it up as if it were a snake that might bite her, then she unfolded the sheet and quickly read the page. Once finished, she crumpled the paper in one hand, clenching her jaw.
“Is everything okay?”
She raised a cinnamon brow at me and then round-filed the crumpled letter and envelope. “I’ll only tell you if you say you’ll play with my group tonight.”
I frowned. “Dragon Epoch?”
She snorted. “No, Donkey Kong. Yes, of course, DE.”
I stared past her at the screen. The thought of playing DE for fun honestly did not excite me but I shrugged. “What the hell.” My eyes flicked back to her. “So now tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m not in any trouble. And you aren’t going to understand because it’s a big long story but they want me to go back to Canada for a case that my brother is involved in. They are threatening to issue a subpoena but I don’t care because I’m not in that country anymore. And I have no plans to go back after I get my green card. Satisfied?”
I leaned forward. “You’re exiling yourself from Canada? That seems drastic.”
“I answered your question.” She swiveled back to the monitor where her gaming group was now forming up. “Get back here with your laptop and use your admin privileges to port a character over to Omni.”
Fully aware that she’d evaded giving me any important details whatsoever, but at least cognizant that she’d somewhat put my mind at ease, I did as she asked. In no time, I returned with my laptop and headset to sit beside her. It only took a few minutes to have a character of the appropriate level ready to group up with them.
I was about to meet Kat’s regular gaming group and for some reason, I was nervous about it. After clicking to accept her group invitation, I adjusted my headset. Kat said, “Hey guys, it’s my new hubby online as the darkling assassin, Teakwood.”
Huh, I hadn’t even paid much attention to the character’s name. I had literally dozens of them, mostly used for testing the game post release on my own time. But this character’s name seemed very apt considering the constant state of things below the belt during most of my waking—and sometimes my not-so-waking hours. And mostly because of the sexy woman sitting beside me.
I cleared my throat and spoke into the mic. “Hey everyone.”
“Hey Woody,” said a man’s voice. “Good to meet Mr. Persephone at last. I’m Fragged, the tank. We’ve got crowd control, Eloisa, our spiritual enchantress. DPS is that funny looking monk over there, FallenOne. And of course, not to forget our group healer, your beloved bride.”
I frowned. This dude’s voice sounded familiar. Kat gave me some side-eye with a weird grin on her face, probably waiting for me to embarrass myself. “Well, I’m a team player and I’ll go with the flow. What quests are you working on?”
From there, we got to know each other over the next quarter of an hour. The other two were also friendly. But crazily enough, the obvious didn’t dawn on me until we made our way through a particularly grueling fight.
“We keep getting adds. Mia, lock them down!” Fragged, the tank, said.
My head jerked in Kat’s direction and she started laughing uncontrollably even as she was pounding the keys to dole out heal spells. Mia, huh? No wonder all these people sounded so familiar. I already knew them.
“So I’m guessing that FallenOne is Adam? And Fragged is Heath then,” I muttered at Kat who just barely had the time to get off a heal on Fragged before he fell down dead.
“Damn it, Kat. Not so close next time, please?” he groused.
“I was distracted,” she said between laughter and tears streaming down her face. “The jig is up, guys. He knows who you are.”
“Took you long enough,” said Mia, aka Eloisa. “Heath is the one who blew it, though. Too much nagging at me using my real name.”
“If you’d been able to control the adds, there wouldn’t have been a problem,” Heath shot back. “They were starting to aggro on Kat.”
I rubbed my forehead, puzzled. “Do you guys play together a lot?”
“We used to,” said FallenOne-slash-Adam. “It’s rare nowadays since our schedules are all over the place.”
I blinked, surprised. Adam and Kat especially shocked me. They still got this level of enjoyment out of a game that we all toiled on during the day as part of our regular jobs. Especially Adam. Wouldn’t he be aware of