Bennett scrubbed his hands down the length of his face. “There has never been a Brethren sighting or attack by one of them on us. I took Michael’s words that the Archangels were taking care of it. But if you were attacked by one last night then the bastards aren’t doing as thorough of a job if it as they should be.” Bennett looked at me hard and unyielding. “I am assigning you a partner from here on out Alex. I should done so already. No arguments and no buts. It’s either that or chain you to this desk so that I know you’re safe.”
I opened my mouth to argue the whole partner thing. Deacon and Danielle were my last partners and I’ve patrolled alone since then. Bennett cut my words off before I could remind him of that.
“I said I’m not arguing this point with you Alex and I am not budging on it either.” His voice softened as he continued to speak. “
Please
Alex. Don’t make this harder on me than it is. I lost my friend and his wife and I will not lose their daughter,
our
daughter too. If a Brethren attacked you once then a Brethren can just as easily attack you again.”
Bennett picked up a heavily padded manila file folder from his desk and handed it to me. I took it grudgingly. “Effective immediately, Chase Vincent, the new transfer, is your new partner. I was already considering assigning him to you. From the file the Orlando Sect Leader sent over, the guy was the best in his training class and also the best in the whole damn sect. Orlando has some tough fuckers so that’s saying a lot.”
So that was the name of the too-hot-to-be-real guy with sapphires for eyes. After leaving his apartment last night I’d realized that I never asked his name. It nagged at me until I got home and had fallen asleep and still when I’d woken up and sat through my hour and a half Organic Chem lecture that I didn’t have a name to put with the face. Now that I did, I could stop thinking about it.
“Your new partner should be on the basement level in the training room,” he kindly informs me. “Go get further acquainted.”
I scowl at him. I did not
do
partners. I didn’t do people in general all that well after Deacon and Danielle. It was best for them to stay away from me. I was toxic. The prophecy I never knew about until then that said I was going to either help save the world or damn it was further proof of such.
Men and women were scattered about the training room on the basement level of headquarters. They engaged in various interactions from cooly conversing with one another to being locked in combat. Those that noticed me, nodded quick greetings in my directions, but they weren’t the type of hellos you would give a friend or someone you knew well. They were the type you gave a near stranger, or someone you’d maybe only met one or twice or a handful of times—maybe a loose acquaintance you had very little connection to, perhaps only knew because of a friend of a friend or because you moved in the same circle. I nodded the same brisk greeting back and kept walking past them. There was no one in the training room or even the Atlanta sect of The Society, other than the Bennetts, that I would have stopped to engage in actual conversation with. Once there was.
Once, I would have seen the twins going toe to toe against each other in the fighting ring to my left. I would have leaned against its ropes and looked on in amusement, rooting for both of them and neither one to win. They perpetually made everything into a contest, being born mere seconds a part they couldn’t help themselves.
They
were my friends,
they
were my circle within the group, and
they
were my partners.
Deacon and Danielle were the people I would have stopped to talk to, to socialize with, but
they
were gone. I felt myself getting lost in that thought, being pulled under the ocean towards the memories and emotions that I kept sunken in its depths. Most days I was able to keep my head above water, but today it was proving so damn hard.
I shut my eyes against the levee threatening to break. I inhaled a deep, steadying breath. When I reopened them, I focused my attention on the two Nephilim in the fighting ring beside me. I concentrated on tracking their movements, using the task to occupy my mind, giving it something to do so it wouldn’t wander to other thoughts.
They were both male and nearly evenly matched in height. Though one had a couple of inches above the other, standing at about six feet even as opposed to his opponent’s five feet and ten inch vertical measurement. The taller one faced away from me and was so unfamiliar to me that I could not definitively identify him from behind. The shorter one was turned in my direction and I immediately recognized him to be a Nephilim from my training class whose name was Tyler.
Tyler was a good fighter from what I could remember. He was strong, quick on his feet, and used his brain not just his brawn when he fought. The latter was being proven by the wheels that I could see turning behind Tyler’s eyes. He was assessing his taller opponent’s movements, his strengths and his weaknesses, and strategizing how he could use all the knowledge he gleamed as he fought him against him. The taller Nephilim shifted his weight to his right foot and threw a left side punch that would have connected with Tyler’s face with as much force as a moving freight train. But Tyler anticipated his movement and dropped low, crouching on the balls of his feet. As he came back up, he aimed an uppercut punch at the taller one’s abdomen. Rather than blocking or stepping back from the blow, he stepped right into it, and did not so much as utter an umph when Tyler’s fist rammed into his gut. I marveled at the amount of discipline it took him to remain upright and unmoved. That punch had hurt like a bitch, there was no doubt about it. The Nephilim I couldn’t recognized used his closeness to Tyler to kick his right foot out, sweeping his legs out from under him. Tyler went down and the Nephilim dropped to the mat with him, pulling his head into a mixed martial arts style neck crank.
When he tightened his hold around Tyler’s neck as he struggled to break free, back muscles I never knew existed or were possible to sculpt bunched and flexed. I inhaled another sharp breath but for a different reason this time. I kind of had a thing, okay maybe a borderline developing fetish, for broad, muscular, powerful backs. The Nephilim turned away from me possessed possibly the sexiest back I’d ever seen.
Less than thirty seconds passed before Tyler’s hand impatiently tapped the ground. The Nephilim holding him immediately released him from the choke hold. Both guys stood and fist-bumped each other, acknowledging a good fight. The Nephilim whose back I had yet to stop admiring, hell truthfully nearly salivating over, turned around wiping a towel someone had thrown into the ring for him down the front of his face. When the towel came away sapphire eyes connected with mine and well, shit. Mr. Too-hot-to-be-real apparently looked just as good from the back as he did from the front.
He tossed the towel around his neck and walked towards me, grinning as he did. The deep dimples I’d observed the previous night reappeared, and I thought for a second time of the dozens of panties that grin had probably made drop.
“Hey, Alexandria right?” He continued to grin as he spoke to me. The movement of his lips made the indentations in his cheeks deeper.
“Actually, it’s just Alex. No one calls me Alexandria.” I wondered how he knew my full name. I hadn’t gotten his last night and I certainly had not given him mine.
“My bad. Your file didn’t mention that.”
My eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. “How do you know what my file says?”
“Bennett gave it to me when I arrived as a new transfer three days ago. Said members of his sect patrolled in pairs and you were the only one currently without a partner.”
Bennett was so full of shit. He planned on forcing the new guy on me as my partner all along.
“Sonofabitch! You knew who I was when you helped me out last night!” I didn’t say it as a question because it wasn’t. It was unquestionably an accusation. “Were you stalking me?!”
“Stalking no, but I was following you. The scheduled posted on the first floor let me know where you would be patrolling and I wanted to check you out, get a feel for how you work before we went out together.”
There wasn’t a hint of an apology or guilt in his words.
I crossed my arms over my chest. His gaze dipped there, lingered on the cleavage my cotton tank top exposed, then traveled back to my face. Smug amusement danced in his eyes, but there was something different there too.
“A court of law would call that the same thing,” I said dryly.
Chase Vincent’s left shoulder upturned in a casual shrug. “Then I guess it’s a good thing we Nephilim operate above the law.”
I rolled my eyes, peeved at his casual dismissal of pseudo-stalking me. “Well
obviously
you knew we were partners before I did. Thanks for telling me that last night, by the way.”
He shrugged again, and damn it if he did it one more time, I really was going to have to try very hard not to hit something, namely him. “Bennett said he would prefer to be the one to let you know. He’d do it at the end of the week. Give you the weekend, your of days, now my off days too apparently, to let you process it.”
“Well plans have changed,” I muttered grudgingly. Still aggravated about the fact that they had. “I’m scheduled to patrol Atlantic Station tonight which means you are too since Bennett is intent on joining me at the hip with someone
effective immediately,
” I said mocking Bennett’s no bullshit tone that was meant to let me know he meant business.
My using the word hip made Chase’s eyes drop to them. “I’ve got no complaints about that,” he said with a scorching grin.
I sighed, thinking that I wasn’t going to like this partner thing one bit, but if I was being forced into it then I may as well make the best of it. “I was going to get a bite to eat when I left here. Since I’m stuck with you, we might as well get to know each other a little better. Do you want to come?”
I wasn’t up to take the train, what Atlantans called the rail system that served as Atlanta’s major mode of public transportation. So I suggested we take an Uber from East Lake to the Little Azio’s in Berkeley Park instead. Their pizza wasn’t baked as yummy as the now closed location on Peachtree near 10
th
, but it was still mouth-watering good.
“We traveled half way across the city for pizza?” My new partner said as he stood in line beside me, waiting for the girl behind the counter to finish taking the order of the man in front of us. He looked at me like he suspected me to have suddenly gone brain dead.
“Yeah,” I drawled.
What kind of dumb question was that?
“You do know there is a pizza joint around the block from headquarters and probably a dozen more in between the house and here?”
“Pfft. Who wants to eat that garbage? Pizza is not pizza unless it comes from Little Azio’s.”
“Whatever you say,” he muttered.
And that was when I decided his ignorant attitude towards pizza had to be rectified. All pizza was not created equal.
“What toppings do you like?”
“It doesn’t matter. Pizza isn’t really my thing. I’ll eat whatever comes on it.”
I gaped at him. This level of apathy towards pizza was not normal.
“Can I have a pepperoni pizza?” I asked the girl behind the counter.
“Sure thing!” She energetically nodded her head then motioned for us to move down the counter to the register. “Any drinks?”
“I’ll take a soda, and…” I turned to Chase.
‘Water is good.”
The girl told me my total and I swiped my debit card through the thin slit on the backside of the register’s screen.
I filled my frosted red glass with coke and Chase filled his with water.
“You don’t want anything?” I asked him once we were seated in a booth.
“Nah. Like I said, I’m not really a pizza guy. And I grabbed something before sparring with Tyler from the kitchen at headquarters.”
“Did you know him before transferring?”
“No, I met my first day here. I was in the training room and he needed someone to spar with. He seems cool though. And he fights well.”
A boy who looked young enough that it was clear he worked at the restaurant as an after school job, sat a freshly baked pepperoni pizza about 12 inches round down in between us.
“Thanks,” I said.
He smiled at me shyly and walked away.
It was the Nephilim sitting across me’s turn to gape, wide-mouthed and all. “You can’t seriously eat all that?”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “Why because I’m a girl?”
“Well yeah. And because you’re like this big,” he snapped his fingers in front of his face. “Where is it all going to go?”
“In my stomach, genius. But I’m not going to eat
all
of it by myself.” I picked up a slice of pizza and placed it on one of the two plates the boy had brought to our table. I pushed it toward him. “Try it.”
He eyed me then the pizza then me again.
“You’re looking at it like it’s going to sprout wings. You’re new to Atlanta so I’m doing you a solid— introducing you to the best pizza the city has to offer.”
“You have to taste it,” I said after a beat. “I won’t take no for an answer.”
A facetious glint lit up in the sapphire of his eyes. “You say that as if you can make me?”
“Are you implying I couldn’t simply because I’m a girl again?”
He grinned wickedly at me. “No, I’m implying you couldn’t because while you were ranked at the top of your training class, I am ranked the best fighter in the the entire Southeast. That includes
your
region too.”