Soldier of Fortune: A Gideon Quinn Adventure (Fortune Chronicles Book 1) (6 page)

C
HAPTER
N
INE

THIS, GIDEON DECIDED
, could well be the ultimate dining experience.

At present, he was lounging in a tub filled with steaming water, a plate in one hand and the last bit of naan in the other, using the second to mop up every drop of sauce in the first.

He'd already done justice to one of the skewers of aurochs (Elvis devoured the second) and the soup (foregoing the spoon and drinking it straight from the bowl), setting each empty dish back on the tray where only the traditional piece of laden honeycomb remained.

A cup of tea, poured from a squat clay teapot, sat on the tub's ledge, adding its own modest trail of steam to that of the bathwater.

On the edge of the sink, Elvis, still uncertain about this whole 'water' thing, was grooming himself after neatly dispatching in his share of the aurochs. Gideon had been worried the draco would prove resistant to food that didn't squeak just prior to being devoured, but so far he seemed to be adapting nicely.

And if the warm, sleepy glow infusing his body was any indication, so was Gideon.

With a satisfied sigh he set the all-but-licked-clean (okay, fine, completely licked clean) plate alongside the rest of the empty dishes, contemplated the honey and decided to hold off, content for the moment with the tea, of which he managed one or two sips before his muscles began to melt into the warm water.

Going with it, Gideon set the cup aside, let his head rest against the back of the tub and soaked in the tangible proof of his freedom: food (not a dehydrated, rehydrated food-like substance but actual food); unlimited amounts of (clean) water; and a door that closed (with — and again this could not be overstated — a lock
on the inside
).

It was close to perfect — certainly closer than he'd any right to expect.

Lounging, eyes closed, in water up past his chest, he could only assume events of an unpleasant nature would soon infringe on the near perfection, and then everything would once again be unpleasantly normal.

Cynic
, a voice from his past chided him.

Realist
, he corrected the memory, before sliding easily into the dream.

* * *

"Of course. Forgive me, how could I forget your motto?" the memory said, standing at the foot the tub, studying him. "How did it go? 'Don't get comfortable, don't even make dinner plans because if you do, life will just serve you up a dish of pain.'" She let her fingers trace the scar over his collarbone. "You've tasted more than your share."

"Dani," her name came out as little more than a breath, stirring the water.

"Who else?" She stepped around the tray and sat on the edge of the tub, seemingly unconcerned that her uniform was getting wet.

She brushed her fingers over the water, head tilting as she met his gaze, "Why are you looking at me that way?"

"Because you're not real."

"True," she said with a smile.

* * *

Mia had just come even with her target's window when a motion below prompted her to flatten herself against the granite.

Peering down, she saw the man in the garish green coat and yellow pagri making a beeline out of the hotel.

Did that mean he'd already gotten to the draco? But no, she focused on the retreating back to confirm there was no sign of a pouch or box — no suspicious lumps — just the bright, slim figure of a man in a hurry to be someplace else.

In short, no sign of the draco.

Which meant either he'd been unable to get hold of the creature or the draco wasn't his goal. But what would be the goal, if not the draco?

As she asked the question, she heard a small crash, like a bit of crockery breaking, from inside the window.

Normally, that level of noise would have sent her in search of cover, but this time something — a sense of curiosity or foreboding, she didn’t know which — made her look through the fogged window and into the brightly lit bathroom to see the object of her fagin's desire.

He was perched the edge of the sink, rearing up on his hind legs — and he was
brilliant
, with his iridescent brown gold scales and bright cat eyes — and her breath caught in her throat and for a moment she forgot she was standing on a ledge in the rain with her fingers and toes going numb with the cold of it.

Only for a moment, however, and since there appeared to be no one else in the room, she angled for a better view of the draco, whose neck and wings were now outspread. He was so close, she could even see his pupils, thinned to mere slits as his head turned to the bathtub. So intense was his focus on that particular feature, Mia couldn't help but follow the draco's single-minded gaze.

The first thing she spied was the broken teacup on the floor. Then her eyes moved further left and she spied the tub, and the water sloshing over the edge and, lastly, the draco's owner sliding, all unaware, under the surface of the steaming bath.

* * *

Her smile had always undone him. "I missed you," he told her.

Even saying it, he knew how inadequate that sounded.

"Then why did you send me away?" So did she, apparently.

"It's -- complicated.”

"That was a pathetic answer six years ago," she chided him, though gently, "and it hasn't improved with age."

"Does anything improve with age?"

"Wine, the Infantry long-coats," she glanced at his, where it lay folded over Gideon's clothes, "Blue Suede Shoes — the song, not the footwear — and us," she said lastly, no longer smiling. "We could have improved with age if you'd given it half a chance."

"There was no chance." He wondered how it was possible for a dream to hurt so deeply. "Not after Rand — not after Nasa.”

”And yet, here you are, holding onto a dream."

She wasn't wrong. And not only because, without thinking, he'd taken hold of her hand.

Carefully, he released it.

"Gideon," she murmured his name.

In reproof?

In forgiveness?

He would never know because, though she'd been his for a brief, bright once upon a time, life had indeed served up a dish of pain and Gideon, refusing to let Dani share that particular dish, had pushed her away.

She'd pushed back, hard, but in the end his stubbornness proved greater than hers.

Even then, even after Gideon successfully shut Dani out of his life, he spent the next half dozen years dreaming about her every night and had been  days when memories of Dani
—
her smile, her tragic inability to bake anything without turning it black, her passion for classical Earth music
—
were all that stood between him and a one-way stroll through the crystal veins.

Still he knew, even on the worst days the Barrens could offer, he knew setting Dani free was for the best.

It had to be for the best. He'd spent the better part of six years telling himself that.

"Gideon."

He blinked, looked up to see she was studying him with an expression he could only hope wasn't pity.

"You need to wake up, now," she placed the hand he'd released to his cheek.

"I don't want to," he said, sounding, even to his own ears, pathetically bereft. "If I wake up, you'll leave."

"Gideon," she leaned close, "I was never here."

Then she placed her lips, warm and silky as the bathwater, over his, "Wake..."

* * *

"... up already, won't you?" Mia didn't know how many times she'd shouted at the man since dragging his head out of the water. Her arms were already trembling as she tried to keep him from sliding down again. Though she'd pulled the plug first thing, water was draining too bloody slow, so she just kept holding on and yelling and hoping she wasn't shaking a dead man.

Not that he felt dead.

Not that she knew what dead felt like.

From the way the draco was acting, shifting from leg to leg to leg and crooning anxiously, she wasn't the only one.

"He'll be all right," she told the frenetic beast, then turned her attention back to the inert head on her shoulder. "You
better
be all right," she said, giving him a massive shake and a thud on the chest, which she vaguely remembered seeing a riverman do to one of his mates who'd been pulled from the water after too long a spell.

* * *

When had Dani's voice gotten so high?
Gideon thought.
And why was she hitting him?

He opened his mouth to ask just that when a mouthful of brackish water erupted from his lungs and he coughed so violently he fell over on his right side.

"No, no! Not that way!" the voice that wasn't Dani's bounced around his ears.

"What way?" he asked or, rather, tried to ask. What came out was more a wet gurgle as his inhaled a mouthful of water. He thought he heard a
'nononono'
but everything was muffled.

Why is it muffled?
he asked himself.
And why is not-Dani yanking at my arm?

Because, you idiot, you're drowning
, his self replied.

Himself (selves?) thought he should probably do something about that, but they couldn't come to an agreement as to what.

Which made it almost a relief when a deep and tearing pain dug into his left shoulder, shredding the fog and galvanizing Gideon's body into spasmodic action.

Jerking out of the wet, and with the aid of a pair of fairly determined hands, he got himself upright enough to cough out the water he'd sucked in while not-Dani thumped him vigorously on the back.

"Bleeding Keepers," not-Dani ceased the thumping as his eyes opened, then she began to curse like an infantry drill sergeant.

Gideon appreciated the sentiment, and would have echoed it, but at the moment he was still working on basic respiration. He did manage to lift his head enough to see his savior, but closed his eyes again because it appeared there were three small fuzzy people next to the tub, along with an entire talon of dracos flying from one end of the bathroom to the other.

Life, it seemed, had wasted no time reverting to unpleasantly normal.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

"OY, MISTER! YOU
okay, then?"

The small person —
girl
, Gideon's slowly focusing mind told him — drove away the last whispers of the dream, though her voice still sounded muffled, like it came to him through a lake. Or fog. Or a foggy lake. A cold foggy lake.

He held up a 'just a minute' finger or three, then leaned over the bathtub's edge and shoved said finger(s?) down his throat until he could successfully puke up what had been mostly a very nice dinner, with the small exception of the Morph included somewhere in the meal.

"Oy! That's disgusting."

"I couldn't agree more," he croaked, falling back into the tub.

The girl’s head tilted inside the hood of her tunic. “Then why'd you do it?"

“Because unless you're under the surgeon's knife, Morpheus is better out than in.”

“And how d’ye know—” she began, then stopped herself. “Because you’ve been under a surgeon’s knife, before.”

“A time or three.” He reached out and grabbed the towel draped over the edge of the bathtub. Once he'd covered as much as possible, he leaned back again and closed his eyes because seeing was still an unpleasant proposition.

"You gonna die?"

He raised an eyebrow but didn't open the eye. "Not presently, I don't think."

A moment of expectant silence passed, but what the kid expected he couldn't say. He also couldn't say why there was a kid in the bathroom in the first place, or why a stiff, cold breeze shivered over his skin, or why he heard the steady sound of rain.

He should probably ask about that.

He didn't, not even when he heard the sound of water running from the sink's tap or felt a hot, damp cloth pressed to the talon marks in his shoulder.

Talon.

Draco.

Elvis!

If the window was open…

He was already starting to sit up when he felt the distinctive touch of the draco's head against his cheek and relaxed.

"He sure likes you," he heard the girl say.

"We've been through a lot together."

"Looks like you been through more," she observed. "I ain't never seen so many scars."

And she shouldn’t be seeing them now, he thought, except it wasn't that big a towel.

"How'd you get so messed up?"

A childhood in occupied Tesla, half a lifetime soldiering, six years in hell...

"It's complicated," he said to the backs of his eyelids.

This statement met with another silence, followed by more running water, followed by the slopping, scraping, swooshing sounds of someone cleaning up.

He cracked an eye open to see her using the last clean towel to dump the broken shards of his teacup in the waste bin before moving over to the — aha — busted window to clean up
those
shards.

At least now he knew why it was so cold.

He looked over the side of the tub and noted she'd used the second-to-last clean towel to wipe away his regurgitated dinner. He didn't ask where said towel had ended up.

"Who'd ruin a nice masala, or maybe it was the soup, with enough morph to knock out a mastodon?" he asked instead.

The girl shook window glass into the bin with a musical clatter. "Someone what wants you dead?"

"Guess that rules you out," he commented. "By the way, I'm Gideon. Thanks for saving my life."

She shrugged but rather than offer her own name, dropped the glass-filled towel into the bin with a shake of her hand, sowing the bright white fabric with a field of tiny red drops.

"You're bleeding." Alarmed, Gideon tried to stand and instantly regretted the attempt, not just because of the lingering dizziness, but because he almost dropped the towel.

That earned a snort from his damsel to the rescue. "So are you," she pointed to the cloth on his shoulder, stained with long red streaks.

"Still, you should clean that hand."

"Already did, mother, but thanks.” She did take a moment to pat the bleeding knuckles dry with a bit of tissue.

"How'd you get injured, anyway," he asked. "You did it when you broke the window," he answered his own question. "But why did you break the window? Right, because you were outside,” he continued the trend.

"You talk to yourself a lot, then?"

He stared at her. “You were
outside
?"

"Well, I wasn't hiding in the loo, was I?"

Was he this much of a smartass at that age? Probably. "Okay, but —
why
?"

"Would you rather I left you to drown?"

"Absolutely not. But you know, most folks would wonder why a kid your age would even be in the position to break a second story window, that she might come to the assistance of a drowning man, in the first place. Then again,” he managed a weak half-smile, “I’m not most folks, and neither are you, I'm guessing. Just like I'm guessing you’re the one who followed me here from the tram station."

He enjoyed a brief flash of triumph in being able to surprise the seemingly unflappable girl.

The enjoyment was quickly squashed as she tucked a loose coil hair behind her right ear, momentarily displacing the shadowing hood and allowing Gideon to see the bruise marring her jaw.

That
got him to his feet.

"Who did that to you?"

"What? Who did what?" she looked around herself, startled.

"That stinger of a bruise you're sporting," he said, one hand on the wall and the other gripping the towel firmly in place.

"It ain't nothing," she said, hunching into her hood.

"Isn't anything," he corrected automatically, and almost laughed at the look she shot him. "Sorry, but seriously, did your fagin do that?"

"What d'you know about fagins?"

"Only what I learned from mine, back in the day."

"Your —
you
had a fagin?" That got her interest. "Nah," she dismissed the idea immediately. "No way you was a dodger."

His head tilted as he considered the kid. "Why not?"

"
Because
," she said with the air of one pointing out the obvious, "you're old."

"Well, ouch."

"I mean, you know, you're grown up, is all."

"I didn't start that way," he said.

"Fine,” she shrugged again, "but not many who start as dodgers sign on to the Corps, do they?"

“Yeah, well,” now
he
shrugged, looking uncomfortable, “they did if they were dodging during the occupation."