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xp_logs2008-05-15 03:45 pm
x-skin.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2008-05-15 03:45 pm
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Angelo and Adrienne, Thursday afternoon
Sent by Emma, Adrienne arrives in London to 'read' Amanda's pendant. It's a productive meeting.
Usually jetlag only affected Adrienne when she was flying from a later timezone to an earlier one, but when she stepped off the 64 Square company jet at Heathrow and into her waiting towncar, she wasn't feeling like herself. The twisting in her gut and her dry throat didn't really feel like jetlag, she noted as the car sped towards the center of London, but there was no other explanation for it. She certainly wasn't nervous or upset. Not over Amanda's disappearance. That was ridiculous. She'd only spoken to the woman once! Maybe Adrienne had tolerated her while they'd been smoking, and maybe she hadn't developed an instant feeling of derision towards Amanda that she usually felt towards people, but that didn't mean she was actually worried about her!
To take her mind off of these unpleasant thoughts, Adrienne pulled out her cell and dialed Angelo's number. "I'll be in the city in twenty," she announced without ceremony when the call connected. "Where do you want to meet?"
He glanced around as he continued down the street, looking for somewhere to wait. "Stefano's", he decided after a moment, spotting the sign in the distance. "On New Cavendish Street."
Adrienne disconnected without a reply and sat back against the leather seat of the car, toying with the strap on her overnight bag restlessly and tapping an impatient foot as she gave her driver the address Angelo had relayed to her. Her impatience grew as the car traveled the A4 and entered Belgravia, then north towards Marylebone, where the driver began conversing with cabbies at various stoplights to find the location of Stefano's. She spotted the sign while the driver was asking for more directions at a light and acquitted the car promptly, leaving the driver to his confusion.
Upon entering the snack bar Adrienne spotted Angelo instantly and wasted no time hurrying over to him. "What the hell's going on?" she asked without greeting.
He nodded to her by way of terse greeting, pulling the pendant from his coat. "This is Amanda's. Her brother gave it to her, she doesn't take it off... but I found it in a pawnshop."
Okay, so clearly no one was going to actually satisfy her curiosity and tell her what had happened to Amanda. Well, that was just fine. Adrienne wasn't sure she even cared what had happened. She would do what Emma had asked her to and try to figure out where Amanda had gone by using the pendant- not because Emma had asked, but because Adrienne felt a twinge of guilt over the fact that she'd foreseen something like this happening when she'd keyed in to the St. Jude medallion last month, and hadn't been able to accurately decipher what had been going on then. She wanted another crack at the reading, to see if she could solve the mystery of what was happening to Amanda. "Where was the pawnshop?" Adrienne asked in an almost conversational tone, removing her gloves and placing them on the table. She reached in her bag for a cigarette to steady her nerves, remembered she couldn't light indoors anymore, and cursed.
He would have told her if he knew. 'Missing' was all anyone knew, right now. "Round the back of King's Cross station. Not the city's best."
Adrienne fiddled with her unlit cigarette as she tried to beat back the queasy feeling in her gut that had only grown upon hearing where the pendant had been found. Her time spent teaching in London hadn't been enough to familiarize her with every area of the city, but she read the news and knew enough to know that Angelo was right about it not being the city's best. Since Angelo seemed disinclined to supply her with any more information, she took the piece of jewelry in a hand she willed to keep steady so she could satisfy her curiosity on her own.
Because Amanda was already on her mind, it didn't surprise Adrienne when she keyed in straight to Amanda's coming into possession of the pendant, at the bar she recognized at Harry's. A blue humanoid creature- her brother, Angelo had said?- had given it to her in a wrapped box. It had a spell cast on it. A homecoming spell, Amanda called it. The blue brother suggested it was something to lead her home, if she ever found herself lost.
So why the fuck wasn't it working? All it seemed to be doing was muddling up Adrienne's vision of recent events with flashes and snippets of a much younger Amanda in what Adrienne had to assume was her home- visions that had nothing to do with the pendant, but were somehow being shown to her because of the spell on the gold piece.
Gritting her teeth, Adrienne fought against the pull of the 'home' visions and nearly sighed with relief when she once again saw brother and sister drinking at Harry's with Amanda wearing the pendant. Rolling her eyes in disdain at the touching display of familial affection between the siblings, Adrienne pushed her mind forward along the pendant's timeline, forcing herself to stop when she saw Amanda slammed into a wall by one of two goons, the thug speaking in a rough British accent. Adrienne wished she could narrate for Angelo as she experienced what she knew was an event following Amanda's most recent trip to London, presumably an event that had taken place after her disappearance from her friends. But she had never been able to focus her mind on reading an object and speaking at the same time. So she watched, though she wasn't silent for long.
A startled noise escaped her lips as she saw Amanda try to fight the two goons who had her cornered. She saw the witch's hands come up and heard her speak strange words Adrienne assumed formed a spell. Nothing happened, however, except a smack across her face delivered by one of the brutes. This had Adrienne crying out as if she'd felt the blow, and instantly the British goon appeared transformed into a face she knew all too well: that of her deceased husband. Amanda's face had turned into her own, the alleyway in London Adrienne and Steven Du Clos's bedroom from years before. Her home. She had fallen to her knees under the shock and pain of her husband's blow, just as Amanda had fallen to the thug's.
On a sob, Adrienne bit through her bottom lip and battled the unwanted effects of the homecoming spell, but a return to Amanda's episode with the thugs, one of whom kicked her as she lay crumpled on the ground, the other prising the golden jewelry from her hand, proved too devastating for the deeply-affected psychometrist, who managed to disentangle her shaking, clammy hand from the pendant and fling it onto the table before she sagged forward onto the table herself, head buried in her arms to combat the bright lights that nausea was forcing into her vision. "Shit, fuck, Christ, shit, shit, shit!" she babbled, struggling not to retch in front of Angelo.
Angelo had scooped up the pendant instantly, and his hand now hovered over Adrienne's shoulder, not sure if he should touch her. "What?" he asked quietly, not pushing until she'd recovered. "You saw somethin' bad, didn't you."
Grateful Angelo wasn't losing his apparent composure to push her for details, Adrienne struggled to regain some composure herself with several deep breaths, allowing only a single sob into the sleeve of her blouse before she straightened up with gritted teeth, vision clear. "Two young thugs took the pendant from her," she explained after clearing her throat, attempting to sound as businesslike as possible after her near-breakdown while staring at the table. "I'm not sure where, exactly. She... didn't give it up easily, so they used force to take it from her." Risking a glance at Angelo, Adrienne's green eyes flashed with sympathy before she returned her gaze to the table. "I didn't key in all the way to the present with it," she added, annoyed now. "There's a fucking spell messing with my reading. But I'll try again, if you want to give it back to me." Mildly surprised by her offer, which she hadn't intended on making until she'd looked at Angelo, the psychometrist clenched her hands into fists to steel herself and realized she'd torn her cigarette into fine shreds as she'd been speaking, the threads of tobacco now littered over her side of the table.
He put it back down on the table, between them. "If you're up for it. If not, we'll call this enough done an' I'll go find those thugs an' get it out of them where it happened. Any details of what they looked like?"
Adrienne assumed that admitting one of them had taken on the form of her dead husband wouldn't be helpful, so she frowned as she thought of the correct word for them, attempting to recall the word her British students had used. "They looked like... chavs, I think they call them. Like every teenage and mid-twenty-year-old guy in this fucking city. Baggy pants, hoodies with the hoods up, flat-billed stylized Yankees caps- since they're the only fucking team the Brits seem to know-, enormous shoes..." An involuntary shudder passed through her as she remembered Amanda being kicked repeatedly. "I'm up for more; I'll try to get more for you," she said to Angelo with a determined edge to her voice, and braced herself as she picked up the pendant again.
Keeping the thought of where she'd left off in her head, Adrienne brought herself back to the alleyway in London where Amanda was still on the ground, coughing and retching. The chavs were moving on now, and though the homecoming spell was trying to pull her into images from Amanda's childhood, the psychometrist focused on the pendant until she saw the two thugs, whom she studied intently this time, sauntering down a street she didn't recognize. She managed to notice a sign for the Spitalfields market as they walked.
Triumphant, she moved forward along the pendant's timeline and saw them heading into a pub called the Salmon and Compass that played absolutely atrocious music... forward again and she watched them enter an off-license where they pocketed some candy bars, verbally abused the clerk, and followed a thin young man in a shirt and tie out of the shop and down two blocks, where they cornered him in an alleyway in much the same fashion as they had Amanda and beat him for his wallet and watch. The homecoming spell pitched her back to another beating of her own, and she nearly dropped the pendant once again before determination to finish what she'd started had her forcing back images of her own past and returning to the thugs, who took the watch and pendant into an East Indian-owned all-hours pawn shop behind King's Cross station, where the pendant remained until Angelo found it.
Wary of what was to come, Adrienne pressed forward tentatively, recognizing she was in the pendant's future by the disjointed, discoloured flashes she was seeing rather than the clarity of the past. It was fairly solid for a future reading, but Adrienne refused to believe that it would happen for certain. She saw Angelo returning the pendant to Amanda, who was in bed in what appeared to be a hotel room, and, not wishing to see what came next, Adrienne let go of the pendant as if she expected it to burn her and blinked at Angelo from across the table until she had arranged her disjointed thoughts enough to speak.
"The thugs attacked her somewhere near Spitalfields market," she informed him. "I think that's by the Liverpool Street station? Then they went to some bar called the Salmon and Compass- they seemed to be known to the bar staff. Then an off-license; no name on the windows or awning. Vivid, dark blue paint on the front, though. The clerk knew them- tried to make them leave. They accosted a young man in a shirt and tie for his wallet and watch, then took the pendant and the man's watch to the pawn shop. The smaller one was Caucasian with a scar on the left side of his lip and a really disjointed nose. The larger one was black. Neck tattoo; some sort of tribal pattern... I might be able to draw it. That's all," she finished, holding back on the last vision she'd seen. "It was days ago... at least a week." With a sigh, she wiped cigarette shavings off the table. "She could be anywhere by now."
Angelo nodded grimly, memorising all the details of the description. "It's a pretty good start. I'll find them, maybe they've seen her again since." His voice said they'd be telling him everything they might know, whether they liked it or not. And he hoped they wouldn't. "Thanks, Adrienne. You've been a lot of help."
"I wish they have seen her again since," Adrienne muttered; "maybe this time she used her witchy powers to turn them both into toads." But she shook her head. "It's a big city. They won't have seen her again." The toad quip brought a question to the forefront of her thoughts. "She said something to them in a language I didn't recognize... a spell maybe? But it didn't help her. Can magical powers just... stop working like that?"
"Big city, yeah, but everybody's got their territory. That's how cities work, nobody spends equal time in the whole place." He shrugged, frowning. "Not just like that, but sometimes they can get disrupted. Or maybe she was just out of juice."
Eyeing Angelo with her usual contempt as he explained to her how cities worked, Adrienne placed a finger on the pendant to watch the same hotel-room scene in the future begin again in her mind. She folded her hands in her lap after a moment, pleased that her describing the thugs to Angelo and his determination to go find them hadn't altered what could happen in the future. Amanda could still get the pendant back. Find her way home, or whatever the hell the spell was supposed to do for her. "So if you're so sure these assholes have seen her again, what are you still doing hanging around here?" she challenged Angelo, still unsure whether she should tell him what she had seen in the possible future.
"You asked a question, I stuck around to answer it." He stood abruptly, ignoring the look she was giving him. "An' I'm not sure, but findin' them's the best lead I've got."
"If you want another lead," Adrienne offered, face blank, "she was still wearing her St. Jude medallion when the pendant was taken. Check out some more pawn shops, find it, and I might be able to give you more." She intended to spend her own time searching the shops herself, but having Angelo keep his eyes open as well couldn't hurt. "You don't seem all that upset," she pointed out with a raised eyebrow, mostly to irritate him, "but maybe you're waiting to express your feelings when you find the dynamic asshole duo?" Her squeamishness over the violence she'd witnessed and relived had faded to a dull ache by now, allowing anger to come to the forefront of her emotions. She wanted the assholes to pay.
"You don't have a clue what I'm feelin', Ms. Frost", Angelo responded, looking at her with cold eyes. "I don't do upset in public if I can help it. An' yeah, trust me, they won't be fit to hurt anyone else when I get through with them."
Receiving the reaction she'd wanted, both in regards to Angelo's emotional state and his plans for the thugs, Adrienne nodded curtly but was sure she failed to keep the pleased smile from turning up the corner of her mouth. "There was something else," she stated matter-of-factly. "In the future. It could be that it doesn't come into being- that something happens to alter the events that lead up to it, so it never comes to pass- but I feel like telling you anyway. I saw you give the pendant back to Amanda." She touched the gold piece again, smiling when she saw the image was still in place for the future, and, satisfied, held it out for Angelo to take back.
He did, tucking it away into a pocket, and something lightened in his face at that news, some small piece of worry lifted. "It's good t'know it's possible right now, anyway. Thanks."
Adrienne smirked. "Don't thank me. I didn't do it for you." Her failure at coming up with any concrete whereabouts for Amanda was weighing on her, but she was mildly consoled by the fact that Angelo's face had brightened slightly. Rising to her feet, she shouldered her overnight bag and moved towards the door. "You know, at first I didn't have the slightest idea what Amanda saw in you, but if you deliver on making sure those assholes don't hurt anyone else, I might be willing to admit that you're not entirely a useless lump of flesh," she told him with a wide grin.
"I won't be doin' it for you", he retorted with a flash of something like humour. "But check the papers in a couple days. I plan on makin' sure the right people find them when I'm done."
Usually jetlag only affected Adrienne when she was flying from a later timezone to an earlier one, but when she stepped off the 64 Square company jet at Heathrow and into her waiting towncar, she wasn't feeling like herself. The twisting in her gut and her dry throat didn't really feel like jetlag, she noted as the car sped towards the center of London, but there was no other explanation for it. She certainly wasn't nervous or upset. Not over Amanda's disappearance. That was ridiculous. She'd only spoken to the woman once! Maybe Adrienne had tolerated her while they'd been smoking, and maybe she hadn't developed an instant feeling of derision towards Amanda that she usually felt towards people, but that didn't mean she was actually worried about her!
To take her mind off of these unpleasant thoughts, Adrienne pulled out her cell and dialed Angelo's number. "I'll be in the city in twenty," she announced without ceremony when the call connected. "Where do you want to meet?"
He glanced around as he continued down the street, looking for somewhere to wait. "Stefano's", he decided after a moment, spotting the sign in the distance. "On New Cavendish Street."
Adrienne disconnected without a reply and sat back against the leather seat of the car, toying with the strap on her overnight bag restlessly and tapping an impatient foot as she gave her driver the address Angelo had relayed to her. Her impatience grew as the car traveled the A4 and entered Belgravia, then north towards Marylebone, where the driver began conversing with cabbies at various stoplights to find the location of Stefano's. She spotted the sign while the driver was asking for more directions at a light and acquitted the car promptly, leaving the driver to his confusion.
Upon entering the snack bar Adrienne spotted Angelo instantly and wasted no time hurrying over to him. "What the hell's going on?" she asked without greeting.
He nodded to her by way of terse greeting, pulling the pendant from his coat. "This is Amanda's. Her brother gave it to her, she doesn't take it off... but I found it in a pawnshop."
Okay, so clearly no one was going to actually satisfy her curiosity and tell her what had happened to Amanda. Well, that was just fine. Adrienne wasn't sure she even cared what had happened. She would do what Emma had asked her to and try to figure out where Amanda had gone by using the pendant- not because Emma had asked, but because Adrienne felt a twinge of guilt over the fact that she'd foreseen something like this happening when she'd keyed in to the St. Jude medallion last month, and hadn't been able to accurately decipher what had been going on then. She wanted another crack at the reading, to see if she could solve the mystery of what was happening to Amanda. "Where was the pawnshop?" Adrienne asked in an almost conversational tone, removing her gloves and placing them on the table. She reached in her bag for a cigarette to steady her nerves, remembered she couldn't light indoors anymore, and cursed.
He would have told her if he knew. 'Missing' was all anyone knew, right now. "Round the back of King's Cross station. Not the city's best."
Adrienne fiddled with her unlit cigarette as she tried to beat back the queasy feeling in her gut that had only grown upon hearing where the pendant had been found. Her time spent teaching in London hadn't been enough to familiarize her with every area of the city, but she read the news and knew enough to know that Angelo was right about it not being the city's best. Since Angelo seemed disinclined to supply her with any more information, she took the piece of jewelry in a hand she willed to keep steady so she could satisfy her curiosity on her own.
Because Amanda was already on her mind, it didn't surprise Adrienne when she keyed in straight to Amanda's coming into possession of the pendant, at the bar she recognized at Harry's. A blue humanoid creature- her brother, Angelo had said?- had given it to her in a wrapped box. It had a spell cast on it. A homecoming spell, Amanda called it. The blue brother suggested it was something to lead her home, if she ever found herself lost.
So why the fuck wasn't it working? All it seemed to be doing was muddling up Adrienne's vision of recent events with flashes and snippets of a much younger Amanda in what Adrienne had to assume was her home- visions that had nothing to do with the pendant, but were somehow being shown to her because of the spell on the gold piece.
Gritting her teeth, Adrienne fought against the pull of the 'home' visions and nearly sighed with relief when she once again saw brother and sister drinking at Harry's with Amanda wearing the pendant. Rolling her eyes in disdain at the touching display of familial affection between the siblings, Adrienne pushed her mind forward along the pendant's timeline, forcing herself to stop when she saw Amanda slammed into a wall by one of two goons, the thug speaking in a rough British accent. Adrienne wished she could narrate for Angelo as she experienced what she knew was an event following Amanda's most recent trip to London, presumably an event that had taken place after her disappearance from her friends. But she had never been able to focus her mind on reading an object and speaking at the same time. So she watched, though she wasn't silent for long.
A startled noise escaped her lips as she saw Amanda try to fight the two goons who had her cornered. She saw the witch's hands come up and heard her speak strange words Adrienne assumed formed a spell. Nothing happened, however, except a smack across her face delivered by one of the brutes. This had Adrienne crying out as if she'd felt the blow, and instantly the British goon appeared transformed into a face she knew all too well: that of her deceased husband. Amanda's face had turned into her own, the alleyway in London Adrienne and Steven Du Clos's bedroom from years before. Her home. She had fallen to her knees under the shock and pain of her husband's blow, just as Amanda had fallen to the thug's.
On a sob, Adrienne bit through her bottom lip and battled the unwanted effects of the homecoming spell, but a return to Amanda's episode with the thugs, one of whom kicked her as she lay crumpled on the ground, the other prising the golden jewelry from her hand, proved too devastating for the deeply-affected psychometrist, who managed to disentangle her shaking, clammy hand from the pendant and fling it onto the table before she sagged forward onto the table herself, head buried in her arms to combat the bright lights that nausea was forcing into her vision. "Shit, fuck, Christ, shit, shit, shit!" she babbled, struggling not to retch in front of Angelo.
Angelo had scooped up the pendant instantly, and his hand now hovered over Adrienne's shoulder, not sure if he should touch her. "What?" he asked quietly, not pushing until she'd recovered. "You saw somethin' bad, didn't you."
Grateful Angelo wasn't losing his apparent composure to push her for details, Adrienne struggled to regain some composure herself with several deep breaths, allowing only a single sob into the sleeve of her blouse before she straightened up with gritted teeth, vision clear. "Two young thugs took the pendant from her," she explained after clearing her throat, attempting to sound as businesslike as possible after her near-breakdown while staring at the table. "I'm not sure where, exactly. She... didn't give it up easily, so they used force to take it from her." Risking a glance at Angelo, Adrienne's green eyes flashed with sympathy before she returned her gaze to the table. "I didn't key in all the way to the present with it," she added, annoyed now. "There's a fucking spell messing with my reading. But I'll try again, if you want to give it back to me." Mildly surprised by her offer, which she hadn't intended on making until she'd looked at Angelo, the psychometrist clenched her hands into fists to steel herself and realized she'd torn her cigarette into fine shreds as she'd been speaking, the threads of tobacco now littered over her side of the table.
He put it back down on the table, between them. "If you're up for it. If not, we'll call this enough done an' I'll go find those thugs an' get it out of them where it happened. Any details of what they looked like?"
Adrienne assumed that admitting one of them had taken on the form of her dead husband wouldn't be helpful, so she frowned as she thought of the correct word for them, attempting to recall the word her British students had used. "They looked like... chavs, I think they call them. Like every teenage and mid-twenty-year-old guy in this fucking city. Baggy pants, hoodies with the hoods up, flat-billed stylized Yankees caps- since they're the only fucking team the Brits seem to know-, enormous shoes..." An involuntary shudder passed through her as she remembered Amanda being kicked repeatedly. "I'm up for more; I'll try to get more for you," she said to Angelo with a determined edge to her voice, and braced herself as she picked up the pendant again.
Keeping the thought of where she'd left off in her head, Adrienne brought herself back to the alleyway in London where Amanda was still on the ground, coughing and retching. The chavs were moving on now, and though the homecoming spell was trying to pull her into images from Amanda's childhood, the psychometrist focused on the pendant until she saw the two thugs, whom she studied intently this time, sauntering down a street she didn't recognize. She managed to notice a sign for the Spitalfields market as they walked.
Triumphant, she moved forward along the pendant's timeline and saw them heading into a pub called the Salmon and Compass that played absolutely atrocious music... forward again and she watched them enter an off-license where they pocketed some candy bars, verbally abused the clerk, and followed a thin young man in a shirt and tie out of the shop and down two blocks, where they cornered him in an alleyway in much the same fashion as they had Amanda and beat him for his wallet and watch. The homecoming spell pitched her back to another beating of her own, and she nearly dropped the pendant once again before determination to finish what she'd started had her forcing back images of her own past and returning to the thugs, who took the watch and pendant into an East Indian-owned all-hours pawn shop behind King's Cross station, where the pendant remained until Angelo found it.
Wary of what was to come, Adrienne pressed forward tentatively, recognizing she was in the pendant's future by the disjointed, discoloured flashes she was seeing rather than the clarity of the past. It was fairly solid for a future reading, but Adrienne refused to believe that it would happen for certain. She saw Angelo returning the pendant to Amanda, who was in bed in what appeared to be a hotel room, and, not wishing to see what came next, Adrienne let go of the pendant as if she expected it to burn her and blinked at Angelo from across the table until she had arranged her disjointed thoughts enough to speak.
"The thugs attacked her somewhere near Spitalfields market," she informed him. "I think that's by the Liverpool Street station? Then they went to some bar called the Salmon and Compass- they seemed to be known to the bar staff. Then an off-license; no name on the windows or awning. Vivid, dark blue paint on the front, though. The clerk knew them- tried to make them leave. They accosted a young man in a shirt and tie for his wallet and watch, then took the pendant and the man's watch to the pawn shop. The smaller one was Caucasian with a scar on the left side of his lip and a really disjointed nose. The larger one was black. Neck tattoo; some sort of tribal pattern... I might be able to draw it. That's all," she finished, holding back on the last vision she'd seen. "It was days ago... at least a week." With a sigh, she wiped cigarette shavings off the table. "She could be anywhere by now."
Angelo nodded grimly, memorising all the details of the description. "It's a pretty good start. I'll find them, maybe they've seen her again since." His voice said they'd be telling him everything they might know, whether they liked it or not. And he hoped they wouldn't. "Thanks, Adrienne. You've been a lot of help."
"I wish they have seen her again since," Adrienne muttered; "maybe this time she used her witchy powers to turn them both into toads." But she shook her head. "It's a big city. They won't have seen her again." The toad quip brought a question to the forefront of her thoughts. "She said something to them in a language I didn't recognize... a spell maybe? But it didn't help her. Can magical powers just... stop working like that?"
"Big city, yeah, but everybody's got their territory. That's how cities work, nobody spends equal time in the whole place." He shrugged, frowning. "Not just like that, but sometimes they can get disrupted. Or maybe she was just out of juice."
Eyeing Angelo with her usual contempt as he explained to her how cities worked, Adrienne placed a finger on the pendant to watch the same hotel-room scene in the future begin again in her mind. She folded her hands in her lap after a moment, pleased that her describing the thugs to Angelo and his determination to go find them hadn't altered what could happen in the future. Amanda could still get the pendant back. Find her way home, or whatever the hell the spell was supposed to do for her. "So if you're so sure these assholes have seen her again, what are you still doing hanging around here?" she challenged Angelo, still unsure whether she should tell him what she had seen in the possible future.
"You asked a question, I stuck around to answer it." He stood abruptly, ignoring the look she was giving him. "An' I'm not sure, but findin' them's the best lead I've got."
"If you want another lead," Adrienne offered, face blank, "she was still wearing her St. Jude medallion when the pendant was taken. Check out some more pawn shops, find it, and I might be able to give you more." She intended to spend her own time searching the shops herself, but having Angelo keep his eyes open as well couldn't hurt. "You don't seem all that upset," she pointed out with a raised eyebrow, mostly to irritate him, "but maybe you're waiting to express your feelings when you find the dynamic asshole duo?" Her squeamishness over the violence she'd witnessed and relived had faded to a dull ache by now, allowing anger to come to the forefront of her emotions. She wanted the assholes to pay.
"You don't have a clue what I'm feelin', Ms. Frost", Angelo responded, looking at her with cold eyes. "I don't do upset in public if I can help it. An' yeah, trust me, they won't be fit to hurt anyone else when I get through with them."
Receiving the reaction she'd wanted, both in regards to Angelo's emotional state and his plans for the thugs, Adrienne nodded curtly but was sure she failed to keep the pleased smile from turning up the corner of her mouth. "There was something else," she stated matter-of-factly. "In the future. It could be that it doesn't come into being- that something happens to alter the events that lead up to it, so it never comes to pass- but I feel like telling you anyway. I saw you give the pendant back to Amanda." She touched the gold piece again, smiling when she saw the image was still in place for the future, and, satisfied, held it out for Angelo to take back.
He did, tucking it away into a pocket, and something lightened in his face at that news, some small piece of worry lifted. "It's good t'know it's possible right now, anyway. Thanks."
Adrienne smirked. "Don't thank me. I didn't do it for you." Her failure at coming up with any concrete whereabouts for Amanda was weighing on her, but she was mildly consoled by the fact that Angelo's face had brightened slightly. Rising to her feet, she shouldered her overnight bag and moved towards the door. "You know, at first I didn't have the slightest idea what Amanda saw in you, but if you deliver on making sure those assholes don't hurt anyone else, I might be willing to admit that you're not entirely a useless lump of flesh," she told him with a wide grin.
"I won't be doin' it for you", he retorted with a flash of something like humour. "But check the papers in a couple days. I plan on makin' sure the right people find them when I'm done."