Anything but Ordinary (3 page)

‘Your aim’s bad,’ countered Denny sneeringly. ‘You haven’t hit me once.’

She hit him hard in the chest and flung him across the room. But even in the midst of the raging fury that had taken possession of Denny, he still could not bring himself to retaliate with a like action. He missed her by inches sending her diving for the floor, but she was unhurt. 

‘STOP IT RIGHT NOW! ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL EACH OTHER?’ In the doorway, taking his life into his hands, was Stiles. 

There was a silence before Stiles continued in the same bellowing tones. ‘YOU’RE FRIGHTNING CINDY’S KIDS AND I HAVE AN ALMIGHTY HEADACHE. OTHER PEOPLE LIVE HERE TOO, YOU KNOW. YOU MIGHT HAVE A BIT OF CONSIDERATION INSTEAD OF ACTING LIKE TWO-YEAR OLDS. SORT IT OUT AND THAT’S AN ORDER.’ He stomped out of the room. 

‘I guess that told us,’ said Denny rubbing his head ruefully. 

‘I’ve never seen him so angry,’ said Tamar, awed. ‘I’ve never seen
you
so angry either actually,’ she added.

Denny maintained a tactful silence here. He
had
seen Tamar this angry before, many times, just never with him.

‘He’s got a pretty loud voice when he wants,’ she continued. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard him shouting before.’

‘He had good reason, don’t you think?’ said Denny. ‘We
were
pretty awful. I mean just look at this mess.’ He indicated the destroyed kitchen.

‘I’ll get a dustpan and brush,’ said Tamar. But Denny assumed she was joking and held his peace. 

He did, however, wave a hand and clear away most of the rubble, just in case she was not. 

Tamar sat down on the floor suddenly looking defeated.  ‘How did it get like this?’ she said. 

Denny knelt down beside her and took her hands gently. ‘Why don’t we talk about it and find out.’ he suggested.

‘I wouldn’t have killed you,’ she said suddenly.

Denny’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I know,’ he said. But it should not have needed saying, he thought, feeling slightly disturbed. This was worse than he had realised. For the first time since they had met, Tamar felt like a stranger. Would they, he wondered uneasily, ever be able to bridge the gap that had sprung up between them so suddenly? 

* * *

A frigid silence had descended over the house. Denny and Tamar had, by tacit agreement, decided to keep away from each other at least for a few days. In a smaller house, he would have been sleeping on the sofa.  As it was, he moved his few possessions into a spare room on the same floor. There was a dull ache in his chest that he recognised as a breaking heart. He did not know how to go back, he wished he did. He would have done anything.

Tamar was feeling bad too, but somewhere inside her was the unquestioned assumption that she could somehow fix this. What she was mostly feeling was frustration that she had not yet figured out how. But she did not doubt that she would. It was her unshakable belief that she could fix
anything
.

It was Stiles’s contention that nothing would be fixed unless they talked, as he tried to tell them both. 

‘But every time we try, we end up fighting,’ argued Tamar.  ‘I just can’t reason with him.’

‘What are you, my dad?’ was all that Denny had to say about it. 

Cindy, despite her still unresolved feelings about Denny, was distressed by the turn matters had now taken. She tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore the situation as much as possible, feeling that she was neither qualified nor impartial enough to interfere. Hecaté had no such reservations, and was resolving that a month on a desert island was what they both needed when matters suddenly came to a head in an unforeseen and abrupt way. 

The atmosphere in the house was nearly normal again, at least on the surface, when they had some unexpected visitors. 

The two agents stood rather awkwardly on the front doorstep while Tamar, Denny, Stiles and Cindy appraised them intently. 

Tamar was the first to speak.  ‘Well,’ she said, drawing on her experience of Denny’s favoured viewing habits. ‘If it isn’t Mulder and Scully.’ she glanced at Denny for confirmation that she had the names correct, but he remained impassive, his eyes flinty and cold. 

‘He’s Scully,’ said the older agent pointing at his companion who shrugged bemusedly, he had clearly never heard of the X Files.

A spark of amusement flickered in Denny’s eyes for a moment, but only Tamar, who was watching him closely, observed it.

‘Agent Dawber,’ the younger agent, who had been designated “Scully”, introduced himself.  He looked as if he was in the middle of a particularly incoherent yet convincing nightmare. 

Denny sympathised, but did not show it. 

‘Rook,’ said the older agent curtly. ‘Can we come in?’

‘What do you want?’ said Denny. He sensed a threat here, if not to his person then at least to his peace of mind.

‘To come in,’ said Rook cagily.  He seemed nervous; at least, he kept looking behind him as if he expected to see something unpleasant following him. 

‘
No
!’ said Denny more forcefully than he had intended.  Tamar looked curiously at him.  ‘What can it hurt?’ she asked. ‘I want to know why they’ve been following us about.’

‘I just don’t want them here,’ said Denny stubbornly. ‘We’ve got enough trouble as it is, they could be more.’ Even as he said it, he knew he was wasting his breath.  Tamar never took advice, even from him. 

But this time Tamar hesitated. Things were bad enough between Denny and herself at the moment.  ‘Well,’ she began ‘if you really think …’

Agent Dawber bobbed forward. It’s important,’ he hissed. ‘And we need to talk privately.’ 

‘Before all the soddin’ press turn up,’ said the one called Rook meaningfully. ‘We’ve noticed they always seem to find you too.’

‘They’re probably following
you
,’ said Denny. After all,
we
aren’t anybody. Maybe they want to make you a film star,’ he added caustically noting the younger agent’s immaculate appearance. Behind him, he heard Cindy giggle.

Then Tamar lost patience. ‘Oh come in then,’ she said and stood back from the door. Denny did not move.

The agents moved forward hesitantly and Denny eventually moved casually aside without taking his eyes off them.  The two men shuffled in hastily under his gimlet like gaze; neither of them met his eye. Up close, this apparently scruffy and unimpressive “boy” as they had thought him, was incredibly intimidating. 

Agent Dawber, in particular, hoped that he would take his disapproval to the extreme of leaving them alone with Tamar. But Denny had no intention of doing any such thing. He propelled them firmly into a study and ordered them to sit down. ‘All right, he said. ‘What do you want?’

Tamar stood behind him smiling but saying nothing.  She was remembering in exact detail a conversation that had taken place between her and Denny not long after they had first met. 

‘Always consider the possibility that you might be dead wrong,’ she muttered under her breath.

If Denny heard her, he gave no sign of it.

‘Well?’ he said, as the intimidated agents quailed in their seats. 

‘We work for a government agency,’ said Rook eventually. ‘You might say
the
government agency actually, but we can’t tell you any more than that at the moment, not unless …’

‘Unless what? Denny’s voice grated harshly across the agent’s.

‘We’ve been sent here to recruit you,’ said Dawber. ‘All of you really, or as many of you as are willing.’ He looked at Tamar.

‘What you
mean
,’ cut in Stiles. ‘Is that you want Tamar, but you’ll take the rest of us if you have to.’

‘Not at all,’ said Rook smoothly. ‘We know who you are, who you all are; and we are aware that you all possess remarkable talents that our agency can use.’

‘Keep dreaming,’ said Denny ‘there’s no way …’

But Tamar nudged him. And he heard her thoughts clearly in his head, as he had not done for some time.  ‘
Say yes, or at least maybe. We can find out who they are then, what this agency is …’

‘Who cares?’
Denny’s thought flashed back.

‘I do.’

‘You’re going to have to tell us more than you have if we’re even going to consider it.’ Denny temporised, knowing that if he did not say it Tamar would, and a whole lot more besides. 

‘What
do
you know about us?’ asked Cindy with just a tinge of concern in her voice. Denny gave her an approving look, which set Tamar’s teeth on edge.

‘Everything,’ said Rook meaningfully. Which was not entirely true, but they, or rather, The Director, knew enough. 

‘Are you really five thousand years old?’ asked Dawber
naïve
ly.

Tamar gave a start.

‘It’s not polite to ask a lady her age,’ said Cindy, unexpectedly rescuing her from having to answer.

‘Sorry,’ muttered Dawber looking at his lap.  This was all a bit much for him really.

‘We
know
she is,’ said Rook firmly. ‘Really “Scully”, don’t ask stupid questions.’

‘Just like we know that you defeated the Queen of the Sidhe and rescued all those children,’ he added.

This was, in a way, common knowledge. At least it had been in all the papers in one form or another. But all the same, it was disquieting to hear in such matter of fact tones.

‘We aren’t going to get out of here alive are we?’ said Agent Dawber looking at the angry, astonished faces surrounding him.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Denny. ‘We don’t kill people.’

‘Well,
he
doesn’t,’ said Tamar wickedly. ‘I might.’

‘I might be persuaded, myself,’ put in Stiles, ‘given enough provocation.’

‘Well, I
wouldn’t
,’ said Cindy positively. ‘But I have no objections to turning them into toads or something.’

‘Chickens,’ muttered Tamar. ‘Or puffins maybe,’

Denny allowed himself a smile. 

‘Your situation is not a good one,’ he told the agents. ‘I’d start talking if I were you.’

The agents looked at each other for the first time. Each was thinking the same thing. They had not been told nearly enough about what they would be getting into here. Someone was going to pay for this. But in the meantime …

‘We’ll talk,’ said Rook. ‘It’s why we came.’

~ Chapter Three ~

C
indy and Stiles were talking in the conservatory. There was a definite air of conspiracy in this, as it was the only part of the house that could be relied upon never to contain either Tamar or Denny. Both were allergic to having glass all around them. Tamar, because it reminded her of living in a bottle, and Denny, because of its reflective qualities. Denny avoided any surface that might contain a reflection as assiduously as any vampire could.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Stiles. ‘All that stuff about secret government agencies – secret
world
government agencies – and probing into the supernatural. That’s
our
job.’

‘I think that was their point,’ said Cindy. ‘Tamar was far too interested if you ask me,’ she added.

‘I noticed that too,’ said Stiles. ‘And with things as they are … you don’t think she would …?’

‘She
has
been going on lately about getting a
job
,’ Cindy said this last word disdainfully. ‘In my opinion, that’s going
too
far.’

‘And she isn’t the type to take just
any
job,’ said Stiles thoughtfully.

‘Time was, she’d have left those two in a dormant volcano somewhere, and that would have been that,’ said Cindy. ‘But she actually listened to them.
Politely
.’ She shook her head.

‘I think we need to talk to Denny,’ said Stiles. 

‘What does Hecaté think?’ asked Cindy curiously. She thought it was odd that he had chosen to talk to her about this and not his wife. 

Stiles shook his head. ‘She’s not human, like us,’ he said. ‘She tries, but she really doesn’t understand this sort of thing. It’s not how gods behave apparently. Besides, you’ve been talking to Tamar a lot lately. I just wondered what you thought. As it turns out, you think pretty much what I do.’

Cindy sighed. ‘It’s all such a shame,’ she said. ‘If two people were ever made for each other …’

Stiles nodded. ‘It’s funny really, I mean they’ve never fallen out like this before,’ he said. 

‘I never thought they would,’ said Cindy. ‘Not them, not Tamar and Denny. It makes you wonder …’

‘If there’s more to it?’ said Stiles. 

‘So many weird things happen around here,’ she said.  ‘You never know.’

‘Magic you mean?  Can magic do that sort of thing, break people up like that?’

‘Ordinary people maybe,’ said Cindy, ‘but not those two. If someone was using magic on them, they’d know.’

‘Oh.’ Stiles was disappointed at this stark summation. He had momentarily entertained hopes of a conspiracy that he could unmask and save the day. His life in recent years had prepared him for this type of eventuality.  But it seemed that there was no sinister puppet master in this case. Only puppets, being blown this way and that by their own volatile emotions. This was not his area; he doubted that it was anybody’s.*

*[
Stiles believed that psychiatrists were people who charged you $500 an hour to listen to you talk about your dreams because no one else would listen and then tell you it was all because of your mother anyway.
]

‘We need to talk to Denny,’ he repeated.

‘I don’t think we’d be telling him anything that he doesn’t already know,’ said Cindy glumly.

* * *

Denny was reading a note:

Dear Denny,

It’s not working is it?  I need to get away for a while. I have no doubt that you could find me if you wanted to, but I think it would be a bad idea. Please just give me some time to figure out how to fix this. I’m not giving the ring back – not yet. I haven’t given up – I
will
be back. I love you.