No one wants to read of my week of frustrated convalescence, so I’m going to skip that and jump right into the interesting stuff. Not that interesting stuff. Veronica won’t let me write that here.

Emmanuel Cortez was my focus during that week, and I read, watched and listened to everything the world wide web had to offer on him. There was a surprising amount and apparently, he was fond of high rise apartments with nice big balconies. Recon was also boring as all get out. But did earn me some valuable information as I mapped my route in and out and plotted on how exactly to destroy then kill the man who’d effectively killed my pup. It may have been a bit overboard but only if you had felt how sick Helix was, how much pain he was in until his last heartbeat. All on Emmanuel’s selfish orders. For some kind of status symbol.

You know what people don’t put guards on- balconies. It was nine days later, and I was crouched on the balcony belonging to Emmanuel Cortez, my hair tightly braided and tucked away into a black balaclava, body hugged by dark grey and black clothing. The top was a black zippered jacket, the zipper itself black. Black kidskin gloves tucked into the jacket’s sleeves. My tendrils were loose because I’d needed them to climb the building and for what I had planned. The black pack on my shoulder carried far stranger things tonight than my tendrils.

I held back in the shadows of an umbrella table (who needs that in a pent house?) and listened. The glass of the French doors was crystal clear, letting me see the inside of the penthouse. Everything was white with red accents. The walls- unrelieved white. The floor- nearly white wood. Ceiling-white. Couch- white. Rugs- white.

Ceiling fans- red. Doors- red. Throw pillows-crimson. Kitchen appliances-scarlet.

At least my planned vengeance would match the décor.

The owner of the visually boring apartment emerged from an office to stalk into the living room. The doors of a private elevator were sliding open as he approached them and I must say, Emmanuel looked outright peeved over something.

I crept closer to the doors, low to the ground, and watched the scene unfold in front of me. They were so loud as they yelled at one another in the entry way, I was able to slip through the doors with a near silent click and neither of them noticed.

“You let that shark die!”

“I did no such thing,” came Emmanuel’s cultured voice, sharp with rebuke. “You should have worked harder to keep that shark alive.”

“Whites do not survive in captivity and when we told you he was failing to thrive you refused to let us tag and release him,” the newcomer shouted. I could see a man in khaki pants and a polo shirt howling at the suit-wearing executive I wanted to slaughter. There was something… feral about him in a way I couldn’t describe. “We told you! I sent you film of it refusing food and showing obvious signs of failure to thrive and you ordered the aquarium’s staff to ignore me. I mean, the worst of your cronies got his comeuppance during that break in, but you are not innocent in this.”

“You’re fired,” said the executive, obviously bored with the entire conversation. “No one cares about the life of a shark.”

If ever there was an entrance cue, that was it. Yes, there was a witness, but damned if I cared. I could knock the visitor unconscious, though I wouldn’t hurt him if I didn’t have to. He was mad for the same reason I was after all.

I launched myself from where I’d been crouching behind the couch. I had Emmanuel against a wall and held up by tendrils at his throat between one heartbeat and the next. “Oh, I believe you are very wrong about that, Emmanuel. Some of us value the lives of our adopted children far more than yours, in fact.”

“Wow,” the newly fired man said quietly. “Who are you?”

“None of your damn business, mister nosey.”

“You- you’re one of the 40 series, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know who you are, but later we can or talk or I can kill you,” I said over my shoulder, too shocked over hearing that from a random person to react. “Emmanuel and I need to discuss how he deserves to live after killing Helix.”

A gurgle made me loosen my grip on the exec’s throat and lower him to the ground, top tendrils still at his throat, his hands bound by my lower set. He coughed a couple times before spitting out, “Who the fuck are you? Hell, what are you?”

“Eloquent,” I murmured before slapping him across the face. My voice was harsh, the tone playful. “That’s not how this is going to go, Emmanuel. You’re going to tell me how you knew to be so Johny-on-the-spot after that wave that damaged our boat. Then you’re going to tell me why you let Helix die. You might even live long enough to finish.”

At my victim’s silence, the man who knew things he shouldn’t know spoke up again. “The team that made the pickup said that he’d arranged it with someone. Never heard who or how they could predict where a dazed white shark would be. I wasn’t told until the shark started to have difficulty in the recovery tank.”

“White’s cannot survive the exhaustion brought on by captivity,” I said, voice icy with rage. I slapped my hand across Emmanuel’s other cheek. “You still awake in there? Would hate to be boring you.”

That got me a groan of pain and he glared at me with unfocused eyes full of hate. “I don’t deal with kidnappers, you stupid bitch. My men will be here soon.”

I laughed, full of dark mirth, like a promise of pain to come. “Oh, I am not a kidnapper. I’m a killer, Emmanuel. You’re going to die and your men know nothing about it. You told them not to watch the video feeds at night, didn’t want them spying on your pussy parties.”

I felt his pulse jump in anger but he couldn’t turn any redder without shading into purple. “Who talked!?!”

“Big glass doors, cockstain,” I said, pointing over my shoulder. “I’d say you need a better security plan but it won’t matter soon.”

“You can’t kill him here,” the bystander turned informant said.

“Oh, I assure you, I can.”

“Don’t kill me.”

“Shut the fuck up, you.”

I gave an exasperated sigh. “Why can’t I kill him there and who the fuck are you?”

“Like you said, later on the second one,” his responded, smiling at me. “For the first, won’t you get caught?”

“No fingerprints,” I answered, waving a gloved hand. “Also, the ligature marks on the body won’t show up right because, well, who else has seen a corpse with a severe case of tendril fucked-up’itis? No one.”

Yes, too much CSI for me probably.

“Escape? Witness?”

“You don’t care if he dies,” I answered with what I saw in him. “And no one would believe you didn’t do it if you told on me. Woman with tentacles? Nah, you’d go to jail. Do we have the death penalty?”

“Good points,” he agreed, studying my face. “You look like Doctor MacLeod.”

That stopped me. I turned away from Emmanuel to stare at the man, muscles tense. “How do you know them?”

He turned his left shoulder to me and raised the sleeve to show a tattoo… no a branding of “11.5” seared his flesh. It looked old. “I was one of the last of the 10 series. Dr MacLeod went from the program I was created in to the 20 series and later was put in charge of the 40 series. You look like they did when I first met them. Less angry than they did the last time though.”

I was in a killing rage but they looked angrier? “How so?”

“I’d just killed their husband in front of them,” he answered, truth in his eyes. “I’ll tell you more later. You’re an escapee, too?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I made it out of the Northern California facility a while ago. If you’ll excuse us, Emmanuel and I have a dance scheduled. You should leave. Plausible deniability and all that.”

“How are you going to do it?”

Emmanuel tried to interrupt again, and I slapped a tendril over his mouth, tired of him already. He had no heart, didn’t care and wouldn’t talk, what else was there for him to do but be slowly asphyxiated? To die just like Helix had.

“Read about it in the papers,” I said with a smirk. “But leave. He needs to get busy, you know.”

He laughed and pulled a card from his wallet to lay on the dining room table. “Take that, its got my cell. If you want to talk, give me a call. If you turn me in, I’ll hunt you down and make this look like a kiddie ride at a theme park.”

“Turn me in and I’ll put you through a woodchipper slowly and feed you to corals,” I retorted. “I’ll call.”

“Sounds like my funeral plans, would save my estate some money,” he told me with another laugh. Why did he think it was funny, when I had a man I was about to murder in my grasp? He left before I could ask, elevator doors closing with a soft thud. I grabbed the card with my spare tendril and tucked it into a back pocket on my pants.

Free from distractions, I turned my focus to the task at hand. I raised my right hand and snapped my fingers as I targeted the humidity around the light bulbs, bursting each one. Light shouldn’t touch what I had planned. I dropped Emmanuel into a breathless heap and turned the master key in the elevator, dismantling it. It would take a fire Marshall’s key to override according to what I’d learned while delivering a parcel. Some of the guards talked easy enough. It was so hard to find good help these days, as the saying went.

It was four hours before I left, smelling like fresh water, my suit soaked from the shower except for a pair of his shoes that I slipped in to walk across his bedroom’s white carpet and the white wood to the balcony. I left wine red loafer prints behind me. I smiled at the statemen they made before climbing up to the balcony. I was trailing water but that would dry in the sunlight in a couple hours. The footprints would confuse the hell out of the police.

The glass was slick under my tendrils as I climbed down, sticking to the areas over support walls and avoiding any lit apartments. Given it was around three am on a Tuesday night, there was no one awake to see me jump from the building to one just south. Nor from there to another building, tendrils helping boost my jump and make a grab onto a stone ledge atop a museum.

On and on, building to building. The water on my body dried as I heated up from the exertion. I was fully dry when I touched down on the pavement in an ally an hour later. My tendrils were sore from exertion, would need to work on endurance in them somehow I thought warily. I shrugged into my backpack and tucked those weary limbs away. Slipped on wine-stained fluffy skirt and unzipped my top to reveal a scanty halter top underneath. Shook my braids out into a fluffy mess of hair.

When I walked into the dinner Veronica was waiting at, I looked like I’d partied too hard on a school night and was dreading classes. I slid my exhausted butt into the booth beside V and offered my lips for a kiss.

She gave me one, hand running along my face as she did so. “So how was your night, cutie?”

I gave a cat that ate the canary grin. “Oh, it went well. He was hung like a horse.”

“You’re so bad,” she said, pulling me tight. Her voice was a breathy whisper against my ear. “I’ve been worried sick, there’s nothing in the news yet.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling away. “I lost track of time at his place. I won’t do it again.”

Then a waitress showed up with two huge plates of food. She Huevos Rancheros in front of Veronica. For me she had chicken enchiladas, beans, rice and enough corn chips to see me through eating another plate. V told me she’d ordered when I showed up on the tracking app, knowing I’d need to eat.

“God, I love you,” I said after wiping my mouth. She smiled over her cup of coffee, eyes warm but tired.

“You could be a god, you know.”

“But I’m not into MILF’s like Zeus is,” I reminded her. “Now marine biologists, that’s a kink I could get into after a few days of sleep.”

Fates listen to me and my big mouth, if only to mess with me. I swear it.