Re: [En route: Janus, Steve, Atticus]
Janus had done very little preparation for this little trip. He had no real idea where they were going (Steve could have said 'New York' and meant 'Antarctica,' and Janus' response would have been the same) or any idea why. Matthew was a grown boy, and a super-soldier Russian spy as far as Janus knew. He didn't know enough to be concerned for the man, nor had he heard enough from Steve or Atticus to know that anyone else really was, either. This could be the equivalent of picking your kid up from school, only the school had armed guards and you wanted to play it safe.
However, Janus owed these three men big. Very big. As much as a 'roads demon that traded favors could owe. That was not without value, and even though no one had said anything about favors, for such a thing as this, he wouldn't have said no even if he'd wanted to.
The preparation did, however, extend to minor tweaks to his appearance. That budding feeling had struck early this morning, when the night was still yesterday, and now she came forward in the image matching the one female she knew nobody would be surprised to see in Steve's company. She was comfortable enough on her heels, stepping out of a nothing that smelled like scorched stone about five feet away from Atticus. To Atticus, of course, Janus would always look like that equal-age, slightly rough-jawed man he'd dated at a bar--though the faint sway to the hips definitely suggested that the real form he had was on heels. So did the voice, the female voice, a rasp that matched Cat's vocal chords but held none of her cadence, accent, or vocabulary.
"Am I late, or early?" She tipped her chin upward to take in the plane, mildly curious, but he had granted countless wishes for wealth and fame, and a private jet wasn't going to knock socks off in this quarter. She raised one hand for Atticus' rough cheek before they boarded, but didn't end up touching him (much the way he'd done on the side of the road next to a bus), and went inside the plane before the silhouette of Steve and the bike resolved so that she was sitting with knees crossed when Steve showed up down the aisle and the plane accelerated cross-country.