Day 1

Harlow Arrives in Hell

Some days, it just didn’t pay to get out of bed. Today was one of those days, only she didn’t know that until well after the blinding explosion of light that left her stumbling backward on her low-heeled pumps.

It wasn’t the unusual blinding blast of light that made the day so unappealing. Neither was it the sudden sensation of weightless floating nor even the nauseating dizziness that came and went in a heartbeat, leaving her disoriented and woozy. No, the true reason she wished she’d stayed in bed came far after the light faded, and her vision cleared, and she saw that she stood (cheese danish in one hand, paper cup of coffee in the other), not in the utilitarian staff break room, but in the very center of a giant and luxurious office. And she had no idea how she’d gotten there.

The office, in and of itself, wasn’t the unappealing part, either. It was quite tasteful and elegant. Still, she wobbled in a dumbfounded circle, taking in the old-world pomp and circumstance of heavy dark woods and aged leather, and the sweeping grandeur of vaulted ceilings filled with masterful brush work. It was as though the Palace of Versailles gave birth to an English Duke's ancestral office. Her stomach clenched. Again, with the nausea and again, not the truly unappealing part.

Uuhhhhh…what just happened?

Where was the coffee pot she'd just put down? The trays of muffins and danishes, and donuts? The yellow Formica countertop on which the coffee maker and trays of breakfast goodies rested?

Why was she wherever in the hell this was and, more importantly, how had she gotten here?

Did she just have a stroke?

An alien abduction?

Was this a hallucination brought on by drugs or blunt force trauma?

The door swung open, and she gulped a moment of alarm, like she was a kid getting caught somewhere off limits. A stunning woman, who evoked the dark, sinister, sensuality of Anjelica Houston’s Morticia Addams, glided sylphlike and displeased into the room. She paused only slightly upon seeing her standing like the proverbial bewildered deer in the middle of a luxurious office. The woman’s expression flattened from inquiringly displeased into coldly displeased.

“Hmm,” the woman intoned. “We’ve been expecting you,” she continued with nothing short of frost.

Expecting her? Here? She tiptoed in another tiny circle, trying to latch onto any bit of normalcy. Instead, all she saw, all she felt, was the off-ness, the hugely obvious wrongness of the situation.

“Senator Lotus will join us shortly.”

Senator? That brought her spinning back to face the woman. Her senator? “Uhm, which senator are you—” she began only to be interrupted by the senator himself.

“Lyris can you pull up Soren’s file,” he said as in strode a man the size of a walking mountain. “He seems to think his actions are without consequence,” he spoke with a chilled cognac voice that sent shivers, like misty droplets of ice, down her spine

Oh, holy night.

Her knees warbled.

Coffee sloshed in the cup, but she didn't see anywhere to put it down, and then she had coffee splotches on her coordinating Burberry pencil skirt and sweater, but none of that mattered because the walking mountain radiated unimaginable ruthlessness and cold. Cold, like cold to the chill of the bone in an arctic blizzard. Ruthless, like a really really, (she meant really really) merciless person. And she had, unintentionally or not, just invaded his private sanctuary.

Bypassing 6 feet by no less than ten inches, he carried his equally impressive muscle with the power and menace of a saber-tooth tiger. Elegant, yet primitive, and capable of shit, she didn’t even want to contemplate on a surface level, let alone any deeper. Only he would feel comfortable in this glacially mammoth office suite.

“It’s crap, Cy and you know it,” another man followed Lotus into the room without a shred of concern that he was baiting an apex predator. A head or more shorter than the Senator, this guy radiated run of the mill pissed off. “How many times has the exalted pain in my ass done the same? The hypercritical bastard.”

“Soren, you slept with a celestial. Celestials and ESF personnel do not mix. Ever. You know this.”

“Cyvarian, Miss Bay has arrived,” Lyris said while handing him a file she’d already had at the ready.

The tightly woven material of Lotus’s suit jacket tensed around his massive shoulders as he looked at his watch and not at all at her and said, “Wonderful,” with no wonderment at all. “Soren, meet your partner, Evangeline Bay.” He opened the file flipped to a page, removed a golden pen from his suit pocket and swiftly wrote.

“Who?”

She didn't ask it, Soren asked it, but he asked emphatically enough for her, too.

“Your partner,” Lotus repeated with quiet care that even she could tell held a lot more meaning and warning. He flipped to another page and signed. “Until further notice, you are both assigned to customs. You report directly to Nathaniel Pine.” He handed the file back to Lyris.

“Are you kidding me?” The guy's tone dipped to shock, and his face drained of color. While Soren gaped like Dorothy's Scarecrow, she forced her tongue to move and jumped in with, “Mr. Senator, sir, I'm not—”

“Miss Bay, back here tomorrow 9 am. Until then, Soren will get you settled. Welcome to Hell.”

Without warning, the exceptional woman herded her and the guy out of the office and into an immense reception area. The giant office door, replete with hand carved reliefs, closed with a gentle, solid, and unapologetic click.

In the stillness of the sudden silence she felt the intense need to say, “Can you help me? I'm not--”

“Miss Bay, I'm sure I have data entry. As the Senator stated we'll see you tomorrow morning, nine am. Attempt to arrive on time.” Sharp stiletto strikes on the gleaming marble floor punctuated the woman's resolve to be away.

The guy ran a hand through dark brown hair and muttered an obscenity. He looked at her and shrank back in his aversion. Yeah, well, back atcha, punk. She wasn’t too keen on the current events either.

“Evangeline Bay, I'm Soren Reed, your new partner,” he bit out the words with an obvious distaste she could all but experience in her own mouth.

She didn't care about his distaste, and she forged ahead and finally managed to say, “I'm not Evangeline Bay.” 

His eyebrow quirked in a clear signal of disbelief. “Why does your name tag say Evangeline Bay?”

What? “What name tag?”

He pointed to her chest with a wiggly finger.

She glared at him. She wasn't wearing a name tag and if she were, it certainly would not say—she looked down...

… and gawked at her left breast. There, on the navy silk of her blouse was a white and blue tag with: “swiggly swiggly” handwritten in blacker marker.

What the hell was going on?

Her “partner” accepted the coffee and danish when she absently handed them to him. She caught a corner of the tag with her nails and pulled and ended up tenting the blouse because the tag stuck firm. She pulled again, and again, from every angle and edge, and point, and the stupid thing would not budge. Okay, this was ridiculous!

She clenched her hands and took a deeeeep breath. “Listen, Soren,” she forced hysteria from her voice before continuing, “My name is Harlow Emerson Snow-Sheridan. There was some sort of bright light and when I opened my eyes, I was here. I don't know where here is and I'm starting to panic.” She thought she did a fantastic job of keeping her voice calm and rational and nothing at all like a woman on the edge.

“You go by the whole name, huh? I don't know what you did to deserve this torture, Snowy, but trust me, changing your name won’t stop the madness. The Big Guys, most especially El Presidente, are on the warpath and headed straight for us.”

She tried again. “No, you don't understand.” She was a woman in a strange place with another woman’s name. Hahaaaa, no edge here. “I'm not this Evangeline Bay person and I do not know where I am or how I got here.”

“You said that already,” he said around the last bite of flaky pastry.

The action pulled Harlow up short. Her head cocked to the side like an alert spaniel, and she did not appreciate the comparison. “Did you eat my danish?”

His baby blues blinked at her in apparent confusion before he tilted back the coffee and drank it all.

Unbelievable! “My coffee, too?”

“I needed to wash down that dry danish, besides it was cold.”

 Cold? How could it be cold? She'd poured it, freshly brewed, not two minutes ago, right before the light. She opened her mouth, and he answered his phone.

She didn't bother with him. Instead, she walked down the giant corridor, looking for someone who might know something to get her back to somewhere…

… she'd settle for vaguely familiar at this point.

Despite the intense terror trembling at the surface, Harlow would not give in. She was a logical woman and there was a logical reason for what was going on. And damn it, damn it, damn it! She would discover it before she flipped the hell out because there was nothing crazy here except a mild amnesia and a case of mistaken identity.

She could do this. She was strong. She was resilient. She was possessing of a quick and agile mind. She knew people and how to manage them. She just needed to find a person who was more like a person and less like a person who was more than a person. Oooh, ooook, that did not make sense, sooo, she simply needed to stay calm and breathe. She sucked in another fortifying breath.

The breath wasn't released when Soren caught up to her. “Hey, Snowy, no customs today. We're joining a vryk-nest extermination. Purely observational. I promise.”

She exhaled in a whoosh and bit out, “I have no idea what you said. Stop calling me Snowy. Go away. I'll find someone else to help me. Thank you,” she snipped. The last thing she needed was an arrogant, unhelpful, and unbelieving ass blathering at her in nonsense talk.

He snipped back, “You're welcome,” then placed his hand on her arm.

Harlow glared until she got woozy and he removed it.

Harlow's First Vyrk-nest

Soren took his hand from his new partner's arm and used it to rub the back of his neck, doing his best to coax out the latest knot drilling down to his shoulder. Some mornings it just didn't pay to get out of bed. Today was one of those days. He'd known it the instant he'd woken (only two hours into sleep) to Cy's demand. A text with 2 words: "Headquarters. Now." Fuuuck. He hadn’t been due in the office for another six hours so he'd forced himself out of bed, into the shower, and across town to HQ. Only to get kicked in the nads for something the Big Guys did on a daily basis. Hypocrisy thy name was jackass politicians who just happened to be his boss's bosses.

“Where are we?” his high-strung, blonde, cross-to-bear screeched. For two blessed seconds he'd forgotten about her. But there she was, an unwanted and unexpected noose around his neck. He sighed again. He could do this. He was a strong and capable man. He'd been through worse situations. He could squire around an uptight blonde and play nice with Nathaniel Pine for a few days. And he meant a few days because he sure as hell wasn't going to be tethered to a partner for longer.

“San Diego, California, District of Earth,” he answered her and started up the walk of a standard American suburban house. Some shade of light brown with a small, trim lawn and a bland, family friendly vehicle in the drive. Pretty typical as vryk-nest set-ups went. Blend into the environment as best you can and don't call notice. The Teams wouldn't have known about this nest without an informant tip off.

“What just happened? How did we get here?”

Something about her tenor had him looking back. Her eyes were flared wide and alert. She clutched the pearls at her neck. Pearls. Oiy.

“Have I been drugged?”

He shrugged, unsure how to respond. Leave it to Cy, the purveyor of unfair demotions, to team him up with an uptight lunatic. Who thought changing your name would get you out of a bogus, governmentally mandated punishment? God he was tired, and he didn't care. Four days in the field followed by two hours of sleep followed by a surprise demotion and partnering and Soren really wasn't sure what was happening.

“Come on.” He waved her toward the house.

She went for the sidewalk instead. “Ouch! Mother fracker!” and dissolved into a cacophony of curses.

Soren grimaced. “That's the perimeter block. The one the team set. The one you can't walk through.”

“It looks like the outside!” she shouted as she banged her fists against the perimeter.

Sweet baby Hades. “It is outside,” he sighed. He shook his head and walked for the house again. When he reached the door and she didn't, he turned back around. She had her cell phone out and was talking at it in strident tones.

“Why isn't my phone working?” She demanded. Her ground eating stomps toward him, cell phone raised high and facing him like a torch in her hand, had her looking like an angry lawyer on a mission. No lay, no matter how good, was worth this.

“Did you pay your bill?” he asked. She gnashed her teeth at him and he couldn't figure out why. He didn't want the partnering either. He, at least, was willing to make the best of it until things cooled off. Maybe not willing. More like resigned to dragging her around just long enough to unload her. Hopefully, he could lose her in customs. Fug, He hated customs.

He tried sounding helpful. “Have you updated your status on the Eternity network?”

“What the bleep is the Eternity network? You know what? Never mind I'll use a land line.” She growled and marched passed him into the house, only to march right back out chanting. “No! No, no, no, no.”

He stepped into the house to check out the melee. “It's only a small brawl, Snowy.”

“Stop calling me Snowy! My name is Harlow and I'm not walking into a fight!”

“Relax; it looks contained to the living room. I told you, we're not here in any official capacity. Trust me, you've got nothing to worry about.”

Her eyes darted around like a cornered mouse looking for an escape. Apparently, she couldn't find one because she clenched her fists, which she seemed to do a lot, locked her elbows, and then followed. “Take me back,” she demanded, “to wherever we were. Better yet, zap me to my office or open the wall thingy and let me out. Or--god!--just wake me up.”

He frowned at her. “You've been to Eternity before, right? Are you a newbie?”

“Okay, ye of slow brain, I don't know what you're talking about!”

This time is was his teeth that clenched, and his fingers dug deeply at that stinkin' knot. “You know, things between us will go a lot smoother if you stop your hostility.”

She shook her head like she couldn't understand him, leaned back against a wall next to a really bad painting of flowers, and buried the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I just want to wake up.”

A crash in the living room grabbed his attention. He breathed in the fight as his last piece of freedom before the monotony of customs.

“Are you fired?” Baran asked as he approached from the side of the battle. The big man blocked a flying chair, tripped a fleeing vryko, and redirected a novice Team member back into the fight, before reaching Soren. Earlier, upon recieving Cy's summons, Soren immediately texted Baran, and Mercer to find out if they'd also been summoned and what they knew. The answeres were "no" and "nothing."

“Not exactly,” he hedged.

“Who is she?” Baran nodded toward the woman.

The moment of truth had arrived. He had to tell his friends and, by tonight, his personal life and demotion would be on every lip in ESF. Worst bunch of gossips this side of the Styx. He sucked it up and did his best not to grouch. “My partner.”

“We don't have partners.”

“Tell that to the Big Guys.”

Baran studied her and then said, “She's not a Lakas handler. Why did they pair you with a human civilian?”

Soren kept his eyes on the fighting, “I'm demoted.” He watched a team member grab a vryko and slam him into a wall. The house jiggled. “I report to customs immediately.”

See, even stoic Baran winced. Cy and the Big Guys had fucked him. “Customs? That’s just cruel.” Hard

“Yep.” And without a drop of lube to be found.

A low droning sound reached them from his "partner".

“Is she ohming?” Baran asked.

“Sounds like it,” Soren replied. “Pretty impressive through the locked jaw.”

Baran frowned. “There's something contradictory about her. Like her energy is wavering. It doesn’t feel stable.”

“She not stable. She’s crazy.”

“She's your partner?”

“Yeah, Evangeline Bay.”

“That's not Evangeline Bay.”

Soren stilled. “You know her?”

“Her? No. I know Bay. I watched her fail boot camp twice. Bay is,” he positioned his hand five inches below his shoulder, “little.” Baran nodded toward Snowy. “Whoever she is, she is not Evangeline Bay.”

Oh. Damn.

A few things congealed at the moment for Soren. The realization that if she was, in fact, Blah Blah Snowflake then maybe she was legit when she said she didn't know where she was or how she came to be here, which would be pretty damn scary. Which also meant that he'd been kind of an ass in her time of need. He opened his mouth to say something vaguely apologetic when she started screaming.

As much as he wanted the piercing notes to stop, he couldn't blame her because one of the cuffed vryko lunged for her. His mouth opened and was inches from contact when he was yanked back by a team member and faded to the Pit.

Soren leaped forward, giving Snowy a large object to hide behind, which she did while she ranted, “Did that guy just try to kill me? That guy tried to kill me!”

Then Soren stupidly said, “that doesn't make sense. Why would he go for your soul? He can't harvest it. You're dead.”

(...and this...this right here was when Harlow knew why she should have stayed in bed...this was it...the truly unappealing part...the truly nauseating part of the day...the truly scary part...)

And in the space of an endless slooow-motion second Snowy took the impact of her apparently recent, and unrealized, demise with the intensity of an elephant gun.

Heavy and hard.

Soren turned as she dropped straight down. If he hadn't seen it coming, he would have fallen with her. Fortunately, he was a fairly bad-ass guy, so he managed to catch her while steadying himself. And there he stood, a strange woman unconscious in his arms, a vryko scuffle going on around him and one of his best friends helpfully saying, “You know, something about this is really odd, but, for a dead chick, she's got great gams.”