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Nile Freeman, gun in her hands, bullet between her teeth, and head literally hanging on by a thread, was starving and tired.
"Starving" was an insensitive exaggeration that coded for how goddamned much she wanted some fucking gummy bears. Haribo. Specifically the green ones. God.
"Tired" was more of Nile's existential state of being this decade (she couldn't measure in centuries yet, which Joe and Nicky insisted was a blessing but for family street cred's sake felt more like a curse). Being the newbie was exhausting, a minefield of jokes she didn't understand, rules she hadn't learned, and weapons she still wasn't proficient enough in.
Not to diss on all the experiences she'd had and the love she'd gained. Her 100 years with Joe and Nicky had been a gift. Yeah, she was still minorly pissed at Andy- they'd all been so relieved when she'd regained her immortality, and Nile had been so relieved to get to keep her female friend around, only for Quynh to resurface literally a month later and Andy to scamper off into the sunset with her the moment she did.
Which was fine, ladies, Nile understood they had a whole lots-of-fuckery-to-sort-through-lots-of-sex-to-have-I-die-you-die-love-of-my-life shit going on. But did they need 100 years to figure it out? 100 years in which she was left alone with just Joe and Nicky? The two of them were wonderful, obviously, fantastic people and amazing mentors. Truly, Nile was so, so grateful and thrilled to have them. But if she had to watch them spoon-feed each other homemade carbonara one more time she was going to end herself.
Ugh. Not that she could. But God, Gen Z humor dies hard.
The SUV jolted over a bump and the ligaments attaching her head to her fucking spine snapped again.
Nile gargled and screeched, any curses for the pain spilling out of her open windpipe and avoiding her mouth and tongue entirely. Booker hissed from the driver's seat, spitting 'bordel de merde' from between his teeth, which Nile had recently learned directly translated to 'whore of shit.' She couldn't agree more.
Or she thought she couldn't. She was drunk out of her mind, or the violent beheading equivalent, and she couldn't really feel her mind or her body at the moment. The skin of one side of her neck had only just now knit itself together enough for her to gingerly set her head back on her neck stump.
Beheading hurt like a bitch. This was her second time. Her first had been boring. Big whoop, a standard sword, just another day at the office. But this one had been at the hands of an honest-to-god machete, and if that wasn't just the most funtastic way to go then Nile didn't know what was.
Or actually, maybe she did- she had delightedly discovered last week that back in the 1890s, Booker had died via eating shit by falling off the Eiffel Tower.
After 100 years without him and with the boys thoroughly avoiding all subjects that had anything to do with him, Nile had finally had the pleasure of hearing all sorts of stories about Booker's 350 years of life 30 years ago when he had re-joined their little family. Joe and Nicky claimed they just wanted her to hear about him from him, to form her own opinions, untainted by their aged (like fine wine, Nicky said) and decrepit minds. Of course, they still talked about him plenty- she just wasn't allowed to join the discussion. The two of them spoke in French when they wanted to have conversations without her, because apparently Booker, the betrayer of a man they detested at the time, deserved the kindness of teaching her his mother language.
Nile didn't fully understand yet the skewed morals these five adhered to, but Joe still teared up sometimes when he heard traditional Arabic drifting out of a mosque so that was that.
The car slowed on crunching gravel as it pulled into the "driveway" (overrated deer trail) of the "house" (shack long ago claimed by termites) she and Book were staying at for this super special cartel take-down mission they had the joy of executing. His fingers spasmed briefly around the wheel. His forearms were in tatters, presumably including the nerves and muscles required for motor control, courtesy of a flash bomb he had caught that had shredded the skin off his bones and left a sizable chunk of his right cheek and eye missing. Booker couldn't see, but head severing trumped missing eyeball so she got to play passenger princess.
He slid the car into park as he dropped his head against the back of the seat. The clonk his skull made when it hit the headrest perfectly summed up how she, and she assumed he, felt. But he reacted like this to grievances of all sizes, so it was difficult to tell if he was really in pain or just facing day-to-day Booker feelings.
If there was one thing Nile had learned about Booker since re-meeting him, it was that the man frequently looked as he did now--like his bones inside him were about to buckle and give out and send him tumbling to the ground (and oftentimes, they did). He looked haggard, which was a word she had never used in her life before immortality but found herself using regularly now. Her daily usage quote had increased exponentially since she had known the indefinitely run-down man next to her. Booker, with his permanently rumpled clothing, hair forever bordering on gray, and beard that was too long to be called stubble but really too short to be considered a beard, was without a doubt the most haggard man she had ever met.
Slowly so as not to disturb the healing still taking place between his skull and optic nerve, his eyes fluttered closed.
Beautiful, even stuck as forever 42. Technically the oldest in the group.
His features were old, his mannerisms even older, and his soul ancient. Who he was was tied intrinsically to the story his face told: that of the delicate, outdated European. The dabbled light on his eyelashes, the panes of his cheekbones, the line of his nose against the sun behind him. He was highlighted in a fitted layer of sunlight. It made him stick out against the drab backdrop, pulling him out of the obscurity she knew he craved but could never quite seem to claim. How could everything about him scream grace when the man inside was clumsy as shit?
Booker's fingers drummed against the wheel and he broke his bright frame suddenly, dropping his head to the side and opening his ruined eyes to find hers, already staring at him.
He was graceful. Nile knew he was, deep down. So could anyone who knew him as she did. She caught glimpses of it occasionally, in the ways he could anchor her with a gaze, stabilize a stranger, and stand tall when everyone around him was crumbling. But centuries ago something in him had broken, cracked like a dam--something he couldn't or hadn't fixed that had left him as the one collapsing. Who Booker was had ruptured and he had lost grace in whatever bullshit life had wrapped him up in since then.
Annnd speaking of bullshit, Nile had some of her own she needed to incite.
The gremlin in her started to cackle as Booker opened his mouth and spoke, the words grinding out of him like pepper in a shaker and aligning splendidly with her stupid-ass foolproof scheme.
"I'm going to go to the store," he said.
She huffed a smile at this, or the best Botox version she could do considering her nerves were not currently connected to their proper synapses. This was the perfect opportunity to execute the plan that had been brewing on her mind ever since Book had announced that he didn't know what a "BFF" was.
Prepare to get trolled, bitch.
As sweetly as she could muster she asked, "Could you get me some gummy bears? Haribo?" She raised her eyebrows imploringly, or at least tried to with her failing facial muscles. She got one up, maybe?
Booker's soft and tired smile was there as he blinked at her. "Sure."
Then his expression turned hard and focused again as he faced forward and closed his eyes the way he did before battle, taking a deep breath.
Then he exhaled and pushed himself out of his seat and out of the car. He stumbled slightly climbing out of the suspension vehicle (never mind the fact that the guy was 6'2" and by all accounts should have been fine), the skin on his arms still spiderwebbed. Booker's eye was only halfway reformed and he caught it in one hand as his feet hit the gravel, the cord of muscle that was supposed to be doing its damn job and holding the eye in place stretching from his decayed eye socket to the eye.
He let out a string of cuss words in French that was so native it was more nasally wheezing than anything and Nile slammed her hand over her mouth to graciously afford him the dignity of not laughing, even though she definitely could have because hooray! Her organs were functioning and she was down to just regrowing the skin that would cover the internal organs of her neck!
Growing a head back was so weird. There was phantom limb, for one thing, which was bizarre for any extremity but a different level of funky when that limb was actually your entire body and all you were was a fleshy stump with eyes. Like a minion, but without arms and legs. Thankfully this time the goddamn machete (she was still on this, it would have been a freaking fantastic story for the grandkids if she could fucking have them) hadn't gone clean through, leaving her in a nearly headless Nick situation. The other time this had happened she had been split into two completely separate pieces. Joe had sympathetically held her together until the skin of her neck was attached to the skin of her head, letting go once she was stable enough so he could go make her tea, leaving her to suffer in silence as everything beneath the skin regrew. Nile had essentially been a human sausage. Just thin flesh casing mushy red goop.
But truthfully, wasn't that all humans were anyway? Just big, sentient meat sausages?
Booker slipped while walking around the front of the car and cried out as he landed hard on his ass.
Nile did laugh this time. Nah, humans were so much cooler than sausages.
She laughed harder when an extended middle finger appeared above the hood of the car. Her favorite fact about Book to date was that the time he died falling off the Eiffel Tower? It had been because he tripped. He was immortal, a trained killer, and a fucking world-class klutz who had been slipping on banana peels since before she was born (he was also, characteristically and for the same reason, extremely bad at Mario Kart).
Booker rubbed his ass as he stood with his trademarked no-harm-no-foul smile. Bro was the dictionary definition of a good sport. Nile's theory was that his forgiving attitude was what had caused the rest of the team to welcome him back so easily. He had fooled them all--they had emulated him subconsciously and thus been unknowingly manipulated into loving him sooner.
Maybe manipulate was the wrong word to use. It was foul in this context. Yes, once upon a time Booker had lied his way to hell and back, but Nile had watched him manipulate people many times since then and chose to believe he would never do it to someone he cared about. They'd been on several missions together when they needed to get information out of someone and he got cold and quiet or bloody and terrifying, and every time she had just held her position and fought to keep her face blank. It was disturbing. With blood slathered across his face or with pristine hands, Book was just as dangerous as she was and an active threat in any situation you put him in, but it was easy to forget that when she was picking up Jimmy Johns with him. It was a lot harder when he had someone quaking at the end of a gun.
Nile focused on composing herself from laughter as said murderer and hitman (because labels were labels, no matter what cause they fought for) rounded the car to her door. Think of the mission, Freeman.
He might have been an ex-contract killer, but Booker was also a gentleman, and so he did as gentlemen did and opened the door for her (a guy hadn't done that for her at Target the other day- which p.s. yes was still around in 2150 because it turns out cheap boho home furnishings are essential for human life no matter the century- and she had laid into that dude then and nearly cried tears of joy now because chivalry should've been dead but Sebastian le Livre was still fucking alive, bitches!). Book leaned against the open door, arms finally healed and folded, and Nile briefly wondered if it would break under his weight. For all he tried to fold himself into the background, Booker was a big guy. He towered over her even as she sat elevated at least 2 feet off the ground in their new-age Land Rover.
"Is your head healed?" he asked, studying her neck as if he could see the crack. He definitely couldn't.
"Yeah."
"Stellar." He uncrossed his arms, holding one of them out to her to help her out of the car.
The first time he had tried to do that, her 21st-century sensibilities had nearly shit their pants. Now it was as basic as breathing, a part of their mission routine that cemented Booker's status as a relic and her's as a modern woman who chose how she wanted to be treated. She had broken and built empires and anyone who questioned her taking someone's hand to get out of a car was clearly suffering from toxic feminism. He had lived for 350 years and by all means could have gotten over the old-fashioned custom, but she suspected it had been as pounded into his generation as TikTok was into her's and old habits die hard.
Fuck, she missed TikTok.
"Wait, wait, wait," Nile said, holding up a hand.
Booker's arm dropped and a somewhat resigned look fell across his face. "What?" She wasn't sure if she was imagining the slight whine in his voice, the sound pulled from the dregs of her memories, back to when her brother had used the same tone with Mom when she asked them to unload the groceries.
"You need to promise," Nile said. She crossed her arms and legs as if to prove her point. She even turned her nose up a little bit for good measure.
"Promise?"
"Yeah."
"Promise what?"
She rolled her eyes. "My gummy bears, you troll."
Booker chuckled, showing off laugh lines she would never have, and reached his hand back out. "Yes, yes, I promise."
The mission was a go. The stakes were high. The gummy bears were imperative. Time to cast her line.
Nile dropped her voice. "Do you... pinky promise?"
Booker blinked at her.
His eyes were quizzical and empty at the same time. God, with all the dumb blonde moments he had, Nile wasn't entirely convinced her BFF (even if he still didn't know what that meant) wasn't secretly Ken.
"What?" he finally asked, the word devoid of any feeling or intelligence.
Nile held her pinkie in the air but kept her eyes locked on Booker. "Promise," she said. Like I was simple. Like it was easy.
Then she smiled the barest bit so he would know it was not.
Booker's eyes narrowed. She was the best liar on the team and he knew it, but lucky for her, he couldn't pull her apart yet. Her tell was if her lips twitched, Joe and Nicky said, but they had 100 years of dealing with her bullshit on Book, and Nile's 30 together with him meant nothing when she had spent so much time prior perfecting the hard line of her mouth.
His eyes darted to her finger and then back up to search her face. He clenched his jaw, his brow pinched together, and she reached like she was going to fix it for him but he rubbed his thumb between his eyes to smooth his face back out before she could.
His face was always so tight, so drawn with worry. It didn't have to be over much. He told her once, after a very long night with the burn of whiskey in her throat and on his breath, that it was from being the only father on the team.
She'd started smoothing the scrunched pieces that night, starting, always starting, with the pinch between his eyes. His lashes had stuttered closed the first time she did it. Now he did it himself whenever his face drew in on itself from stress or confusion or in this case, desperation.
His cheeks sucked in slightly and she knew he was pleading for his life. She didn't intend to give him a fucking inch.
An exasperated sigh left his lips that was so European Nile felt more French, merde being exhaled like breath as he shrugged his shoulders back and moved to stand more fully in the door. His forearm settled on the car's frame above her in a way that could only be described as dad-ish and he inclined his head lightly at her hand.
"And what the sweet fuck is this, Nile?" he asked, sweet being dragged from his lips, higher pitched as e's were. He looked up from her fingers to her with his tongue pressed to his teeth, the few strands of hair that Nile suspected represented what little sanity he retained hanging loosely in his face.
"A pinky promise," she said, enunciating for dramatic effect. The words were like stones dropped into the lake of Booker's mind she prayed to God would sink. They were the slow slide of paper across a desk. A deal she desperately wanted him to sign.
She held his gaze with calculation and begged him to call her out, even letting her lip twitch a little. She’d been working on this defense for weeks. Go ahead and read the fine print, she'd defend it with her life. Sign the deal.
Booker just blinked at her. Not a thought behind those eyes (at least, not one that wasn't of her). Lights on, lights blasting with full orthodontist-strength LEDs, but no one was home. Bro was laser-focused. He was trying to work this out. He was trying to work her out.
His mouth was hanging slightly open.
Nile internally sighed. Ahh, mouth breathing. An issue even for the agitated French Renaissance man.
He finally broke, leaning sharply out of the door and dragging a tanned and freckled hand down his face. His fingers got stuck somewhere around his mouth, the bands on them digging into his lips and dragging them down.
"This a real thing?" he asked. His eyes were opened wide to appear questioning and sincere, but it served to do nothing but draw attention to the severe bags beneath them. Shit.
Booker suddenly looked exhausted.
Or had he looked like that throughout this entire conversation and she just hadn't noticed?
A low "Well?" rumbled from his chest and Nile shriveled because the gruffness of it was confirmation. The normal parts of his voice (and ergo of him, her vile little thoughts needled) were blatantly overworked and overused. Fuck.
Nile felt awful to be doing this to him all of a sudden. She'd been so caught up in her stupid game she hadn't seen how he was dead on his feet, the entire upper half of his face weighed down by his hand and fatigue and his eyes spread wider than they should have been because of it. He looked like shit.
If their rules were reversed, would she have been like him? Worn from the years running like water over her bones until they should've been gone? Feeling the phantom ache of them, even when they were whole?
Nile was tired. But she knew the emotional weariness she felt was nothing compared to the bone-crushing exhaustion Booker must feel. Even with a body that lived fine and after 100 years outcasted alone to get his shit together, he was dead in the ways that mattered. Nile wondered if he was only deader because of it.
She should've picked Joe or Nicky to mess with and dragged the rest of them into this later. Fuck. God, how was she nearly 150 years in and still finding ways to be an idiot?
Inexperienced. Unprepared. Just fucking young.
It wasn't fair to lament her issues when she was actively making Booker's worse, but the words burned in her head like a brand, and besides, Booker could take it. They all took shit like this from each other all the time. That was how you lived when you were this old, she had leaned--you just dump emotional issues or cruelties on everyone else and it's fine because we're all doing it and we'll have time to clean up and start over, and the undercurrent of pain that was the true source of their shared mental health issues was communally understood. They were all struggling and they all knew it, so there was little to no refining emotions. Apologies always came with excuses left unsaid because voicing them was a waste of energy.
The point was that Booker would recover from this, even if tonight she felt awful. By this time tomorrow, after several sincere and half-assed apologies, 'the pinky promise escapade' would just be a bad joke as she had intended it.
But would Nile ever recover from being young?
She almost just dropped her pinkie and her voice cracked when she cleared her throat and spoke again. "Yeah Book, this is what the kids do now," she said, attempting to deliver it with a nonchalant shrug. She was wasting her time. Book was too good; he picked up on everything and her cover was definitely blown at this point. Nothing she could do to save it.
God, the image of him standing there like a sad, lost golden retriever out in the rain was going to haunt her tonight.
He was still staring at her, skeptical and blank, so despite her frantically twitching bottom lip she decided to give this whole botched operation one last-ditch effort by scoffing, "I know it's not a blood oath or anything-"
A heavy finger closed around hers.
Nile blinked out of the self-pity fest she was throwing to see her hand- their hands- because Booker's pinkie had interlocked with hers.
He squeezed lightly and her eyes flew to his face, all her hopes re-inflating as he said, "Nile Freeman, I pinky promise that I will get you your gummy bears tonight."
Shock permeated Nile too deeply for her to do anything for a moment.
The cold seriousness of his eyes once again reminded her of the trained killer beneath the soft, graying facade, but she couldn't bring herself to care this time. What the fuck? was her first fragmented thought, followed closely by he's just messing with me--but she'd gotten to be a pretty good BS detector and upon closer inspection, dedicating special focus to the bridge above his nose, Booker was remarkably in the clear, so finishing off her colorful prancing parade of thoughts was a twirling how the hell did he fall for it?
Dazed, she shook their fingers like it was a handshake in the business deal he somehow, miraculously, believed this was. Wow. Her voice crackled to life, disbelief evident that she was actually getting her cake (gummy bears) and eating it (achieving trolling level frat star), too. "Thanks, Book," she said.
Booker smiled, a bright flash of teeth splattered with blood.
Then he winked.
He leaned in conspiratorially, and Nile mimicked him for grins and giggles' sake--and then he opened his mouth and whispered some shit that would haunt her for the rest of her life. "Anything for my BFF."
He might as well have set off a bomb.
The words toppled into her ears like hand grenades but they felt like champagne bubbles, it felt giddy and drunk and the realization hit her as the pin was pulled and Nile shrieked, "You BITCH!"
This idiot had known. He knew about BFFs, he knew about pinky promises, he had let her yap for a solid 20 minutes, he had somehow KEPT THIS ALL FROM HER and he was SMIRKING at her right now. Hell, if she asked him road work ahead? he would probably respond sure hope it does! because this ABSOLUTE BITCH in front of her was apparently a fucking fiend for Gen Z references and she just hadn't had any idea--what kind of fucking BFF was she? What kind was he?
Booker grinned at the splintered look on her face. Decided to drop more bombs. "I've been using pop culture to fuck with Joe and Nicky for centuries," he said, because apparently he liked playing everybody, not just her.
Was this what elation felt like?
Nile's eyes were blown so wide the cold air was stinging them. "Holy- holy shit," she stumbled, as more and more pieces of her world dawned on her and clicked into place, "are you the reason Nicky thinks Beyonce is a car model?"
Booker just smiled wider. "Yup."
"And Joe believes btw stands for 'bring the wife.'"
He snorted a laugh. "Does he still text that every time he wants to know if he should bring Nicky to something?"
"HE'S GO ANDY IN ON IT NOW!" she yelled, squawked more like, throwing her arms wide to illustrate the point. "The two of them just send it back and forth to each other in every group chat for whatever, like espionage plans or Christmas shopping or family brunch, you know them they don't care- and it's driven me insane trying to figure out where they got it from without tipping them off because it's fucking hilarious!"
Booker laughed, the brightest ring of it she had ever heard. "That might've been my finest moment," he said with that stupid, proud-of-something-dumb-I-did smile boys did. He offered her his arm again to help her out of the car and she took it because she didn't trust her legs to support her when she hit the ground otherwise. Then the 350-year-old man giggled. "Although actually, did I ever tell you about the time I convinced Andy the Macarena was a ritualistic French funeral dance?"
"NO."
Booker laughed again and shut the car door behind her, looking downright giddy and pleased with himself to be trolling their old-as-dirt family grandparents. He rounded the front of the car again to the driver's side.
"I'll tell you about it as soon as I get back," he called over his shoulder and she jerked out of the mental image of Andy shaking her ass at a dead Napoleon to scoff at him attempting to get back into the car.
"And where the hell do you think you're going?" she asked, using her voice like an incredulous fishing line to grab this boy from his delusions and yank him back to her.
Booker froze halfway into the diver's seat. "To get gummy bears?"
"Fuck the bears. We're joining forces on this right now and I need to hear everything."
Something shifted. Something in Booker loosened, some muscle she hadn't realized he had that couldn't be smoothed over by her thumb, some burden on his shoulders, some tension in his forehead. There was the grace.
Trolls love company. Even immortal, sardonic, clumsy-as-shit-trolls. She was tired of feeling alone. Nile and Booker were moving in under this bridge together.
"I would love that."