Karma Patrol (8 page)

“I’ve been thinking about that all morning,” Shannon agreed, taking a sip of her plum wine. “We may have a problem.”

“No problems,” Jade groaned. “I can’t handle another problem today.”

“It’s not a ‘you’ problem as much as it is a ‘me’ problem,” Shannon told her. “I got so excited when my app notified me that you’d met him, I wasn’t thinking about why I wasn’t there to see it happen and make sure everything went according to plan.”

Shannon had a point. She was the Cupid assigned to this area, and the first meeting of a soulmate pair fell squarely into her job description. The Powers That Be should have signaled her when the meeting was about
to happen, not after it was already over and done with.

“Has that ever happened before?” Jade wondered aloud, and Shannon shook her head.

“Not to me. I thought about calling my boss, but…” Shannon trailed off, glancing at Jade, who felt her face heat up.

“You think it’s related to Destiny Division,” Jade realized, putting the pieces together. “I—oh, Shannon, it didn’t even occur to me, but you might be right. Celia specifically warned me not to get involved in investigating the shooting, that Destiny Division was in it up to their necks and I should stay out of it, but by the time she called me, I’d already been to the crime scene. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to meet him today.”

Shannon was silent for a long moment, staring at her empty plate.

“So what’s the consequence?” Jade persisted, feeling a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the stress of the last twelve hours. She didn’t usually get upset about personal problems. She didn’t usually
have
personal problems, because she didn’t have much of a life outside her work. The best part of being half of a destined soulmate pair was knowing that eventually her soulmate would arrive. She’d been banking on that guarantee, on the knowledge that love, romance, and finding a partner were things she didn’t need to worry about since the problem had already been solved for her. If her own ambition in trying to solve the karmic consequences caused by the morning’s sentinel event had cost her that promise, she wasn’t sure what she would do.

“I don’t think it would be too terrible,” Shannon said finally, with a confidence Jade suspected was feigned. “Free will comes up in our line of work, too. It just doesn’t happen as often as it does in yours. An accidental run-in with your soulmate before you were destined to meet doesn’t have to mean the plans are ruined.”

“Should I avoid him?” Jade asked, waving off the waiter in favor of finishing their conversation. She was hungry, but not hungry enough to want to wait on Shannon’s response.

“I don’t think it’s necessary. My app is showing the two of you as confirmed soulmates now, which means that as far as my division is concerned, you’re a done deal. You don’t have to worry about us separating you. In fact, since you’re both living in my catchment area, it’s my job to do whatever I have to in order to make sure you stay together.” Shannon’s mouth was set in a firm line, the most serious expression Jade could recall ever seeing on her face. “No one is going to screw with a soulmate pair on my watch. Not even Destiny Division.”

Jade nodded, feeling the tension leave her shoulders. Shannon was the best Cupid in Manhattan, and she and her soulmate were in good hands. “In that case, let’s eat,” she declared, managing to draw a smile from Shannon, although she still looked unusually grim.

They ordered enough sushi to feed a small army and devoured it as they dissected the meager file Shannon had on Luke Jackson. Jade was tickled to see that her soulmate was the tall and handsome detective. She would take real joy in someday reminding him, perhaps on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, that his first words to her were ‘get lost.’

Resolving the rest of the karmic damage from the sentinel event was Jade’s primary goal for the remainder of the day. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to check her phone app and find the karmic balance for her catchment area at 0.16, a full five hundredths of a point improved from that morning. Her own work so far couldn’t have made more than a hundredth’s worth of a dent in the balance, and it took her a long moment to realize what must have happened. She felt a little foolish then; clearly, Destiny Division had decided to lend a hand. Maybe Celia had managed to convince them it was the polite thing to do, or maybe they’d been planning to clean up their own mess all along. She’d been worrying over nothing.

She was already almost to the Serbian Embassy, but decided to turn around and head westward toward Times Square, which was midway between the Serbian Embassy and Restaurant Row. The area tended to be a hotbed of short-term karmic imbalance. She would leave the embassy and the consequences of Emil Stankovic’s death for Destiny Division to fix, and go see what she could do about getting that last hundredth of a point knocked off of her area balance instead. Hopefully by nightfall she would be back where she’d started. Tomorrow, she could start on trying to get down to a ‘superlative’ rating, and the Powers That Be would never need to know there had been a blip in her catchment area.

She was almost to Times Square, on Forty-Sixth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, when a familiar pair of men stepped out of one of the little delis that dotted the streets around the area. When she recognized them, she couldn’t help the dreamy smile that flitted across her face. One of the things she’d learned from Shannon years ago, back when the other woman first discovered that Jade was one half of a not-yet-confirmed soulmate pair, was that once soulmates found each other, the bond between them made sure that they would
keep
finding each other, particularly if some issue in the relationship needed to be resolved in order to ‘create harmony of the souls.’ If their first meeting was any indication, a lack of harmony was an issue that was alive and well in their soulmate pairing. She could expect to keep running into Luke Jackson all over town until their relationship was deemed sufficiently harmonious by the Powers That Be.

His partner Aaron spotted her first, and he offered her a small wave as they started to head in the same direction she was going. She sped up enough to catch them as Luke turned to see why his partner was waving.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he muttered, clearly irritated by her presence. “Lady, don’t you have anything better to do?”

“I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot,” she said, willing to be gracious despite her future husband’s obnoxious attitude. It didn’t hurt that just the sight of him made her heart beat faster, and she tendered a silent apology to their soulmate bond. It might not have given her love at first sight, but love at second sight was perfectly respectable. “I wasn’t trying to make your lives any harder this morning, and I apologize if that’s how it seemed. I was just doing my job, the same way you were.”

“Hey, I understand,” Luke’s partner said, extending his hand to her with a glazed look that said he was halfway to being smitten by her not inconsiderable charms. “I’m Aaron Sanford, by the way.”

“Jade Bailey,” she replied, giving his hand a polite squeeze before withdrawing her arm. “And who is your grumpy friend?”

“Luke Jackson,” Aaron said, when it became obvious Luke wasn’t going to do more than glare at Jade. “We’re detectives with Midtown North. No offense, Jade; cops don’t tend to think real highly of reporters.”

“Neither do I,” she snickered, because by and large it was the truth. “I’m actually a freelance photographer. I do some work for the
Bulletin
, but a lot of what I do has nothing to do with the news.”

Which was also true, because most of what she did was karmic account enforcement, and that only had something to do with the news when someone received a large consequence and it
became
news. When that happened, she always managed to get the best photos because she knew it was coming. She’d sold the
Bulletin
a fair number of action shots of people being hit by cars, or falling into manholes, or walking face-first into street signs. She’d even sold them one heartwarming photo set of an elderly woman who, while walking through Central Park, found the heirloom diamond ring she’d lost in that same spot nearly thirty years beforehand. “I’m actually doing a collection right now about Midtown. Just basic everyday life stuff, you know? I want it to give people in other parts of the country an idea of what living here is like.”

Aaron was smiling and nodding and looking appropriately interested. Luke continued to glare at her like she was something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. She had a brief, uncharitable thought about soulmates who didn’t have the insight to see that their perfect partner was standing right in front of them, but she had to admit that if she hadn’t gotten the inside scoop from Shannon, she would’ve been more interested in Aaron than in Luke. Luke was certainly the physical type she tended to find attractive, and she couldn’t deny that his mere presence made her knees go weak, but would it kill him to smile once in a while?

“Where are you headed?” Aaron asked her, and she gestured ahead of them to where the lights and busy traffic of Times Square were visible at the next intersection.

“I’m going over to Times Square to take some photos for my new collection. It turns out the paper didn’t need me on that shooting, so…” She shrugged, and then a thought occurred to her. “Hey, you guys cover all of the north half of Midtown from your precinct, right?”

“Over to Lex and down to Forty-Fifth until Ninth Ave, then down to Forty-Third until you hit the Hudson,” Aaron agreed.

It was a fundamental difference from the way Karma Division drew their catchment area boundaries. Jade covered Midtown West, which stretched from Fifty-Ninth Street down to Forty-Second Street for its north and south boundaries, and from the Hudson River on the west side over to Fifth Avenue on the east side. The police precinct, by contrast, included a lot more territory on the east side of the city, but a little bit less on the south side. Unfortunately, their boundaries cut off just before the area she was interested in.

“Who covers the area from Lex over to the East River?” she asked, curious, and Luke finally unbent enough to join the conversation.

“That’s the Seventeenth Precinct,” he informed her, his tone distrustful. “What’s it to you?”

“I was just curious,” she replied, rolling her eyes at his attitude. “I heard there was some excitement at Le Cirque last night, that’s all. I wondered if you knew anything about it. I’m guessing you don’t, though, because you don’t strike me as the sort of guy who would dare to stick his toes half an inch over his own boundaries.”

Aaron coughed to hide a laugh, his eyes sparkling with amusement as Luke’s expression turned thunderous. She probably shouldn’t have baited him; she lived her entire life as far under the radar as possible to hide her unorthodox job, and she knew it was a good idea to avoid irritating the local police. She couldn’t help herself, though. It was a combination of legitimate frustration with his bad attitude and a vague feeling of being cheated by Destiny. This was her soulmate? If he was really as humorless as he seemed, the rest of her life was going to be long and painful.

Luke clenched his hands into fists, grateful that they were tucked into the pockets of his coat so neither of his companions could see the motion. He wanted to strangle
that damned nosy photographer. What were the odds that she’d just ‘happened’ to be standing around on Forty-Sixth Street when they’d come out of the deli? No, it was far more likely that she’d been following them, that she’d tiptoed along behind them when they’d left the precinct for lunch and waited for an opportunity to interrupt and join in on their conversation. She might even have planned to follow them into the restaurant and eavesdrop. Unfortunately for her, the deli he’d chosen was barely big enough to hold their employees and a couple of customers. If she’d been in there, he would have spotted her immediately.

He refused on principle to admit that any of his irritation was related to the feelings she stirred in him. It didn’t mean anything that he’d spent the entire conversation fantasizing about having Jade Bailey in his bed and making sweet, gentle love to her. He didn’t do sweet or gentle as a general rule, but there was something about her that aroused every protective instinct he had.