Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change by Robert J. Crane

this afternoon. Kat watched him with slightly lowered eyes, trying to figure out what the man was thinking. Taggert stood abruptly, stalking his way over to the glass doors that led out to the pool deck. “We just need to hang tight. I’ll get another bodyguard or two.”
    “You saw what that guy did to the last bodyguards,” Scott said, his voice laced with quiet menace. Taggert had argued against letting Scott come back to the house after the attack. Kat didn’t argue with Taggert very often—he was so very often right, and she could see that almost always—but Taggert didn’t have experience with metas, not really, and he was operating from the assumption that the two police officers lurking outside would be enough to stop her attacker. Kat was not laboring under such illusions.
    Karyn gently placed an opened bottle of Fiji water in Kat’s hand. Wordlessly she pressed it to her lips, drinking it down by a quarter of the bottle.
    “Ah ah ah,” Taggert said, scolding her from his place by the glass doors, “graceful. You’re drinking like some dude at the gym; be more birdlike.”
    “Are you joking?” Scott asked, his temper going right to the top—again. “Someone just tried to kill her and you’re worried about how she looks drinking water?” His eyes flashed to the cameraman in the corner. This one’s name was Jed, and the sound guy was—well, she didn’t remember his name. She was mic’d now, though, which meant he could hold the boom mic closer to Scott, who was the only one in the room not wearing his own microphone. He’d refused.
    Taggert made a throat-cutting gesture to Jed, the cameraman, who shrugged. “Fine, we’ll cut it later.” Taggert turned to Scott. “In case you’re as slow as I’m taking you to be, she’s always on , okay? Any moment could be a moment that makes it onto television, and that affects her brand, her image. Now, we can cut around things that don’t look so good, and can even do a little re-shoot here and there if we have to, but if we can get it right the first time, then—”
    “Holy shit,” Scott said, hands coming up to his tousled, sandy blond hair as he turned away from the conversation.
    “Scott, it’s okay,” Kat said, trying to soothe him before he made himself look like even more of an ass. The way he was acting wasn’t going to play well once it was edited, and he probably had no idea. She looked squarely at Taggert. “We still have the party tonight, don’t we?”
    Taggert met her gaze coolly. “The fundraiser at Anna Vargas’s house? Yeah. I was gonna say that you need to be seen there for that. It’s a can’t-miss.”
    “I’m surrounded by insane people,” Scott said, now talking to himself, but loudly. That wasn’t going to play well, either. “Out of your minds, all of you.”
    “Can’t show fear now,” Taggert said, looking at her with a glint in his eye. What he really meant was that she couldn’t show fear until this episode of the show premiered. Then she could look as scared as she was right now, because it’d look great. All she had to do was put up a mostly brave face in front of the other cameras, and let the ones that orbited her like planets around a celestial body catch her doing a little crying just out of sight, maybe.
    “Showing up to a party and dying is cool, though,” Scott said. Kat grimaced; she needed to find a way to break it to him—gently, of course—that he needed to think about his image. He looked right at her. “Kat … this guy looks like the type that can walk through walls. I can’t stop that. You can’t stop that—” He frowned. “Not that you tried real hard to, in any case.” She remained silent, and after a moment he went on. “We need to get you out of here. Can’t you—I dunno, take a beach vacation or—hang out on a private island or something?” He waved a hand in the air. “Anything, really. Basic security considerations.”
    Taggert mulled that one, and Kat watched