the names Berrings and Well written on the front.
"Love the security. . . and the spelling," Helena muttered as she got back into the SUV and tucked the envelope between her seat and the console. The motel had a typical L shape, and their rooms were toward the end of the longer arm of the L. The night obscured the imperfections of the exterior, but when Helena entered her room and flicked on the light, she looked with dismay at the bed frame and dresser with their scarred walnut veneers, the casual chair with its nubby orange upholstery, straight from the set of Mad Men, and the queen-sized bed with its worn bedspread. She had spent many nights in motels like these, she reminded herself; The Cimarron was better than some, worse than others. Until she saw the bathroom, which was clean but consisted of a toilet, sink, and shower stall with an aging plastic shower curtain. Spartan would have applied to a higher level of creature comforts.
Muttering to herself, she returned to the bedroom and looked at the carpet. It was a muddy brown that was certain to be hiding a multitude of sins among its fibers, and which she could only hope had been recently vacuumed. She tried the handle of the door that connected to Myka's room. Given the room's underachieving, she half-expected it to be unlocked. It wasn't. What willful ignorance had made her think that Boise City, as the county seat, might offer a Days Inn or Quality Inn or any other of those economy hotels, which were hardly romantic getaways, but whose blandly decorated rooms didn't smother a romantic impulse on sight. She could no more imagine wildly flinging the bedspread and sheets from the bed and pushing Myka down onto the mattress than she could -. At a minimum, she did have to sleep in the bed. Gingerly she tugged back the sheets, white, thin, and a little musty smelling, but there were no obvious stains or sunken places. She would pay for her boasts in the SUV about keeping Myka up the rest of the night, but. . . she took one more look around the room. Above the bed was a painting, of mushrooms, it seemed, at a river crossing. The mushrooms resolved themselves into a herd of cows when Helena put on her glasses to take a closer look. Cows with very stumpy legs. The painting was better when she had thought they were mushrooms. Seriously, how could she could focus on making love to Myka when that was above them?
She hoisted the suitcase Myka had brought her onto the table, there had to be something, a top and shorts, a nightgown, she could wear. She would shower, put on something that would pass for sleepwear, and hope that Myka's libido had also suffered a knock-out blow from The Cimarron. Perhaps they could just spoon the rest of the night. The wheezing of the room's wall unit air conditioner suggested that it was doing all it could to keep the room at the temperature of warm milk. Helena wasn't going to challenge it further.
Stripping quickly, she tiptoed into the bathroom, noting the one towel over the towel rack. Both bath towel and hand towel? Incredible. She took the washcloth draped over it into the shower with her. The water pressure was indecisive, and there was no light near the stall; she had the distinct impression that their stay at The Cimarron would be one very narrow step above camping. As she rinsed her hair, she thought she heard a voice say, brightly, "Towel service," but that couldn't be right, and then she saw a shadow against the shower curtain. Without thinking, she swept the curtain to the side, pulling the intruder into the stall and slamming her up against the tiled wall, her forearm pressing into the woman's throat. Kenpo was fine in its way, but sometimes the crude power of street fighting was all you needed.
Myka stared at her wide-eyed, but before Helena could drop her arm or apologize, the surprise died in Myka's eyes to be replaced by a look that did nothing to lessen the rapid beating of Helena's heart. "Don't stop," she said, her voice strained by the pressure of Helena's arm. Helena frowned at her, confused, but Myka was smiling, the invitation clear. "Don't say anything, and don't stop."
She hadn't. Helena still didn't know how to characterize how they had been with each other, what they had done to one another, hours later. In the shower stall once again, she soaped herself, noticing the red marks where Myka had clutched her, dug into her. The "Don't stop" and smile from someone else would have been the invitation to a game that Helena had played before. But Myka wasn't following a script in a role play; the vulnerability and the trust were as real as the surprise at being so roughly grabbed and the flare of desire that had followed it. She wasn't surrendering but offering herself, and while Helena, in the past, would have treated the words and smile as a move she needed to parry, she relaxed the pressure of her arm and dropped her head to make amends, kissing, licking, nibbling at Myka's throat until Myka's fingers were hooking into her waist and the "Don't stop" became incoherent stammering.
Every time she looked into Myka's eyes, marveling at how far she could see into them, past Myka's marriage and Boone and Yellowstone, even past Tamalpais, to the first moment they had seen each other, she felt those eyes opening her up in turn. Helena, seeing herself in Myka's eyes, felt the good and bad of her balance. The weight of what she had done a century and more ago, what she had tried to do in this century, she would always carry with her. Lebecque and Poule, the disaster of her time-traveling, the students in Egypt, Yellowstone, they were a burden, but there was ballast on the other side, not the least of which was Myka herself. Not relieved of her sins but not defined by them either. If this was grace she was experiencing with this woman, in this bed, she felt no uplift, but she did feel steady, righted. Which was still more than she deserved.
When she came, it didn't sound like she had had a revelatory experience in the midst of it; maybe she was a little louder, the cries a little more ragged, but nothing that this room hadn't been witness to many times over. Yet it wasn't her imagination that Myka held her closer than usual, and she knew she wasn't hearing things when she heard Myka say, "I'm always there to catch you, Helena."
Helena shook herself awake and turned off the shower. Dressing hurriedly, she slammed, or attempted to slam the door behind her, but it was too warped to fit easily within the frame, and she had to tug it shut. Dismissing room 11 with a glare, Helena turned to find Myka waiting for her next to the SUV. She was wearing one of her DHS-approved suits, black blazer, black pants, white, spread-collared blouse, and she looked entirely capable of hauling Helena back from whatever precipice, physical or moral, she might teeter on next. But Myka seemed unaware of the admiration in which Helena held her, glancing with concern at her watch. "We have two minutes to make our meeting with Sheriff Paulson."
"Factoring in rush hour traffic that gives us a minute to spare. Perhaps we can swing by a Starbucks." As Myka's brows drew together in annoyance over her sunglasses, Helena said, "What? If we're five minutes late, he's going to shop the mess in Ellis to another bidder? We're their last best hope."
However, another potential bidder was precisely what greeted them when they entered the sheriff's office five minutes later. (Four minutes had been taken up by Myka signing over her gun to a deputy's care and Helena's answering the deputy's questions about why someone from England would come all the way to Boise City.) Unlike Sheriff Paulson, who greeted them with the genially relaxed courtesy that reminded Helena of how long it could take small town law enforcement to get to the point of a meeting, the other visitor suffered the introductions and the offers of coffee and banana bread (freshly baked by the sheriff's wife) with ill-grace. He was Major Lowry of the Oklahoma Air National Guard on "special assignment," he said, to help "resolve the threat in Ellis."
As Helena bit into a slice of banana bread, Myka said carefully, "We need to find out what the problem is before we try to resolve it."
The sheriff had had extra chairs brought in, but Major Lowry preferred to stand, stiffly. His gray hair was cut close to his head, giving it the sandpapery look of a match head, and Helena had the idle, but not pleasant, thought, feeling the tension emanating from him, that if she were to scrape her thumb nail against his head that, like a match, he would explode into flame.
"I think the problem is clear," he said dismissively. "Something has taken over that town, nothing seems to be effective against it, and it poses a grave threat to more than this county."
"All the more reason," Myka said with strained patience, "to try to identify what this threat is."
"Sheriff Paulson," Helena cut in, "are there reports of any other communities in the county being similarly affected?" She reached for another slice of banana bread, prettily fanned out on a paper plate on the sheriff's desk. She was hungry, but it was good, even for banana bread. For Myka and Major Lowry to have banana bread, they would have to break eye contact to locate the plate, and neither seemed willing to be the first to look away. Leaving them locked in their stony stares, Helena smiled winningly at the sheriff. "This is very good, you know. Very moist."
"The wife throws in some shredded zucchini and a little bit of applesauce. That's always been her complaint about banana bread, gets too dry." Rocking back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head, the sheriff squinted at Myka and Major Lowry before squinting up at the ceiling. "We blocked off the highway and a county road that run through Ellis, about five miles on either side. Boundary seems to be holding, five miles or more away and you're fine, any closer and you're a zombie." Disturbed by his own comparison, the sheriff hastened to say, "Not like from The Walking Dead, more like. . . ." He searched for another cultural reference. "Like The Stepford Wives."
Wiping her fingers on a napkin she took from a stack next to the banana bread, Helena slowly lifted her eyes to the major. "It would seem that the threat isn't growing, Major Lowry. Let us conduct our investigation. I hardly think bombing Ellis is the solution."
The other three looked at her with varying degrees of alarm. "That is what we're talking about, aren't we? Why else would an officer from the Air National Guard be here?" She had never been much of a conciliator, complimenting the sheriff on the banana bread was about as far as she could take it.
Uncomfortable, Major Lowry shifted his feet. "I'm not at liberty to discuss any military options."
"I believe the only time the United States bombed its citizens, it did so accidentally. I wouldn't think anyone, no matter how worrisome the situation is, would be anxious to give that order." Helena crumpled her napkin and casually tossed it into the wastebasket. "There's no need to succumb to hysteria." She thought she heard Myka sharply inhale, but her attention was focused on Major Lowry.
The major shifted his feet again, but the discomfort stopped at his feet. He was gripping his hands, tightly, in front of his waist, and his stare was, if anything, harder. "As I said," he repeated evenly, "I'm not at liberty to discuss military options. But what I can say is that it would be unwise to consider the threat in Ellis contained. We need to be prepared for when, not if, it begins to expand. And that's not hysteria speaking, Agent Wells." He turned his head back toward Myka, and Helena almost expected to hear the sound of rocks grinding together as his neck moved from right to left. "I think if you speak with your management at Homeland Security, you'll find that they're in agreement that we need to resolve things quickly. The governor wants to minimize the risk as soon as possible. You have three days and then, if the threat hasn't been neutralized, we'll need to reconsider the situation."
The sheriff had remained quiet, but the red mottling his face expressed his opinion. Closing his eyes, as if he were counting to ten, he let out a sigh. "I don't know what resources the two of you have here, but my deputies and I will provide you anything you need. One of my men can drive you out to the boundary, if you'd like. Don't know whether seeing the surroundings will help, doesn't look much different than here, but," he paused, sending a not entirely respectful look in the major''s direction, "we'd like this settled without a lot of fuss. We're a pretty self-reliant bunch. Have to be, out in the middle of nowhere." The sheriff laughed, although his geniality had been all but replaced by wearied concern. "There's hardly anyone in Ellis I don't know. If you can fix whatever's gone wrong and leave the place still standing, we'd all be in your debt."
Myka smiled at him, the stubborn tilt to her jaw that had been proxy for a stabbing finger when she argued with the major all but gone. "That's what we're hoping for, too. Any information you or your staff can provide us on Ellis would be helpful, any unusual activity that's been going on, anything that sets it apart." She glanced at Major Lowry, who, in apparent disinterest, had walked to a window overlooking a tiny patch of grass with a few straggling petunias. "Anything you can share from any aerial reconnaissance you've been doing, Major Lowry, would also be helpful." Her jaw was lifting again, and her voice held little of the friendliness that had characterized it when she was speaking to the sheriff.
One rigid shoulder lifted infinitesimally. "We're operating out of an office down the hall. You're welcome to come with me, and I'll show you a few images."
The sheriff pushed back his chair, not reluctant to begin ushering them out of his office, anxious, Helena supposed, to have the federal nose, as represented by the unlikely trio that she and Myka and the major made, out of his business, which, until now, probably provided no more excitement than the occasional shutting down of a meth lab. Chiding herself for the uncharitable thought, Helena pressed his hand warmly and praised his wife's banana bread once more.
"You know, the county assessor's office is on the second floor. Might want to stop by there. Don't know how finding out the tax value of Ellis' hardware store is going to help you, but. . . ." The sheriff shrugged. As diffidently he added, "We got a little county museum on the third floor. Way back when, Ellis was the big town in the county. Maybe something in its past has come back to haunt it." He laughed uneasily.
That had happened more than once, Helena recalled. There had been a hamlet in Cornwall visited every year by accidents large and small on the anniversary of a mine collapse. The artefact had been a miner's pick that the town fathers trotted out -. No sense in adding to the sheriff's concerns. He could do little more than worry and offer visitors banana bread - with Major Lowry intent upon controlling the "situation."
She joined Myka and Major Lowry in the hallway. His boots striking the linoleum with the same hard insistence he had displayed in the sheriff's office, the major led them toward his temporary office. Helena lagged behind, looking up the stairwell. The museum was at the top, the sheriff had said. It couldn't take long to go through, and even if it was time wasted, it wouldn't be a significant amount of time. Maybe the artefact wasn't replicated from Aimee Semple McPherson's Bible, and there was no one better suited to find out whether Ellis' present problems were rooted in its past. She knew all too well what it was like to live with ghosts.