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If it were up to Shaw anyone with a daemon larger than, say, a dog would be banished to the Montana backwoods.
Screw the Machine for abandoning her to this retail hell, and for sticking her with Sameen Gray’s bitch of a commute; but what kind of idiot tried to ride the subway with a grizzly bear daemon in tow?
Shaw stomped off the train, past a mousy-looking woman in a I ♥ NY shirt who was turning a sickly green colour as the transit authorities tried to remove her bear daemon from the train door he’d become jammed in.
Ameretat stalked half a dozen paces behind Shaw, shooting a haughty feline look at the grizzly daemon.
*
Ameretat had settled young.
She had never been the sort of daemon who shifted with the young Sameen’s every mood; not that Shaw had ever really had moods.
She had always been inclined towards feline forms too, so when ten year old Sameen had sat wrapped in a blanket, chewing on her cheese sandwich she hadn’t at first realised that the baleful eyed ocelot watching her father being zipped into a body-bag was for keeps.
*
A damn ocelot, of all things.
Sometimes Shaw almost envied Reese’s dog daemon. Kiera was as much use with saving the numbers as Reese’s bland good looks and just-expensive-enough suits.
A well-dressed white guy with a dog daemon could go anywhere without raising an eyebrow, but people tended to remember a persian woman with an ocelot in tow; well, mostly they remembered a weird-ass cat or stunted leopard, but the point stood.
Getting through marine jump school with an overgrown house cat strapped to her chest had been a bitch too.
*
For some reason the ocelot daemon’s presence on the shop floor did wonders for the amount of eyeliner Shaw could shift. But when a woman with botoxed lips and a goldfish bowl tucked under one arm splashed water all over the floor ranting about the state of customer service today Ameretat elected to wait out the rest of Shaw’s shift in the stockroom.
The woman sadly failed to send her fish daemon flying onto the makeup counter with a splat, and Shaw spent the rest of her shift imagining shooting people and wondering if she was actually bored enough to wish for Root and her glorified rat to show up.
The only bright spot in the day was that the floor manager, who Shaw thought had at least one and possibly two more kneecaps than he needed, sent her home early because the staff found going into the stockroom for lip gloss only to find Ameretat alone and staring down at them from a high shelf 'creepy and weird.'
*
The ISA had a procedure for increasing the distance its agents could be parted from their daemons.
Cole and his daemon had undergone it; Cole had come back grey, hollow-eyed, and silent. Her partner had liked to talk, about everything, but he never said anything about what the Activity had done to allow him to leave his hare daemon behind on the night he was betrayed and killed.
Shaw assumed that the daemon had turned to dust alone in their unmarked van; neither she nor Ameretat had gone back to check.
Shaw and Ameretat hadn’t gone through the procedure; they hadn’t needed to.
Failure to bond with your daemon was one of the major diagnostic criteria for an Axis-II personality disorder.
The specialist Sameen’s mother had sent them to said that the distance she and Ameretat preferred to keep would cause most people and daemons severe discomfort, and the distance they were capable of going from one another was at very outer reach of what was possible. It was one of the reasons the ISA had been so keen to hire Shaw.
*
Finch’s daemon wasn’t a finch; she was a starling, and Shaw would never admit to leafing through a book on ornithology in the library to discover that fact.
The bird daemon hopped from Finch’s shoulder to a monitor and back onto Finch’s head in a flutter of dowdy-iridescent-dowdy feathers when Shaw entered their new Batcave.
“Hey, Harold.” Shaw didn’t know the name of Finch’s daemon, which she didn’t mind because she knew that not knowing was driving Root up the wall.
A quick sweep of the subway station verified that Reese and Kiera were out playing cops and robbers with Detective Riley’s shield, but that Root was gracing them with her irritating presence.
“Hey, Sam,” she said with a cheerful leer, and then much more solemnly, “Hello, Ameretat.”
Shaw’s daemon went so far as to pause and flick her tail in acknowledgement of Root, before launching herself onto the train car roof to better ignore them all.
“She likes me,” Root said confidently; Shaw rolled her eyes, and a small, ferrety head emerged from the sleeve of Root’s leather jacket and nipped hard at the inside of her wrist. “Ouch! Mac!”
A weasel daemon suited someone who changed identities as often as Root. It wasn’t as though there was a shortage of people in New York with rodent daemons; people were packed into Manhattan like rats anyway. And most of Root’s marks only saw a flash of whiskers and a twitching nose between Root’s collar and the fall of her hair, or a ball of fur curled up in a purse; Mac could be mistaken for anything from a rat to a ferret.
*
Shaw knew that there was no statistically significant correlation between the sex of someone’s daemon and their sexuality, and it still surprised her that Root’s daemon was male.
Root, on the other hand, had no sooner realised that Shaw had a female daemon than a delighted grin spread across her face and she’d embarked on her campaign of death by a thousand come-ons.
So arguably the whole Root thing was Ameretat’s fault, too.
*
Like Shaw, Ameretat was more suited to their second day job.
The daemon landed silently on the floor of First City Bank, and shot a scathing look at the muffled thump Shaw’s boots made hitting the marble floor.
*
Daemons were like emotions to Shaw. She could recognise both, but she had to pay attention; it wasn’t instinctive to her the way it was for other people.
If a person had, say, an ostrich for a daemon then that was obvious enough. But cat and dog daemons weren’t always so clear, and she had no idea how people could pick out one pigeon daemon in a flock of the birds.
Shaw stalked the edge of the park, grumbling at Finch’s suggestion that they locate their new number by looking for his bird daemon.
The worst trouble Sameen had ever been in as a child was when she’d touched a stranger’s terrier daemon thinking it was a regular dog.
Even now, Shaw sometimes finished fussing over Bear and almost reached out to stroke Kiera because she didn’t have that instinctive flinch most people had towards daemons not their own. If Reese had ever noticed Shaw’s fingers twitch towards his daemon he’d never said anything.
Shaw was pretty sure that the CIA had the same procedure as the ISA for parting assets from their daemons, and she doubted Reese and Kiera would have baulked at it; but Kiera dogged Reese’s steps and lay at his feet, and Reese sometimes chuckled drily at things Keira said only for him.
She doubted that their apparent closeness was merely to preserve Detective Riley’s cover.
A man in a black coat and hat took off running across the park, he scooped up a pigeon in mid-flight and stuffed it inside of his coat.
“Ms. Shaw,” Finch said in her ear.
“I see him, Harold.” Shaw gave chase; Ameretat licked her paw, smoothed back her whiskers, and let Shaw get a substantial head start before loping off after her.
*
Not that she’d ever admit it, but there were a few things Shaw appreciated about Fusco; he always brought plenty of food on stakeouts, and he didn’t question why Ameretat had chosen, or was even able, to spend this one sitting on a dumpster in an alley across across the street.
Reading meaning into what people’s daemons said about them was about as exact a science as astrology, but Fusco said that he’d had enough people trying to figure out what a wombat said about him that he wasn’t about to judge anyone else by their daemons.
“It used to get pretty crowded in this car with Carter’s daemon in here too,” he reminisced.
Shaw snorted. Carter and her black bear daemon had been the exception to Shaw’s general belief that anyone with a bear daemon should have to go and live in the Canadian wilderness where they so clearly belonged.
*
Root was a different variety of crazy than Shaw; where Shaw was indifferent to Ameretat, Root was devoted to Mac.
Okay, by now Shaw knew that Root was flirting with her in the hope of screwing her rather than just screwing with her; Root called beating up a bunch of rent-a-thugs and drinking their clubhouse dry ‘date night’. Shaw knew that she’d somehow joined Finch, their computer overlord, and a glorified rat as one of the things Root actually gave a damn about, and surprisingly enough that didn’t bother her.
Ameretat was standing on the bar lapping up spilled whiskey with her tongue. Root plucked Mac from where he was perched on her shoulder pawing at her hair; she popped him down on the table and said, “Go talk to Ameretat.”
Shaw watched the weasel daemon scurry past a semi-conscious biker. “I can’t promise she won’t bite him in half.”
“She won’t,” said Root with quiet confidence; Shaw shifted uncomfortably and concentrated on peeling the label from her beer bottle.
Mac had climbed up onto the makeshift bar and was standing on his hind legs in front of the ocelot daemon; Ameretat was failing to swat him away with her paw.
“You don’t like her much, do you?” Root asked. It wasn’t the first time Shaw’s antipathy towards her daemon had been noted; but it was the first time it had been pointed out so shamelessly, or with more curiosity than judgment.
“No more than she likes me.” Shaw drained her beer. “And I never understood why I’m supposed to be happy about being shackled to a silently judgmental runt of a jungle cat.”
“I have the voice of God in my ear, so you’re asking the wrong girl.” Root laughed and nudged Shaw with her shoulder, and when Shaw didn’t immediately shrug her off she stayed pressed up against her; Shaw let her stay.
*
Shaw had tried to keep her relationship with Root within the bounds of plausible deniability, but then came Tomas and the Marburg virus. It was increasingly obvious that they were all living on borrowed time, and that they might as well enjoy themselves.
Sameen Gray lived in shoebox, and even with Shaw’s less-is-more approach to furnishing it felt cramped.
Shaw left Root standing in the middle of her one room while she opened the bathroom door and tipped her head for Ameretat to go inside. This had been a mood-killer before; some people didn’t want to be parted from their daemons even for this. But it was a dealbreaker for Shaw; she didn’t want Ameretat in the room when she was having sex any more than she would have wanted Bear there.
Root shrugged Mac from her shoulder; he hopped to the ground, and followed the other daemon into the bathroom.
“Voyeurism not your kink, Sameen?” Root asked with a smirk, but she had switched off the external microphone on her cochlear implant before Shaw could cross the room.
*
The next morning Shaw opened the bathroom door to find Mac curled up on Ameretat’s back.
“Hussy,” she said, and Ameretat shot a scathing look at the raw, red rope burns around Shaw’s wrists.
*
The second time Shaw slept with Root was in the Batcave after her cover identity was blown. Root had said she was willing to sit on Shaw to make her stay put, then she'd had a better idea.
Shaw woke to find a weasel lying on her face. “G'ff,” she muttered through a mouthful of fur, and tossed the creature onto the pile of clothes at the foot of the cot.
Touching someone’s daemon without their express permission, half asleep or not, usually led to yelling, crying, and general hysterics. Root mumbled, “Ooh, that tickles,” rolled over, and went back to sleep.
Idiot.
*
No one else had ever touched Ameretat; Shaw herself hadn’t touched the daemon since she was a young child.
Hurting a target's daemon was an enhanced method sanctioned by the ISA, and Shaw had always heard that the pain was unendurable. Now, in the depths of the stock exchange with Martine holding a snarling, spitting Ameretat down with a boot to the ribs as the daemon leaked dust from bullet holes that matched Shaw's, Shaw wondered where that pain was?
Maybe it was one of those things that just didn’t apply to Shaw and Ameretat; or maybe that pain was having trouble competing with two hollow-points and what Shaw was pretty sure was a rapidly collapsing lung.
Shaw could hear Root’s screams receding into the distance, but there was nothing she could do about that now. She inched her hand out and clutched at the fur of Ameretat’s neck; the daemon’s snarls subsided into pitiful yowls, and then stony silence.
Good daemon.
Shaw looked up at Martine levelling the gun at her head. What was the point of having a daemon whose name meant not dying she wondered, waiting for Martine's final shot with her fingers buried in Ameretat’s fur.
She waited for a long time.