I saw your little light. Not smooth, dude.
Her phone chimed seconds later with a response.
Just seeing if you were paying attention. Have a nice day.
The ball popped in her hand.
Shay groaned. “Elves.”
Chapter Fifteen
Shay drummed her fingers on her leg. She didn’t like being in the passenger seat, even with her friend Bella’s nice leather seats. A lack of control never sat well with her, but she’d screwed up before by driving very nice vehicles. Now she just never let her friends see her in anything fancy. She was supposed to be a humble professor, not a globe-trotting adventurer who earned millions per job. It was the details that blew a false identity.
She stared out the windows. It was nice to spend a night with her girlfriends after all the craziness in recent weeks. This would just be a good dinner with friends, no crazy witches with powerful wands or mysterious elves. No gunning down hundreds of cartel douchebags, either—not that she hadn’t enjoyed the last.
Shay frowned, tension suffusing her body. They were damned close to Warehouse Three.
This is stupid. I have no reason to worry about that. A lot of places in LA are close to a warehouse. I’ve got five of the damned things, after all.
“Where were we going again?” she inquired, keeping her tone casual.
“A modern Italian fusion place called Bestia,” Janelle chimed in from the back.
“Italian, huh?”
Maybe I should make James take me to a nice Italian place. That shouldn’t be too weird for him to handle. It’s not super-exotic, and there’ll be plenty of meat, even if it isn’t barbeque. The man needs to broaden his horizons.
“I wish we hadn’t gone this way,” Kara commented, rubbing her shoulders.
Bella frowned. “Why? This is the quickest way to get to the restaurant, according to my GPS.”
“Yeah, I know. My office isn’t that far from here, and my carpool often drives this way.”
Shay looked over her shoulder at her friend. “So? What’s the big deal?”
Kara looked down. “It’s just… I think there’s a haunted building on the route.”
Janelle, Bella, and Shay laughed.
Kara sighed. “There’s this weird old building about two blocks down. It’s some sort of old warehouse, but I don’t think it’s used for that anymore. Sometimes I hear the strangest things when going by it, even from the car.”
Shit. Of course, she had to notice Warehouse Three.
“Maybe they shoot porn there,” Shay suggested.
Everyone laughed, and the tension melted off Kara’s face.
Shay kept a smile plastered on her face.
Shoot something there.
Shay downed some Spaghetti Rustichella, enjoying the citrus notes and sweetness of the Dungeness Crab as her friends chattered. It’d been a while since she’d had good Italian.
At her insistence, the group had been seated at a table in the rear. Shay sat with her back toward the wall, giving her a full view of the dining room. It was a perfect defensive seating arrangement. She hadn’t announced to her friends that she had a 9mm pistol sitting in her purse, but even if they found out it wouldn’t be a huge deal. People packing heat in LA weren’t rare.
The adamantine knife might be more difficult to explain. Shay smirked at the thought.
Her eyes flicked to the side at some quick movement. No assassin with a knife or gun was there, only a waiter, wiping his brow in relief at catching a plate that had fallen. Another sweep of the front revealed only a room filled with well-dressed people enjoying their meals.
Young, old, men, women, different races, and even a few elves in the far corner. It was like most places in LA—a cross-section of modern America.
Situational alertness wasn’t a bad skill to practice, and her encounter with Correk had only reinforced that no matter how far she ran from her past, she couldn’t be sure someone wouldn’t dig it up and come looking.
Her original plan to stockpile money and hide in some tropical paradise far from urban civilization didn’t seem so bad in retrospect.
She resisted sighing. The plan hadn’t seemed so bad before because she’d had nothing holding her back, but now she did: James and Alison. Hell, even Peyton and her girlfriends.
Friends and family. Still can’t tell if they are making me better or weaker.
Bella smiled at Kara. “So, how is everything going with your guy? Didn’t know if this was a burning-through-quickly kind of thing or the start of something more. You’ve been spending a lot of time with him.”
Kara shrugged. “It’s going great. The sex is great, but I don’t know. We’re still in that initial stage where everything feels good, and we’re ignoring each other’s flaws. I don’t know yet if this is going to be something long-term.”
“It doesn’t have to be. Just have fun, and if it grows into something more, then it does.”
Janelle sipped some wine and nodded. “I had to kick Darius to the curb in the end, but I can’t say I regretted our time together. It was fun for a while.”
Shay resisted a smirk. She’d had a confrontation with Janelle’s ex-boyfriend to keep him from harassing her friend, though the more time she spent around her friend, the less convinced she was that the woman couldn’t have handled it.
“So, any plans now?” she asked.
Janelle shook her head. “Nope. I think I’m just going to spend some time rediscovering who I am.” She offered Shay a sly grin. “And so when were you planning on telling us about your man?”
The other two women’s eyes widened, and they leaned in to stare at Shay.
“You bitch,” Bella offered with a laugh. “You snagged a guy, and you didn’t even tell us.”
Kara nodded her agreement.
Shay blinked and looked between the three women, her fingers tightening around her fork. There was no way Janelle could have known about James. Even though Shay had briefly discussed him absent any real details before, she’d never shown them any pictures or talked about him after that.
Dark scenarios ran through the tomb raider’s mind, with Janelle as a spy or a cat’s paw
