Free Nightlife by Rob Thurman

exactly where I had gone, and why. A note wasn't needed. But I didn't understand why my feet carried me there.
    Or maybe I didn't want to.
    It was too early for the soda shop to be open. I knew that. I also knew it would be open anyway. And I knew George would be waiting for me. How I knew, I couldn't say, and the headache that analyzing it would cause wasn't something I aspired to. So, as with so many things in my life, I let it go. I let it go and walked on.
    When I reached the shop the security gate was already up and George was standing at the door. In a slim sweater of jumbled golds, reds, and browns and the silky sweep of a dark bronze skirt, she watched my approach with her arms wrapped around her waist. She looked older. Such a short time had passed since she'd been giggling and drinking her pineapple shake, yet it could've been years, from the haunted quality of her eyes. Through the glass, the bright copper of her hair was muted, the gold of her skin tarnished… a shadow of the Georgina I knew.
    I stood and looked at her, just looked. It was easy to picture my hand rising to grasp the handle and pull the door open. I could see it so clearly, yet my hand didn't move from my side. Maybe it knew what part of me didn't want to admit. The door was locked. If I tried to open it, it wouldn't budge. I knew that in the same way I knew George would be here.
    She didn't say anything, my girl. Not a word. She only watched me in return with a smile so wistful and fleeting that I might have imagined it. Then she leaned a few inches closer and her lips grazed the glass to frost it with her breath. In the fog her finger traced a few curving lines, simple and spare. And then she was gone. Disappearing into the gloom of the lightless shop, she was the autumn glitter of dying leaves and then she was nothing. Nothing to hold in your hand, nothing to catch the eye. Nothing at all.
    Her breath the only thing left behind, my finger followed the same path hers had taken. I frowned. A car. She'd drawn a car. What the hell? As the glass warmed, even that vanished, the same as its maker. Knowing how it would end, I tried the door anyway. I'd been right.
    Locked.
    By the time I made it home Niko was up and packing. It was a ritual for him, done in just the same way every time. As for me… we'd been on the run for so long, Niko and me, that I'd stopped putting our personal touches on the places we stayed. Because in the end, that's all they were… places. They weren't homes, just disposable living space. Forget that and one day you might slow down; you might take the time to regret your loss. And if that happened, if you took one second to mourn what you were leaving behind, well, your ass was grass. Devil takes the hindmost, but Grendels went one better. They took the middlemost and even the front-runners if there was the smallest misstep.
    All this bleak and impersonal existence might scar the soul, but hey, it was a nice bonus if you were a chronically lazy bastard like myself. Packing usually consisted of shoving my dirty laundry in a garbage bag and putting on my shoes. Sixty seconds max. The excruciatingly efficient Niko tended to take longer. That might've been surprising had he not had so many sharp pointy things to gather up. We didn't quite need a U-Haul for all his weapons, but it was a near thing.
    Walking into his room, I leaned around him to extend a finger and run it along the smooth, silver satin of an elegant dagger. "The acid of skin is detrimental to the metal," Niko said mildly as he rolled another blade in a length of dark green felt. He didn't mention my absence and I was grateful for the restraint.
    "And all the blood is like mother's milk," I snorted, raising a different and more eloquent finger for his perusal.
    "Actually…" He curved his lips in a contemplative shadow of a smile. "Never mind."
    I lowered my finger before he took the notion to treat it like a wishbone. "So when do we pull out, Master? In the