Page 36 of Penny for Your Saints

Caz and I exchange worried looks before snapping our heads back to Quentin, completely wrapt by his reminiscence.

“To hear my mother tell it, she was sure I was on death’s doorstep.” He scoffs a cold laugh, shaking his head before re-opening those crackling phosphorescent green eyes. “Then, all of the sudden—I turned the corner; and it was as if there’d been some miracle. Not only did I recover from the dastardly flu or pneumonia or whatever it was that had nearly crushed me like some butterfly between plates of glass—but I became healthier, stronger, more robust. The transformation from wan, sick child to ‘strong, healthy young man’ wasn’t exactly overnight… but it was pretty close.”

As if he’s just remembered Caz and I were actually in the room with him, Quentin startles back to himself—his eyes refocusing on me, his spine stiffening—that ramrod posture of his returning along with the rest of his ‘proper’ carriage.

“All of this romantic reminiscence to say—if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was about to start back into those fevered few weeks of my childhood.” Q allows himself a little nervous giggle at the impossibility of the situation before running a hand over his beautiful, if not tired, features. “Listen to me—rambling on, talking nonsense! You can tell I haven’t slept right in days, that it’s getting closer to…” he trails off, the unspoken words,my heat.

There’s a tense silence as the three of us contemplate the implication of Q’s words—as the moka pot burbles away on the stove.

“I didn’t want to make matters worse, but—” I shift uncomfortably from foot to foot as I heat milk in a small saucepan with cardamom pods and granulated sugar, “—I did a little quick cycle test for you and Miz Penny before I started processing the blood and serum test.” I suck air in through my teeth as I pull cups from the cabinets.

Quentin’s hands grip the edge of the wooden tabletop, his knuckles bloodless white.

“How long do we have?” he asks, barely above a whisper.

I think about the colored testing strips littered at one end of my cluttered ‘lab’ in the other room, Louise’s results showing the dusty rose of the ‘72-96 hours’ color swatch, Quentin’s the bright orange of ‘7-10 days’. Both clear indicators that we need to prioritize finding powerful suppressant meds, or a remote enough safehouse where we can weather the storm of one or both of them going into heat… Which would present its own array of challenges.

“Well, after Frank used the suppressant melter on her… she’s got maybe a few days, you have a week or so—if we’re lucky.”

“A few days!?” Caz balks, rocking up and onto his feet.

“Yeah, that’s a generous estimation, too,” I sigh, pouring strong coffee into three mismatched mugs before adding a portion of steaming, spiced milk to each. “We’re going to have to prioritize getting some meds for both of you or a nest to—how you say—‘ride it out,’” I add in an attempt to bring some levity to the conversation; even though any alpha or gamma will tell you that helping an omega or a sigma through a heat is serious business.

If Louise and Q both go into heat at the same time? Well, who knows how much time we Saints will spend on our knees in worship…

Though he took some convincing, Frank finally agreed to allow us to uncuff Louise hoping when she surfaced from her last round ofnight-night juice, she might be willing to hear some reason—especially regarding the contents of the hard-drive she had with her at the Diamond Center in conjunction with our own findings through the Saints unsanctioned ‘research’ over the last year.

When Louise regained consciousness, I was surprised by how docile she appeared after her showing at the last safehouse. I had only barely caught her that fateful evening in the alleyway—and evidently had been too slow to catch her making the call to her ex-partner from her field agent days on that working girl’s burner phone.

She hadn’t used lethal force on Seb, but it was also clear from the ligature marks on his neck that she could have easily killed him if she had been so inclined.

Silently she stuffs down the pan bread and potato curry Seb has given her—her wrists bare and ringed raw with cuffs of skin that gently ooze blood.

The absurd urge to wrap her wounds in clean gauze and gently lay a kiss over the snowy white bandages hits me like a wave upon the rocks—crashing into me with such intensity—before receding just as quickly as it came.

“We propose an exchange,” Frank explains calmly, leaning forward to place a steaming mug of cardamom coffee and two cigarettes along with a plastic lighter before her breakfast plate—on the stretch of pressure board laid over two milk crates that acts as a coffee table.

“Oh yeah? What are we exchanging? Addresses for postcards? Are we gonna be pen pals?” Louise gasps hyperbolically, clasping her hands—a fork still clutched in one fist—beneath her chin, batting her eyes mockingly.

“Fuck, you’re annoying when you’re awake,” Frank groans under his breath, but none of us Saints miss the grin stuck to his lips.

The Francis doth protest too much.

“When we…picked you upfrom the Diamond Center,” Caz begins, choosing his words diplomatically—doing his best not to wither under Louise’s smoldering glare. “You had a hard drive on you.”

Louise goes rigid, all humor gone from her pale, lovely face.

“Obviously, it wasn’t difficult to get into,” Caz continues coolly, flexing a little of his skill in an obvious bid to impress her.

“Yeah, the idea wasn’t to let it get into the wrong hands, but…” She shrugs tersely, thumbing her nose at Caz. “Obviously I fucked that up, too.”

“Well, I hate to tell you this and add insult to injury—but the intel you had wasn’t anything we didn’t already know,” he laughs nervously, scrubbing a tattooed hand over his head of peroxide blond stubble–knuckles full of different color space invader sprites disappearing from view as he cups his hand over the nape of his own neck.

There’s a loud clanging rattle as Louise drops her fork against her empty plate—her terracotta eyes burning with a mix of surprise and contempt.

“So, you really fucking kidnapped me for no goddamn reason at all—is what you’re saying?” she snarls—low, dripping with the fuel of rage—just waiting to be set ablaze.

“Not quite,” I interrupt, all eyes in the room turning to me as I re-cross my legs—a cup of steaming mint tea finding a home balancing on my knee once more. “As we mentioned before, you have a use far beyond just being a conduit for information.”

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