small.
“I told our other selves that we were looking for a way to coexist.” Joe looked from one to the other, doing his best to read their faces. “That’s not quite true.” He waited until he had their attention, all of them. “I intend to find a way for us to keep living while they go away. Permanently.”
They listened, but none of them said anything. They still had so much information to absorb.
When everyone had finished changing, he went into the bathroom and lifted the top off the back of the toilet. There, taped carefully in place, he found the stack of twenties he’d hidden away.
When he moved back into the room, Not-Kyrie was putting on a light layer of makeup from the small collection he’d purchased earlier. What the hell did he know about cosmetics? Only enough to know that some girls wouldn’t willingly leave a room without having put the stuff all over their faces.
“So, here’s the deal. None of you have ID yet. We’re going underground after dinner.”
“Underground?” Not-Cody’s turn to frown in confusion.
Not-Tina answered first. “We’re going to clubs that are illegal. No carding, no getting kicked out for being underage.” Joe nodded. Like the others, she was getting more of a personality, more of a defined sense of self. She had been awake longer than most of them, well, more often, at least. Both Not-Tina and Not-Kyrie had served very important purposes since he’d awakened them.
Joe nodded. “We go in, we talk, and maybe we get lucky and score a few new friends for the night.” He made sure not to look at either of the women. He didn’t want them getting the wrong ideas. He wasn’t looking to settle down and sure as hell not with one of the women he’d be spending the next few weeks or months dealing with regularly.
Not-Cody looked grim. “What if they come back?”
Joe shrugged. “Then they come back. It’s going to happen. We can’t stop it. Not yet, anyway. I mean, I can help you wake up, I can keep you awake, I think, but sooner or later, Hunter will come back and he certainly can’t help you. Wouldn’t even if he could.”
“Why not?” Not-Cody. He was as curious as a baby, which worked well enough, considering.
“Because he thinks we’re the bad guys. We’re the monsters.”
Not-Cody seethed, his face twisting into a dark storm of rage. “They’re the ones keeping us locked up! Not the other way around!”
Joe smiled and held up his hands in mock surrender. “Calm down, chief. You’re preaching to the choir.” He shook his head. “We’re going to discuss that very thing. We’re going to figure out how to get rid of them. All of them. Forever.”
Not-Gene looked his way for a moment and slowly the brutal features of his face moved into a small, tight, satisfied grin. A moment later the others were smiling as well. Sometimes you just had to let people know you were after the same thing. After that, it was easy.
Chapter Thirty-four
Joe Bronx
When they sat down, Joe ordered coffee for everyone. Caffeine helped them stay alert, stay changed for longer. If they were like him, they wanted the fix, wanted to be free for as long as possible. The group looked ravenous. Fortunately he’d chosen a restaurant that was known for its generous portions. Changing required a lot of calories. As near as he could figure it out, the physical transformation that their bodies went through when they shifted from one form to the other burned about the same calories as a five-mile run. Bones had to grow and change, and muscles had to change with them. It wasn’t just a matter of getting a dye job for the hair. The entire body was altered. Cody to Not-Cody meant putting on a lot of weight, enough to make the difference very noticeable. Cody could eat a dozen pizzas a day for months and not put on the weight that came with becoming Not-Cody. The science of changing was unknown to him, but he knew that every time he took back his life from Hunter, he was so hungry that eating a cow seemed like a nice notion for a snack.
The Others were just as hungry. The four newborns tried everything they could think of and ordered more afterward.
They didn’t spare much time for talking until the feast. But as they settled down to look at the menus, Not- Cody got a petulant look on his face.
“What’s wrong?” Joe asked. “Nothing you like on the menu?”
“I don’t know what I can eat.”
“Why not?”
“Cody’s allergic to shellfish and peanuts.”
Bleed over again. Not-Cody shouldn’t have known anything about Cody. This amount of bleed over would have been enough to guarantee Cody’s death if he’d been one of the subjects that Janus had decided to keep for observation. Joe smiled. “Cody’s not allergic to a damned thing. He just thinks he is.”
“He breaks out.” Not-Cody spoke with the conviction of a religious fanatic.
Joe’s fist slammed into the tabletop hard enough to rattle every plate and glass. People at other tables looked toward him with worry and irritation. He ignored them. They were insignificant. “You’re. Not. Cody.” The four others wore dark expressions, and he had to remind himself how hard he’d worked for self-control. It was easier, so much easier, to take offense, to cut loose and devastate whatever crossed your path. But it was best not to antagonize them. He thought he could shut them down, revert them back to their Jekyll forms, but could he do it fast enough? He didn’t know and didn’t want to test the theory.
When he spoke again, it was with his mind.
You’re not Cody. You don’t have his mind or his weaknesses. Any allergies he has, they belong to him.
Not-Cody didn’t have the ability to speak mentally, so he spoke out loud instead. “How do you know that? If I eat a shrimp, how do you know it won’t kill me?”
His real voice again, now that he had calmed down enough not to want to yell. “You’re new to the world. I get that. All of you are new.” He made sure to look each of them in the eyes. It wouldn’t do to offer insult by ignoring any of them. “I’ve been around for five years.”
“Five years?” Not-Gene sounded doubtful.
“Five years. What can I say? Hunter was an early bloomer.” A necessary lie. He’d been around a lot longer than that, but trying to explain it would take too long. “I’ve had five years to work out details, to learn things. One of the first things I did was to get DNA samples taken of me and my counterpart. What I can tell you without fail is that, as far as that test was concerned, there was no genetic correlation between me and Hunter. Not even close enough to be distant cousins.”
Not-Kyrie shook her head. “Not possible. I saw you change.”
“You saw Hunter become me. We’re not the same. I’m almost a hundred pounds heavier than he is. I’ve developed more body mass, more muscle density. I can see better than he can. I can hear better than he can.” He started lifting one finger for every point he made. “I heal faster, I move faster, I fight better, cook better, read more and even dress better than that loser. He’s probably a virgin and I might as well be a slut. We’re not the same person. We just got stuck occupying the same space. Get it?”
“So how do we change? Do you make it happen?” Not-Gene looked at him with that petulant scowl of his firmly in place.
Joe shrugged. “I can. But that’s not the only way. Sometimes it happens because you’re stressed. That happens to me a lot. If Hunter thinks he’s in danger, sometimes I wake up to handle it. I think it’s almost instinctive.”
Not-Cody stared hard at him, his eyes narrowed as he studied Joe. It bothered Joe that something about Not-Cody made it almost impossible to read what he was thinking. But in the end, Not-Cody accepted the truth of Joe’s words. He ordered shrimp scampi and two additional entrees. The others order several entrees each, and the entire table shared every appetizer on the menu.
When they were done eating, the limo that had dropped them off earlier took them to the next destination, an old warehouse that had been converted into an illegal party hall.
