The feeling of absolute certainly that Steffane Ronin was not lying lasted all through the night and all of the following morning on my way in to work at Agency Headquarters. It had me pacing out side of Storm’s office an hour before he even showed up to work. I was in early. Far too early. But I could not help it. I had barely slept all night.
No wonder I had kept being drawn to Steffane Ronin’s case. I came back to it over and over not because of Steffane Ronin himself, but because of his link to DCK. I must have sensed it.
The idea that I could finally catch him, that he was within my reach, would have been shredding my nerves if I wasn’t protected by my buoyant sunshiny feeling. Instead I was impatient to get going. I wanted him now. Right now. I didn’t want to have to wait for Storm’s permission. And yet I needed Storm’s permission because I needed him to help me find those lost case files. Plus, Storm would be interested in the DCK angle. How could he not be?
And was Steffane Ronin really innocent? Was I going to be able to prove it? I had to if I was going to catch DCK. Hell, for the chance to catch DCK, I had to get Ronin out
of prison whether he was innocent or not. The only way I was going to get the information he had was to set him free. That was what he was counting on.
Half an hour of pacing outside of Storm’s office later, I had made up my mind that Ronin must be innocent. I could feel it in my bones. Sort of. Why the hell would he set me this task if he wasn’t innocent? He could have traded his information in for an easier sentence or for more creature comforts. A guilty man would have settled for that and maybe accepted a slightly cushier form of punishment, but an innocent one? No, an innocent one would settle for nothing less than his freedom. Which meant that Steffane Ronin had to be innocent.
Storm arrived at 8:00 am on the dot and looked surprised to find me pacing outside of his door. I’ll confess that I was not an early bird. If left to my own devices I would have rolled in to work at midday every day. As it was, I barely managed to scrape in by 10:00 am most mornings, but no one minded because all I was doing was reviewing and closing old cases. They pretty much left me up to my own devices. That would change if I was helping on one of their active cases, at which point I would make every effort to arrive on time.
Storm did not look good. And by that I meant he looked slightly less perfect than his usual hunky self. He still had that smudge of dark circles under his eyes and the tiniest hint of being careworn. I supposed I noticed it because I took an overly keen interest in him.
“Not another drunken night out on the town?” I asked him.
His immediate instinct was to glower at me. And then he sighed, and said, “ You might as well come in. I have some news for you.”
He unlocked his office door and let me inside the glass-walled office.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” I said, looking out at the open plan desks outside. Anyone who worked out there could look in and see Storm all day long. “It’s like being a fish in a tank. People can watch you whenever they like.”
I much preferred my own pseudo-office, which was a large empty old loft space one level up in this same building. The loft space had not been refurbished in decades, and was underused and draughty, but I had claimed one abandoned room in it for my very own. It had my flying hammock and some throw cushions on the floor and all my papers were up on the walls or arranged in grids on the floor where I could peruse them at my leisure. It was my perfect ramshackle working space, unlike this pristine fish tank.
Being in here made me feel like the best thing about my own office was its solid walls. God, how I would hate to be watched through the glass all day long. And I bet plenty of people were watching him all the time. Like the pool of secretaries that sat down the hall who could most definitely see all the way across the open plan office to here. And I bet they enjoyed the view. Damn them.
I was too filled with pent up energy to take a seat, so I paced near Storm’s desk. “I have some news for you too,” I said.
“Go ahead,” he said promptly, not bothering to tell me to sit down. That was one of the things I liked about Storm. He was always willing to listen. And it was good to be listened to with such attention. He had this way about his that made you feel like you were really there and really important.
But what I had to say would have to wait since his attention was so clearly on whatever he wanted to say. I wanted his full attention for when it came to my turn. Plus I had no idea how Storm was going to react.
I had no idea how he was feeling after the last time we had seen each other when he had woken up curled up beside me in my bed. From his professional demeanor you would think it had never happened. I didn’t know what I had been hoping for. Maybe a mischievous smile? Maybe a look of amusement or acknowledgment that we had seen each other outside of work for once? Nothing was even different about his music today. It was still that big powerful soothing and wonderful sound radiating out from him. Sometimes when I heard and felt it, I just wanted to give him a huge hug and hold him tight and not let go.
The current look on Storm’s face told me that this was the last thing that he would welcome. Well, if he was gonna be so uptight and professional, I could be that too.
I said to him, “Gentlemen first. What did you want to tell me?”
Storm slid a piece of paper across his desk at me. “I got the Chief’s clearance for you to be trained as a professional oracle. The Agency will fund it and sponsor you, and I’ve already narrowed down three oracles you might like to study with. All you need to do is pick one and agree a schedule.”
He was smiling. He sounded excited, pleased with himself. It was like he expected me to be too.
I felt was sick inside. He wanted me to enroll as a professional auricle? What the hell? I felt like a rug had been pulled from under me. He had mentioned this to me in passing before, but now he was looking at me like I should be jumping at the chance. And if I were anyone else maybe I would have been. But I wasn’t just anyone else. I was the Angel of Death, or maybe I wasn’t. I was certainly something not normal, and the last thing I needed was to spend hours and months in training with a goddamn professional oracle who was going to be able to see right through me. Who was going to find out there was something wrong with me and report it to the Agency, and probably her own bosses too. Because oracles were fiercely loyal first and foremost to their own people, and I was definitely not one of their people. An oracle would ruin everything I had worked so hard for. What the hell was Storm thinking?
“Why the hell didn’t you ask me about this first?” I snapped.
Storm looked taken aback. “I thought this was what you wanted—”
“No, it’s not!” I said hotly. “Which you would know if you bothered to listen!”
“You said you didn’t do it because you didn’t have the money for it,” he said.
“That’s one of the reasons. Who said I wanted to be a registered oracle anyway? Why the hell is that so important to you? If I’m not good enough as I am, why the hell did you hire me in the first place?”
He took back the piece of paper he had given to me and crumpled it up in his fist. “No one said you weren’t good enough,” he said stiffly.
Suddenly I felt terrible. He had been trying to do a nice thing for me. God dammit, he must’ve gone out of his way to persuade the chief about this and it can’t have been easy given that I was not even a real member of Agency staff. I crossed my arms over my chest. “Look, it was really nice of you to think about me but —”