Free Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two by JC Andrijeski

think about that, either. Nik was far from a fool. He would be more careful in what he said to Gantry now. I suspected he’d taken my words to heart about Jake, too.  
    Still, there was no way he’d figure this stuff out overnight.
    I continued to hustle Jake out the door as the realization hit me again.
    Truthfully, I wanted Jake as far away from Nik as humanly possible, for reasons I’d only half-admitted to myself...but I also wasn’t kidding about the lateness thing.
    Gantry wouldn’t have mentioned the “be on time” thing for no reason.
    I was already seriously regretting that I’d told Jake he could come. In fact, I might have insisted he stay behind, if the idea of leaving him alone with Nik didn’t scare me even more than having Jake with me at the modeling agency downtown.
    If Jake was with me, at least I could keep an eye on him.
    So we grabbed a taxi and headed downtown, picking one up on Broadway faster than I expected. If it had just been me, I probably would have walked or taken the bus, or ridden my bike, if it had occurred to me to get the Enfield back from Gantry the day before. The Enfield, which had been a present from Jake himself, funnily enough––or more precisely, a gift from the checkbook of the guy he left behind in Italy––was a high-end, modified motorcycle that had been my pride and joy before I fell through that dimensional portal.
    But I hadn’t gotten the Enfield back.
    And anyway, given how Jake dressed me that morning, neither the Enfield nor the bus would have been remotely practical or even feasible. Well, not the Enfield, at least.
    As it was, I felt pretty ridiculous.
    Teetering down the street in a skin-hugging, dark purple mini-dress that barely covered my butt and crotch, I felt about as capable of defending myself as if I’d been wearing a straight jacket. In fact, less so, although I didn’t have direct experience to say that definitively.  
    The dress left few of my bumps and curves to the imagination, even apart from that, and the most modest thing about me was likely the clunky silver necklace Jake had slung around my neck, like some kind of vicious dog choke-collar. Even that, Jake claimed as some one-of-a-kind original, a “piece” like it was some work of art instead of a trinket that social climbers slung around their necks to give rich old guys an excuse to stare at their chests.
    I noticed Jake managed to make himself look fashionably presentable, too, only wearing a lot more comfortable-looking clothes than what he’d pushed on me. His designer jeans and fitted dress shirt showed off his Italian coastal tan and muscles to fine effect, but also left his sexuality sufficiently ambiguous that he would have options, depending on who we met.
    It scared me that I knew so well how my brother thought.
    The cab dropped us off on the curb in front of one of the biggest high-rises in downtown Seattle, a big black building that locals jokingly referred to as the “Grim Reaper.”
    I hadn’t had a lot of occasions to go inside there before, but I’d met a client or two in the lobby. I knew it had several banks of elevators, as a result, some of which only went to a chunk of the upper or lower floors, presumably to make the climb up those seventy-plus stories faster. Given that ol’ Death Angel probably housed some of the most expensive business real estate in town, especially on those upper floors, I supposed it made sense.  
    Under the segregated elevators, the high-end clients wouldn’t have to ride with the peons working the lower floors...or wait laboriously on the ride to the top while those same peons got off and on the cars for lower-level suites.
    Jake followed me as I teeter-walked to the bank that only visited levels thirty-seven to seventy-six. Jake stood there, preening a bit yet looking suitably mysterious as I pressed the button to call the next elevator down to the lobby.
    Luckily, we were still too early for lunch and too late for the first