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The Familiarity

Before the redhead had appeared, Jericho had his foot halfway out the door, determined to return to Van Zanth where he belonged… at least in part. But despite her icy cold reception, the pull he had toward her told him that he was in the right place, at least for the moment.

‘Does she know me?’

She certainly acted like she did, but gauging by the way she talked and acted, she didn’t like him very much.

Jericho watched her disappear into the back of the diner, tempted to chase after her, but after what had happened at the last place, he didn’t want to push his luck. He could handle himself, but without having a proper handle on this city and the underlying hatred surrounding him, he decided to leave her.

He had the distinct sense that he would see her again, however. He wasn’t going anywhere yet.

He paid his tab to the waitress who was considerably less flirty now, her gaze averted as she took his money, even with the handsome tip. He noticed she went out of her way to avoid touching him.

“What did you mean earlier when you said I was ‘one of those’?” he asked her.

She balked to a near opaque and physically stepped back from the table.

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” she cringed, fear coloring her eyes. “I just meant that you’re an Original.”

“Original what?” he snickered, bemused.

He’d been called a lot of things before, but that was a first. The bell dinged from the serving counter, and she rushed to address the order, rather than respond to him, leaving him to down the last sip of his warm beer and stare pointedly at the swinging door to the kitchen.

But as the minutes ticked by, it became abundantly clear that the angry, mystery redhead who sucked the breath from his lungs was not going to resurface.

Reluctantly, he stood and gestured for the nervous server again, and she begrudgingly trudged back toward him.

“Do you need something else?” she asked, still avoiding his gaze.

“Where’s the woman who was sitting with me? She went into the back earlier. Is she still there?”

“Aria?”

Unexpectedly, the name sent spikes of pleasure through him.

“Aria,” he whined, the moniker falling off his tongue as if he’d whispered it a thousand or more times already. Blinking, he centered himself. “Yes. Her.”

The server shook her head. “She left a while ago.”

Disappointment struck him, but he also wasn’t entirely surprised. The persistent pulsating in his chest had diminished a few minutes earlier; the energy he’d felt seconds before laying eyes on Aria dispersed.

“Does she come here often? Does she live around here?”

The waitress finally met his eyes. “We don’t ask questions about Aria,” she said firmly. “I have to get back to work, if there’s nothing else.”

Jericho let her go, realizing that he wasn’t apt to get much more from her, but his curiosity was beyond piqued. Still, Aria had made it clear that she didn’t want him around, and he had no business chasing after her, regardless of how strongly he felt.

But if he happened to chance upon her on his travels… well, no one could blame him for that.

Grabbing his leather coat, he made his way back to the parking lot, noting the covert stares of the patrons again. Suddenly, they seemed more pointed, more curious than they had before.

‘Do they know me?’

Now, he was just getting paranoid.

He needed to get into the city, not sit on the fringes where all the misfits of society appeared to congregate. Answers weren’t going to find him out there, but he knew he’d purposely avoided heading into the middle of town after his brief encounter with Fabrice.

The new technologies and architecture were daunting and unfamiliar, but he would have to learn to adjust, and that wasn’t going to happen by drinking beer in a rundown café in the desert.

Plus, if that redhead lived anywhere, she sure as hell didn’t live out in the boonies.

Sliding into the driver’s seat of the stolen sedan, he curled his hands tightly around the steering wheel and started the vehicle, determined to seek the answers he’d come for. And hopefully, find the redhead along the way as well.

Jericho quickly found that Amestris was nothing like Fabrice. Although the city did boast several high-rise buildings, none rose to the height of those in the place that had seemed like science fiction to him. People went about their business in much the same fashion, dressed in business attire, talking on those strange, hand-held devices to their ears, which he quickly understood were portable telephones.

It still defied reality to him that he had managed to overlook all of these major changes in the world as he hid away in Van Zanth. A sense of guilty unease overtook him when he pulled the car onto one of the main roads, finding a parking spot near a courtyard park.

Two young mothers sat with two children, both vastly varying in age. It appeared as though the fertility issue existed here as it did everywhere else. There was an old-time feel to Amestris, despite the modern advances, the buildings clinging to an antiquated décor, the movements less hurried than the residents of Fabrice but not quite as slow as them in Van Zanth.

He strode toward the parking lot but stopped, looking toward the storefronts across the street instead. His pulse quickened as he recognized the sight from the postcard. A flash triggered a fleeting memory, and he raced to grab at it, but it was gone before he could capture it.

‘I’ve been here before! I know this place!’

The thought was astonishing. Amestris was hundreds of miles away from Van Zanth, thousands from where he’d unearthed himself from a certain death.

‘When had I been here, and why?’

Slowly, he turned around in a full circle, his eyes taking in every detail of the downtown core around him, willing himself to remember, to understand why he was there. But the more he stood there, the more his frustration mounted.

Without memories or guidance, he really didn’t have anything to go off but a sense of curiosity.

That and a very sexy redhead whose gravitational pull was worth keeping him in her orbit for another day or two until he got a handle on why he’d been mysteriously summoned to the ends of the world.

He didn’t want to believe he’d come all that way for nothing, much as it was beginning to look exactly that way.

But maybe Aria was a good enough reason—assuming he ever saw her again.

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