“Which Wonder Girl?” I counter. “Donna Troy or Cassie —?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, clearly impatient. “Neither of them flies the plane.”
“Are you sure?” Arguing with Clyde is usually an ordeal, but I enjoy it. “What about Drusilla, from the old Wonder Woman TV show?” We rented and watched it over the holidays. The World War II episodes are more fun than the “modern-era” ones.
“She’s not canon!” Clyde exclaims.
I don’t bring up the more recent animated productions. We have a pact to always discuss those separately.
It’s ten minutes after six. Sanguini’s is always booked solid, but Saturdays are especially intense. Using my sleeve, I wipe my forehead. The restaurant just opened at sunset, but we had prep dishes to take care of first.
“Hey, kids!” The manager, Sergio, offers us each a glass. “Take ten.”
I immediately chug my ice water as a couple of the waiters snag their appetizer orders. One is decked out in a red satin shirt and black leather pants, complete with a high-necked cape. The other is costumed as a Turok-Han vamp.
That’s not unusual around here. The shtick is that this Italian restaurant is supposedly staffed by the undead. Consequently, dining-room employees model Goth-style attire, and the majority of guests arrive similarly or at least spookily dressed. It’s paranormal cosplay to the nth degree. Pretend, most of the time.
“Here, take these!” Sergio presents Clyde and me with personalized business cards, both with the title Culinary Engineer. “Every Sanguini’s employee is an essential team member,” he insists. “We all contribute to making this place a success. Let me know tonight if you want any changes, and you can pick up a box of them with your check next Friday.”
It’s my first business card. Nifty. I thank Sergio, slip it in my wallet, and head out to take ten with Clyde. We exit the building via the rear ramp, and he rolls to the parking lot. He’s doing better with the wheelchair, and pushing it has built up his arms.
Last fall, Clyde was critically injured in a real-life vampire attack. It took powerful healing magic to pull him out of the subsequent coma. Despite physical therapy and his heightened wereopossum healing abilities, he’s still on the mend.
I double-take at the vehicle in the handicapped spot. “Is that your car?”
Under the overhead light, the once-beige Ford Explorer is covered with gleaming dominoes — from roof to hubcaps, everything but the windows, mirrors, tires, and license plate . . . hundreds, maybe thousands of them.
When I glance down for an answer, Clyde isn’t in his wheelchair. He takes a few halting steps on the asphalt — the first time I’ve seen him stand on his own since being injured. “These dominoes were made from shifter bones.”
“Bones?” I move in for a closer look, determined not to make too big of a deal out of the fact that he’s walking. Clyde gets self-conscious easily.
“Some people collect them,” he informs me.
“Isn’t that sacrilegious?” I hesitate. “Or at least disrespectful?”
Clyde bristles. “Collecting them or my sticking them on my car?”
I was thinking both, actually, but I let it go. As a human being, it’s really not my place to lecture him on what shape-shifters should find offensive.
In the past year, my social circle expanded to include the furry, feathered, and armored after I became close friends with a sweetheart of a werearmadillo named Travis through the Environmental Club at school. He was considerate and gentlemanly (and okay, kind of lumpy-looking). When it comes to guys, I prefer substance over style.
Travis was my “almost” first love, my “maybe” first love. Then last September someone tore him into bloody pieces before we could figure “us” out.
A customer in skull makeup and a black leather jacket parks his motorcycle in the next row as Clyde announces, “I’ve decided to call the car ‘the Bone Chiller,’ because it’s covered in bones, the sight of it will chill evildoers, and it’s so cool, it’s chilly.”
Uh-huh. Truth is, I find his dorkiness endearing. After all, I know as much about superhero sidekicks as he does. Waiting for the guy decked out as Ghost Rider to boogie on by, I try to pull a domino off the hood and can’t. “How did you —?”
“My dad helped me. It took most of the day.” Clyde’s on a roll. “I was researching ghosts over the holidays — spirits usually hang around because of unfinished business or because their remains weren’t properly put to rest — and I came across these dominoes on eBay. I bid on a crate for fifty bucks and won.”
Okay. “But why —?”
“The last time we faced down the supernatural, it royally kicked our ass.” Clyde runs a hand through his very prematurely gray-speckled dark hair. “I’d rather not be caught flat again. Anyway, there’s no way of reuniting these bones with their original owners, so I’m making a statement. I’m taking them back on behalf of shifters everywhere. I’m giving them a chance to reclaim their dignity.”
Reclaim their dignity? Did he just say that out loud? Having been seriously injured has changed Clyde. He’s deeper than he used to be. He cares more.
“It’s not bad enough that werepeople are fair game to humans and the undead,” Clyde adds. “We even target each other.”
“Werepeople” is the preferred term for shape-shifters, but it’s controversial. The prefix “were” actually means “man.” So, by calling themselves werepeople, shifters are denying their animal form, which is a huge part of their identity.
I shush him as a couple dressed as a voodoo priestess and witch doctor get out of a Volvo with California license plates. Once they’re on their way, Clyde announces, “It has to stop. We can’t go on killing each other, the way Ruby Kitahara killed Travis. I’m going to make an example out of her. I’m going to make sure she’s punished for what she’s done.”
Oh. Well. Clyde’s channeling his inner superhero all right, but neither of us is the muscle of our little social circle. Quincie P. Morris, who inherited Sanguini’s from her late parents, is a wholly souled vampire (the cuddly, nonhomicidal kind). Her boyfriend, Kieren Morales, is a werewolf, and Zachary is the “slipped” (not fallen) guardian angel assigned to watch over her. They all just left town together to visit some friend of Zachary’s in Vermont. Clyde and I weren’t invited — not that, after the Michigan fiasco, our parents probably would’ve let us go along anyway.
Trying to track a murderous werecat like Ruby without our big guns . . . “Clyde, think about what you’ve been through. Do you honestly —?”
“You don’t think I can cut it?” He crosses his hairy arms over his thin chest. “I don’t strike you as a man of action? I’ll have you know —”
“I don’t want anything terrible to happen to you!” I yell. “You know, again.” I take a breath. “It wasn’t that long ago that you almost died.”
“Oh, right,” Clyde replies because, shifter or not, he sucks at dealing with emotions as much as most teenage boys.
As much as my head hates his Super Possum idea, my heart finds it romantic. Except I see myself by his side. I imagine us being like Oliver Queen/Green Arrow and Dinah Lance/Black Canary.
No, forget that. I’m not that big on fishnets, and talk about relationship issues!
More like Barbara Gordon/Batgirl/Oracle and Dick Grayson/Robin/Nightwing — two sidekicks who grow into their legends as their friendship blossoms to more. . . .
Granted, they have their issues, too.
Love is scary hard, even for superheroes.
Not that it matters, because we are talking Clyde after all, and I could whack him over the head with a brick and he wouldn’t notice I’m a girl.
Ignoring the gang of “Thriller”-esque zombies that just lurched out of a minivan, I offer a hand to help him back into the wheelchair. “I can’t talk you out of this?”
“No way,” he says.
“Then count me in,” I reply. “But for the record, I’m not your sidekick.”
r /> WHAT GRAMS NEVER UNDERSTOOD is that I don’t just fool around with girls.
I appreciate them. All shapes. All sizes. All humanoid species. I adore them, and not just for their “feminine wiles,” as she likes to say.
True, Mom abandoned me as a cub, and I never knew my father. But I’ve always had my sister, Ruby. For that matter, until now, I’ve always had Grams herself. I may not like the old puss, but, especially now that she’s of my past, I kind of miss her.
When I want an actual conversation, I go to Ruby. Or at least I did until she left home. My sister hugged me good-bye over a year ago. It was after winter finals of her first semester at Butler Community College. She told Grams that she’d applied on the Internet and landed a six-month internship in music promotion in Austin. She’d be working with some guy named Paxton.
“He’s a Cat, too,” she informed me.
Discussing one’s species with a stranger online struck me as a stupid idea. Groups like the National Council for Preserving Humanity troll the Web for shifters to target. And then there are the opportunists. Our animal-form bodies are stuffed and displayed in natural history museums. Our animal-form pelts are sold by black-market furriers, and our bones are ground and marketed as aphrodisiacs.
But my sister was fine. For months, she was fine. She sounded happy even.
Ruby never came home, but she called, e-mailed, and texted.
Then, without warning, Grams and I didn’t hear from her again. Not after last September. Not even two weeks ago, on my eighteenth birthday.
I’ve been worried, I admit it. But now that I’m on my own for the first time, I can appreciate how amazing it is. So Ruby got busy, lost track of time. Maybe even fell in love. So what? She’ll be jazzed to see me.
This is my first trip outside the Midwest, and I cannot get over the weather. It’s almost sixty degrees. In January. Passing an outdoor vendor hawking tie-dyed clothing, I spot honest-to-God palm trees and a skinny man dressed in only a thong riding a bike.
“It’s around here somewhere,” I mutter to myself, searching for Ruby’s place on South Lamar. I pull into a strip-mall parking lot and scan the storefronts. An art-supply store. A yoga studio. A place that sells musical instruments.
Home Post Office matches the address I have for my sister.
I’d been hoping to find Ruby herself, or at least her apartment.
Lacking any better ideas, I go inside the mail store, triggering a small bell above the glass door. The clerk is young, thin, and lanky. He has acne and huge, blond, frizzy hair. The name tag on his white polo shirt reads Timothy. He smells like weed.
“Can I help you?” he asks, glancing up from a Victoria’s Secret catalog.
“I’m looking for someone who rents a box here,” I begin. “Ruby or Rubina —”
“Rubina?” He straightens behind the counter. “Sorry, man, I’m not allowed to give out any information —”
“But you do know her?” I say. “Long black hair, slender, hapa — you know, half white, half Japanese?” Being her kid brother doesn’t blind me to the fact that Ruby’s unforgettable. “Look, she’s my sister, and —”
“I see the family resemblance,” he replies. “You’re taller, though.”
You think? “This is the only address I have, and she never checks messages.”
Timothy keys in her name, finds the number, then picks up a phone to call. Seconds later, he says, “This is Timothy at Home Post Office. Your brother stopped by, looking for you.” He leaves a number and hangs up. “She never checks messages?”
“Free spirit,” I explain.
Timothy laughs. “Yeah, me too, but I live for my phone. She didn’t give a street address, but . . .” He ducks behind a half wall to an intake-distribution room lined with lockboxes.
A moment later, Timothy comes back and spreads out two business cards and a slightly stained, torn piece of ruled paper on the counter. “You’re not the only one looking for her. These people all asked me to call if she shows again.”
If? “How long has it been since she picked up her mail?”
He frowns as if thinking it over. “A few months.”
Months? The first card is printed with the name Karl Richards of Richards Heating & Air-Conditioning. The little logo in the corner depicts a turquoise-blue armadillo, wearing a scarf. The second is from Detective Konstantine Zaleski of the Austin Police Department. And on the scrap paper, someone has hand-scrawled Clyde and a phone number. Before Timothy can protest, I swipe up all three. “Thanks.”
“Want to leave your digits?” he asks. “In case she calls back?”
I scribble them down and turn to leave.
Finally, Timothy sees fit to inform me: “I know where she works.”
My smile is forced. “You don’t say?”
“Sanguini’s,” he declares like that’s supposed to mean something. “Ruby is — or at least used to be — their spokesmodel or whatever.”
Spokesmodel? Ruby’s notoriously camera shy. She didn’t mention a new job, and she’s not the type who enjoys being the center of attention. “What kind of place is it?”
“A restaurant.” Timothy rattles off directions.
THE OLD ONE-STORY brick building doesn’t look like much on the outside. As I pass through the parking lot, the most remarkable thing is that it doesn’t have any windows.
I don’t like that. It suggests a trap.
The Saturday night crowd doesn’t seem worried. They radiate Goth to giddy; sassy spookiness to S&M. A trio dressed as fairies (sparkly violet wings) skips by, holding hands and giggling. A woman in a raspberry-colored minidress slinks out of a shiny black Mercedes-Benz, carrying a crop. She’s joined by a devil in a black suit with a red satin cape and convincing horns.
Coming around the building, a vixen with a Cheshire grin holds open the front door for me. She exudes feline in her laced-up, push-up, low-cut, tiger-striped, skintight custom bodysuit.
I appreciate any girl in a catsuit, even if it is false advertising.
Inside the restaurant foyer, the decadent aromas are almost overwhelming. I make out the scents of roasting garlic, rattlesnake, alligator, boar. . . .
Once the diners ahead of me are seated, I approach the desk.
“Welcome to Sanguini’s.” As the hostess glances up from her leather-bound reservation book, I notice the embroidered black flowers barely covering her more enticing bits beneath the otherwise sheer black dress.
“Are you predator or prey?” she asks.
“Hmm?” I blink back up at her face. “Oh, right. I’m here to see my sister, Ruby.”
“Davidson Morris’s . . . friend Ruby?” she asks with finely arched brows.
Never heard of him, but Ruby’s not a common name. “Possibly.”
“I’m sorry. Ruby Kitahara is no longer with the restaurant” is the answer.
When I just stand there, blank, she adds, “Let me find a manager to help you.”
A guy with a Celtic-style cross carved into his ’fro guides me through heavy long red drapes and into the dining room. Though the building is old, the interior has been newly remodeled. I register the gleaming crystal chandelier, the deep-blue carpeting, and the crimson napkins folded into the shape of bats.
A passing waiter in a black sequined sheath has shellacked his silvery hair to fan out six inches around his face. Two buxom women — I assumed they’re wearing clothes, but it looks like lavender body paint — lean over deviled eggs to kiss, and I catch a flash of tongue. From hidden speakers, Frank Sinatra sings “Days of Wine and Roses.”
“This way,” my escort says, and I realize I’ve paused to drool.
The guy abandons me in the manager’s office, saying someone will be right there, and shuts the door behind him. It’s a bland, fairly utilitarian space. A desk. Two chairs. A filing cabinet and a tropical tree — make that a fake tropical tree.
I pace the tight perimeter once. Twice. Check my watch. Sit.
Two minutes later, a tee
nager staggers in. In his damp white T-shirt and jeans, he doesn’t look like he belongs at the restaurant. Taking jerky, pained steps, he touches the brick wall for support before settling behind the desk and introduces himself as Clyde.
Is this the Clyde who left his number with Timothy at Home Post Office?
My nose identifies him as a wereopossum. He’s no doubt recognized me (and possibly Ruby before me) as a Cat the same way.
“So you’re Ruby Kitahara’s brother.” He taps his finger-claws, slightly extended, against the desktop. “And you don’t know where she is, either?”
“Just hit town,” I explain, “and I can’t seem to get ahold of her.” It’s none of his business, but I’m trying to play nice. “She hasn’t called home lately.”
Clyde takes that in. “And home is?”
“Kansas,” I reply. “Is a manager still on the way?”
“Yes.” He steeples his fingertips. “What’s your name?”
“Yoshi.” The kid has tiny crosses tattooed around his neck. “Yoshi Kitahara.” He’s probably intimidated because I’m a werepredator, and he’s a goofy-looking animal form. I try small talk. “What do you do around here, bus tables?”
He narrows his dark eyes. “Yoshi, nobody has seen your sister since mid-September. She was involved with Davidson Morris, who was the manager at the time.”
“‘Involved with’ as in ‘dating’?” I ask. “I don’t think so.”
Something isn’t right. The manager should’ve showed by now. I want out of this cramped room. Standing, I reach for the filing-cabinet drawer labeled “Employee Records.”
“Hey!” Clyde exclaims. “Those are private.”
Not for long. Old-fashioned, using paper, but more convenient for me. I yank the drawer open, breaking the lock. “All I want is my sister’s home address.”
“Ruby never had an official file,” Clyde informs me. Using the desk for leverage, he rises from the chair. “You’re sure you don’t know where she is?”
I check to confirm he’s right, that there’s no file, and lean against the cabinet. “What’s she to you?”