Love is a Bloodhound Read online

  Customer inhales and is annoyed. Niklas catches a glimpse of suit, and more than a whiff of cigarette smoke. "You're missing your nametag." The accent is overwhelming. "The other guy had one. Whoa, what happened to your eye?” An almost chortle in a voice that's poured gravel.

  He stands straight, and meets gaze with eyes so deep brown they could almost, just almost be red in the right light. The man is taller, stronger, in a suit- and to Niklas, though he is almost pretty beyond the harsh line of a self-satisfied smirk, something about him screams impulse, authority. "May I take your order?" he repeats, careful not to break away his gaze. To show he's not cowed. In the back of his mind, he wonders where the hell Tethys is.

  The man grins ferally and keeps staring him down. Niklas is aware how that gaze probes away from his own single eye, to his face, his mouth, his askew apron, his undershirt over the standard staff polo. "Your friend with the funny name sure seemed to think so. Get me a..." he looks up, and the change in his expression is tangible. Niklas internalizes his wince. Viola threw up that chalkboard all of two years ago, and he's bemoaned each day since. "The fuck is a cafe bonbon au cotton candy with macchiato sprinkles?"

  "Condensed milk with a shot of espresso, a string of cotton candy on top with stained sugar sprinkles," Niklas recites in a monotone. "Bonbon is French for ' candy'." Cafe candy au cotton candy. Redundant, he knows.

  He barks a laugh and puts his arms akimbo. "Who the hell orders that?"

  "Pre-diabetics. People in an advanced state of denial regarding their personal health. Twitching night shift workers."

  A snort. "Pussies." He raises his arm and runs his knuckles across his lips, eyes flicking between the board and Niklas. There doesn't seem to be music playing through the cafe, though there should be. This being is destroying the peace of the place as it stands, maybe even more than the usual customer does. "So what's a Breve Bonbon? A height-challenged sugar addict?"

  The cafe is very, very silent and the air feels colder than he set the thermostat for. Niklas takes a deep breath in, a deep breath out. "Cappuccino with a layer of steamed half-and-half and condensed milk each."

  "People actually order shit like that?"

  This is getting very tiresome. Niklas realizes he's making a fist around a mug. He lets go before the tightness shatters it. "No. We just keep it up there because it looks nice and alliterative."

  "Let me guess, kid, this is also the kinda cafe with sizes in pseudo-Italian shit. All pretentious and sounding exotic."

  "On the contrary, it's pseudo-Russian. Our sizes come in идти, ебать, and себя1[1]. Which roughly translate to Dilettante, Commuter, and Junkie. For those inclined, we also allow for an extra order of our house-made cookies and top the drink size up to-"

  "Double shot espresso. Regular size. No frills."

  "ебать size," Niklas says, very softly, resisting the temptation to tell the man that a real double shot espresso can only come in one size. No frills. He can do that. He goes for the machines immediately, happy to at least physically put this customer behind him for now, and starts placing filters. "You're having that here or to go?"

  "Here... Naw, wait, to go."

  He freezes and awaits another change of mind. When it doesn't come, he resumes work, wondering if he should make it decaf and cast a curse on the rest of this man's day. In the end, though, that's just too spiteful. He makes it like he would any other drink, only stopping to align the mouthpiece of the lid with the fold on the paper cup. The man will have his caffeine- spilling on his shirt on his way out.

  "Three dollars," Niklas says as he sets it down.

  "I said no frills. What's this?" he taps the sleeve, not even seeming close to ready to pay.

  He looks at the offending object. Is the man serious, or just grasping at straws to annoy him now? "It's a sleeve... sir. It's a piece of paper we use to wrap the cup and insulate this thing called heat... which, incidentally, is radiated by hot coffee, so our less machismo-fuelled customers don't burn their hands on their way out."

  The man's eyebrows have furled at that remark, but it seems to have soared neatly over his head. Tentatively he goes for a sip at the stuff, not even caring if it's boiling because clearly he's too macho for that. "This shit's weak. Really?" he says as he brings it back down. "I'm in a rush, but I'll give you business. Rebrew it. Stronger this time!" His face all but twitches in that queer, wide, predatory grin that he probably uses to slam employees into the ground, whatever he does.

  A sinister shadow in Niklas's mind quietly intimates, If you make it strong enough, he may not taste Tethys's laxatives.

  But Niklas has never sabotaged his customers' drinks, no matter how insufferable they've been, and he's not about to start now. Without a word he takes back the coffee and works to start an entirely new brew. "Do you want anything else?"

  The man doesn't answer. When he looks back, he realizes he's on his phone now, looking ready to start a call. Niklas barely flinches, but the man's oblivious, the coffee's painstakingly dripping its way out, and the wait in his presence couldn't get any worse. He leaves the front counter and pushes around the back to the kitchen.

  Tethys, he finds, is fuming and muttering in the kitchen, surrounded by a fog of flour and the aroma of heated... spices, is he putting spices in the cookies? "There's a customer out there that you walked away from, Glysborne," he says as quietly as he can with the guy still out there.

  The look on Tethys's face is twisted with blind fury. "My apologies, Captain..." he hisses, before looking back to his dough as if it has personally offended him, as well. “He called me Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley is a hack!"

  It's a feat of self-restraint not to throw flour in the man's pale face. Coolly, he says, "I'd dismiss you, but you're not on the clock." That at least brings a satisfactory response, but then, cowing Tethys isn't anything to brag about for him. He watches as the cadaverous man hunches back over his work. He does a 180 back to the front, where his man is barking something into the phone.

  "Of course you want the papers on the guy at hand when you- damn it, Ray, I’m-" he pauses, halts as if he’s been fired at by that voice on the phone, and adds something in a low mutter.

  From here on Niklas is completely ignored, but he supposes that's preferable to the way the man was earlier. He slips the new coffee in and watches the fee come up... And up, and up, and back in, and up more than three times what it's supposed to be. Niklas wonders if the man is just outright playing evil now, but wordlessly takes the ten dollar bill and goes for change.

  All the while yapping on his phone, the man makes a blink-and-you-miss-it grab and Niklas freezes up unlike anything else- his hand is on his wrist, warm, and completely encompassing it. He looks up, readying his free arm for a punch, for an extra napkin, for anything- and finds the customer shaking his head. "It's yours," he mouths, before releasing his firm grip and giving Niklas a grin. Which may or may not have just been supplemented by a wink.

  The man waltzes away with his phone and coffee as if nothing happened, leaving a brisk breeze in his place when the door chime rings- and soon after, the first drops of a storm dash upon the pavement outside. It soon escalates to a full-blown shower, and Niklas gives himself the satisfaction of believing the bastard was caught in it. In his experience, sometimes all a swollen ego needs is a cold shower of street water thrown up in their face by a car.

  "Glysborne," he calls after a moment, stuffing the 10 in the register. "He's gone now. Get in here.”

  And, coated white with flour up to his sticks for biceps, Tethys comes and stands there bug-eyed and attentive. Niklas glares for a moment, constructing criticism and lectures in his head, but they all turn to dust looking at the bonesack of an employee he has before him. In the end, he sends him right back to baking, and turns to clear dust off the counter.

  It's there that he finds, on a scrap of paper by the coffee machine, a message the man must have gotten in while he was at the kitchen.

>   "I look forward to seeing you at the Temple. -V."

  Ah, fuck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Niklas sets out at 12:30, leaving Tethys in charge with a sheet of directions (mostly "Don't"s: "Don't berate customers their choice of drink", "Don't improvise", "Don't call me unless the counter top is in flames or worse", et. al.) and scratching his dark blue jacket more than he knows he should. He would just walk out in his uniform, but Svetlana always selects higher-end restaurants, and the Temple is a name in town.

  With Svetlana in her faded tie-dye clothes and undone hair and bead necklaces, it was easy not to feel like the sore thumb in the room- and she bore the weight without ever caring, without ever being bitter. Perhaps because she was wealthy and being genteel was something she could afford not to bother with. Straddling his motorbike in the rain and taking care not to get too wet somehow, Niklas Baranov knows today won't be the same.

  He can remember loving Couer. For a child, even the low-end living seemed like a scape for your next castle adventure- the dumpsters would be moats, the cardboard boxes your castle, the rare toys you received on Christmases (or, more often, shook free from the litter) your sword and shield. Your worst enemy is not the dragon you've conjured from ribbons and string and sticks but someone telling your mother you've been disobedient.

  Then your mother finds out about your playing, then you come home every day and get scrubbed until your skin is raw. Then you gain a history and reputation for lashing out against the street bullies, and rumors spread about you and the underground, and they aren’t pretty.

  Then you grow up, and find that beneath the fluorescent streetlight is grime and road kill and shit, that somehow along the path of your childhood you missed all the cold and homeless curled up against the walls amid beds of flapping newspapers. Or perhaps they just moved there while you weren't looking.

  Castles become wasted paper. Dumpsters become public sanitation hazards. You shake nothing free from litter but perhaps your shoe when you accidentally step in it, and even then, with disgust. And if you're unlucky enough, sometimes you find yourself on those streets again, seventeen years old, drunk off your head and arm in arm with bloodstained brothers, chasing a castle of your own in the form of some kind of chauvanistic glory.

  Somewhere along the way, Couer's magic slipped away from this part of town. Niklas rides past his old apartment and wonders if the family that lives there is any happier, but they probably aren't- the sun just doesn't seem to shine there anymore. The street is cracked and has gone gray and the wooden facades of the once grand terrace houses are chipping.

  It's another couple of blocks until the streetlights start taking on a newer chrome finish and the fresh buildings are a safe enough distance from the old buildings to bloom up. Music comes in, drones of guitar chords melting into drums, too processed to be live. It drifts down the stylishly narrow street, in through his helmet, and then fades to a murmur of bass with just as much ease as he accelerates away. This was a part of town that was nothing but a field back when Niklas was a child, but now it's everything hip, strewn with neon, colorful overhead banners, and freshly trodden-on grime and laid cobble.

  He pulls in at the front of the Temple, closer to the gilded pillar on the right, and looks up at the place in all its goldleaf glory. By right, it's a Thai restaurant, complete with an eponymous Buddhist temple facade. Still, in the tradition of appropriation, every dish in it is so watered down Svetlana's claimed they invest more in gold leaf and uniforms than actual food. He rushes to park the bike and head in under shelter, feeling the heated air rush into his face as he presses through the glass doors.

  If there is any clamor within the walls of the Temple, it is muted by beige upholstery and well-varnished wood. The air is permeating with the blended aromas of incense and lemongrass and the faintest pinch of chili. Waitresses glide by, forms behind folding screens depicting subtle but suspiciously un-Thai-looking paintings of nature.

  Niklas does not eat Thai. He does not even like Thai, but he doesn't care, because the Temple's food is so westernized, he's heard, that nobody actually calls it Thai. He heads up to the sprawling, cloth-covered spruce counter- and one moment it's empty, and the next an olive-skinned young lady in a gold-trim waistcoat is there, breathless, and smiling with brown eyes so wide she obviously just threw the grin on. She greets him quickly, rushing through the rigmarole so fast Niklas is sure she could have rapped it under duress.

  "I have a reservation for a two. Under Morris?" he asks as another waitress comes in and whisks away his raincoat, leaving him feeling much more appropriate.

  "You're just on time," the woman, or Theresa as her nameplate declares her to be, speaks with an inflecting tone. He can tell she's questioning something as she's looking at that computer of hers. She looks up and smiles. "We have the table ready for you right now, sir. I'm Theresa and I'll be your server today. Would you like to look at some appetizers while your date comes?"

  Whirling away to the table already, Theresa doesn't see Niklas go pale at the prospect of being on a date with the asshole that came in his cafe earlier that day. Surely, it had been some kind of trick being played (and a cruel one), but before even opening his mouth the man in his memory had still not made a savory impression. He'd reeked... of something he couldn't describe, but he'd start with the words addictive personality and end with loose cannon.

  It still remains to be seen just why Svetlana is sorting this date together. He does remember some sounds being made about opening another branch of the Ishmael somewhere else, though he'd instantly refuted that they absolutely didn't have the money and that had been that. So what's this?

  Niklas goes through two cups of water and the entire menu by the time a slender, suited figure swaggers on into his peripheral vision and pulls the chair opposite him.

  And a whole cloud of cigarette smell trails in behind him like a proverbial storm. V., his ' date', drops place and slouches back into a sleazy kind of comfort almost immediately, putting a leg over his knee and putting the menu over that.

  Somehow, he's changed since that morning. While that smirk seems permanently affixed on that face of his and his eyebrows are still harshly furrowed, he seems calmer... more together and alert. "Sorry about earlier," the man says, running a fingertip over the top of the menu, then moving it to touch his lips as his eyes flicker up. He scans over Niklas, up and down, calmly. As if he hadn't gotten an eye-full at the cafe. "Lana seems to have faith in the kind of man you are, Niklas, but she wanted me to. So I fucked with you."

  Lana? "You tried to get to know me by trying to rile me up?" he asks. "I run a coffee shop. Men like you are not a phenomenon."

  He gets a raised eyebrow for that. Clearly, ' V.' thinks he is a phenomenon. "Well would you look at that. You actually have a mouth on you, Mister Baranov. I like that in a person." He looks around, fidgeting, then leans in confidentially with a smile. "But did you have to get us a place in non-smoking?"

  He refuses to think the genial, talkative old lady he knows is old friends with this man. He's too young. Niklas leans back to make up for the space the man's invading. "How do you know Madam Morris?"

  He drops back, thankfully. "Lana and I have known each other for a long time. Too long for either of us, really." A snort and heavenward glance, whatever that means. "And I'm doing her a favor showing up, but I'll say, I'm pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a bar fighting thick-boned vodka-swigging Russian, not..." the man makes an ‘all this' gesture.

  "Are you two ready to order?" Theresa pops in. Niklas's shoulders drop and untense with alacrity- the woman obviously can't read the atmosphere, but he won't begrudge it of her.

  Neither of the men have even looked at their menu once since Lars' arrival. Niklas looks down very quickly and starts from the top, but even by then, he can hear the man across the table blathering, "Thai name... Thai name... Thai name... Does your menu guy not speak English?"

  Their waitress tries a sad, unconvincing laugh.

>   "Ah, grilled chicken. I'll have that. Aaand... Thai whiskey. On the rocks. For both of us." The man wags his menu Niklas's way. "He needs it."

  Niklas narrows an eye. "I'm sorry, what?"

  Theresa is writing away. "And you, sir?"

  "I'm-"

  Lars reaches over and flips his menu shut, and sends a winning smile Theresa's way. "He'll have tom yam. You guys serve tom yam, right?"

  It's their waitress's turn to look dubious. "Yes... the best in town."

  "Not too hard when you're the only Thai restaurant this side of Couer, yeah? That'll be it." He claps the sheets of his own menu together and hands it over with finality, giving her a grin that's too assumed, too confident to be real. When Theresa hangs for a second, brows furled and genial facade cracking, he sits back and returns the look with a questioning smile. Finally, she leaves, too distracted to even remember Niklas.