Angel's Mark

Three

I'd always admired the quaintness of Lucie's kitchen. Everything in Cian's and my kitchen was white and black and polished to a spotless shine, like one speck of dirt was the very end of the world. But Lucie's seemed more homely to me, with its warm, dusty brown cabinets and painted tiles and the little round table between the door and the Frigidaire.

I sat at that table now, Lucie across from me. She had some sort of math homework spread out in front of her, a half-crumpled piece of paper scribbled all over with letters and numbers and smudges of graphite. When I'd been in school, math had been my best subject, but whatever the heck she was looking at was way beyond my years.

Lucie tapped her pencil upon her teeth, then set it down with a heavy sigh and looked to Cian instead. "It's a pizza place," she reminded him. "It's not like they're looking for Bill Gates."

Cian, leaned against the counters, eyed her dejectedly over the crust of his pizza. He'd decided to buy some before we'd left, and he'd been devouring it ever since we got here, with that same disappointed look on his face like he already knew he'd failed. "So?" he mourned. "I want to be Bill Gates anyway. I should wow people no matter where I am, right?"

"You're an overachiever."

He harrumphed and tore another piece from his pizza slice with bared teeth. "Runs in my family, muffin."

Lucie wrote something else down on her paper, clicked a few buttons on her calculator—which was clunky enough to be a mini computer to me—and then paused. "Did he really ask you if you were Irish?"

"Yes."

"You're not Irish, are you?"

"Not that I know of! Oh my God, you're missing the point."

"I've got the point. The point is you're being a baby about this whole thing, Cian," Lucie countered, rolling her pencil around underneath her fingers. Cian was glaring at her, and she seemed aware of this, but she didn't appear to care. "I'm sure you got the job. And even if you didn't, it's their loss, anyway."

Cian's glare softened into something more along the lines of "heart eyes." I snorted. He still became a bumbling idiot around Lucie, despite the fact they'd been together for months now. "Really?" he said. "You mean that?"

Lucie rolled her eyes, then snapped her fingers in Cian's direction. "Shut up and hand me a slice of that—no, not the one you bit off of, you bozo."

"Bozo?" Cian repeated, turning back towards the box again. "That's a first."
Lucie let out a breath, taking the pizza slice from Cian, which he'd set on a flimsy paper towel that was already damp with grease. Her eyes moved towards me then, and she reached out, tapping the table with her fingers. "You've been awfully quiet, Vince," she observed. "What's on your mind?"

The right question was what wasn't on my mind. I had this annoying capability to be in five million different places at once, and it wasn't a skill I could always turn off when I needed to. For instance, at the moment, I was thinking about just how many bullseyes Zev was going to make me shoot when I got home, how many times I was going to fail before he upped the stakes. I was wondering if Cian really would get the job. And I couldn't stop thinking about what happened back at the pizza place—that feeling, that warm buzzing within my veins. Danger.

If there hadn't been any, why had I thought there was anyway?

It was while I was pondering all this that I realized Lucie was still awaiting a reply. The longer I didn't say anything, the higher Lucie's eyebrow crept upwards, the deeper her dubiety grew.