by AJ Larrieu
Shane and I froze in the doorway. The guy had wings.
Chapter Five
He stood up when he saw us. “Cass Weatherfield?”
I nodded slowly, and he walked forward. He looked young, but I knew better than to trust my eyes when it came to guardians. His hair was buzzed but might’ve been dark blond when it grew out, and he was tan and green-eyed. His arms were corded with hard muscle and covered with tattoos. A black dagger, an ornate cross covered in twining roses, a woman’s name, Emily, in old English capitals. That last one looked fresh.
“Susannah said to give you this.” He held out a card, and I took it automatically. It was one of the Sand Angel business cards, sea green with hot pink script. On the back, in surprisingly elegant script, she’d written Favor No 1.
“Are you...”
“Ian West. New guardian of Baton Rouge.” He said the words as though they weren’t familiar. I had a brief moment of regret that he wasn’t ours.
“How new?”
“Very.” He stirred his wings. “Susannah said you’d give me a place to lay low for a while. Said I should make myself useful.”
“With what?”
Ian shrugged. “She didn’t say.”
I was genuinely perplexed. We hadn’t told Susannah why we’d brought Janine to see her son. Then I remembered the telepathic cashier. He’d probably lifted the whole story from my mind while I’d been waiting in that line.
Ian’s wings were nothing like Susannah’s—hers were white tipped with dark gray-blue, like a gull’s. The only other guardian I’d met had been in San Francisco. His wings had been pure crow-black.
Ian West had wings like a red-tailed hawk. Variegated brown and russet with hints of black and gold and cream. Complicated. They were huge, and he carried them away from his body, as though he wasn’t quite sure where to put them.
“Right.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Well, I’m Cass—I guess you knew that already—and you already met Bruce, and this is Shane Tanner. His uncle Lionel owns this place.”
Ian held out his hand. Shane gripped it briefly, his face impassive. For the briefest of instants, I thought I felt a flare of hostility from the guardian, but it was gone in the next moment. His expression was perfectly blank, and my quick scan of his surface thoughts came up with next to nothing. The most I could get was the flavor of his thoughts, and there was no sign of anger in them. I couldn’t even find nerves or uncertainty, only resigned trepidation. It reminded me of the way I’d felt as a foster kid meeting a new set of would-be parents. The absence of hope where it should be rampant.
“Why exactly do you need a place to lay low?” Shane asked. His tone was one shade shy of conversational. Ian projected the same passionless calm.
“Can’t go to Biloxi,” he said. “Out of my territory.”
I didn’t miss that he hadn’t answered the question.
“Does Lionel know?” I asked Bruce.
Bruce shook his head. “I didn’t want to wake him. He’s been feeling poorly, and you know he’d just stay up late fussing.” This was true, but it wasn’t the only reason I was glad. I wanted to check this guy’s story before we gave him an official welcome.
“I’m calling Susannah,” I announced, and walked out onto the back porch.
She must’ve been expecting my call, because she picked up on the first ring.
“Are you going to explain what this is about?” I asked her, betting she’d know what I meant.
She did. “Get him out of sight—he can’t keep his glamour up long.”
I glanced through the window. The soft gold light illuminated Ian’s wings all too well. “He’s not keeping it up now. What is he doing here?”
“Just make sure he isn’t seen. He won’t be any trouble.”
I stepped off the porch onto the patio and walked to the old outdoor kitchen. It was a freestanding brick structure, a relic from a former time. Lionel was using it to store garden tools. I ducked behind it to shield myself from view. “Why, exactly, would I expect him to be trouble?”
She paused. “I’ll let him tell his own story.”
This was not reassuring. “Why send him to us?”
“He’s too new to be far from his anchor point. I needed someone close by I could trust.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be worried or flattered that I made the list of people Susannah could trust. “This is worth more than one favor,” I grumbled.
“We’ll see,” she said, and hung up.
Back in the kitchen, everyone was silent. Ian and Shane stood at opposite ends of the room with their arms folded while Bruce studied his beer.
“Well,” I said, and they all looked up, “looks like your story checks out.”
Ian only nodded.
Shane sent me the impression of his doubts on a tightly controlled mental line. “You sure about this?”
“He could be an asset.”
“He looks more like a liability.” Shane regarded the guardian with the barest darkening of his eyes, and I knew he was scanning Ian’s thoughts. Shane had always been better than me at getting through mental blocks, but I could tell when he came up with nothing, just as I had moments before. He shook his head. “I don’t trust her, much less him.”
“I made a deal. Not much we can do about it now,” I sent him, and he gave me the mental equivalent of a resigned grunt.
“Right,” I said to Ian. “I’ll, uh, get you settled.”
He gave me an efficient nod and picked up an army green duffel bag at his feet. It had a long way to go. He was easily over six feet tall, and I had to crane my neck to look up at him. He walked past Shane without looking at him.
I led him up the stairs toward Mina’s old room. She was Shane’s twin sister, but she was living in San Francisco now. Lionel was still secretly hoping she’d come back, so he hadn’t converted her room to a guest suite yet.
“Can you hide those while we’re in the hallway?” There was no telling when one of the guests might stumble down the hallway drunk. I could probably write him off as a costume party guest, but I’d rather not have to try.
Ian didn’t answer, but his wings flickered in and out of focus, like an automatic camera trying to lock onto an image. After a moment, they went watery and indistinct and disappeared, but I could still see the ragged holes he’d torn in his black T-shirt to make way for them. It would have to do. I led him down the hallway.
Mina’s room was still crammed with her stuff—vintage music posters on the walls, bright pillows and blankets, the clothes she hadn’t packed—but there was room enough for Ian’s things. His wings snapped into view the second we walked in. He stood stiffly on the rug between the bed and the fireplace and folded them tightly behind him.
“You really can’t let the guests see you with those,” I said.
“I’m not supposed to let anyone see me, period.”
I decided this wasn’t the time to ask. “There are toiletries and things in the bathroom. Shampoo and soap and stuff.”
He glanced to the bathroom door. Mina’s robe hung on the hook—a bright red silk thing, long and embellished with tiny black flowers. At the sight of it, the first hint of emotion washed over his face, a tide of regret mixed with raw, ragged longing. It was gone in another instant, and when I tried to read his emotions, I came up blank yet again.
“Let me know if you need anything.” I tried to make the words encompass more than just shampoo. I didn’t know why he was here, but I was betting the story didn’t have a happy ending. He didn’t take the bait.
“I’ll do that,” he said.
All I could do was nod and leave him to unpack his enormous bag. I hoped there wasn’t a body in it.
* * *
Shane and I stayed the night at the B&B, in what used to be Shane’s
room. Lionel had turned it into a guest room since he’d left, and it was almost unrecognizable—new sage green paint on the walls, new bed linens and photographs of swamp scenes above the fireplace. The antique bed was the same, though, and we fell into it gratefully. We were both exhausted, and anyway, we’d need to be here in the morning. Bruce would never forgive us if we made him explain the situation to Lionel alone.
Of course, Lionel knew something was going on the moment he woke up. The three of us were already in the kitchen making breakfast when he came down. He really did look like he was feeling poorly. He had a runny nose, and his eyes were bloodshot. He was also frowning. Lionel never frowned.
“I was going to let you sleep—” Bruce began, but Lionel cut him off.
“Who’s the young man in Mina’s old room and why does he feel so strange?”
Shane and I looked at each other.
“You-all can handle this one,” Bruce said, and turned back to the pancakes he was making.
“Have some coffee, Uncle Lionel.” Shane telekinetically sent a mug floating over.
“I don’t want coffee, I want to know what’s in Mina’s room.” He ignored the mug, which floated insistently in front of his face. Shane left it there for a few hopeful moments before resting it on the kitchen table. Lionel didn’t break his gaze with Shane once.
“Well,” I said, “Last year, I made this deal...”
I explained the arrangement I had with Susannah—I’d never told him the details. I shouldn’t have been surprised when Lionel took the whole thing in stride.
“All right, then. We’ll just have to bring him his meals.” Trust Lionel to think of the food first. He had some kind of compulsion about making sure people were fed.
Shane and I decided to wait until dark to go back to Diana’s house, and the wait was brutal. Shane made me promise not to go alone, or I would have been camped out in the bushes across the street. I made beds and dusted antique carved mantels in a state of distraction, staring at my phone in case Diana called. She didn’t.
It seemed to take forever for Shane to get home. When he walked into the B&B in his work clothes, carrying a plastic shopping bag from an electronics store, I went limp with disproportionate relief.
“Did you find everything you needed?” I asked him, following him upstairs to his old room.
“Think so.” He set the bag on the floor and unbuttoned his Charlie’s Auto Body work shirt. He wore a plain white T-shirt underneath, and I couldn’t help watching the way his muscles rippled as he shrugged off his button-up. “Did she call?”
“No. I’ve been going a little crazy.”
Shane sat on the bed to take off his boots. “I found out a little more about that house.” He pulled out his phone. “Current owner is Annette Perrin. She bought the place right after Katrina.”
“Really?” I sat down behind him and looked over his shoulder. “How did you find that out?”
“Real estate tracking sites. I got into them when I bought the condo. Anyway, I called around, and there’s nothing going on at that address. No cable, no internet, no phone number listed.”
“That’s suspicious.”
“Yeah.” He pocketed his phone again. “Now we just have to wait for dark.” He cocked his head so he could see me from the corner of his eye. “You gonna survive?”
I fell back on the bed. “Probably not.”
Shane twisted around and ranged himself over me, bracing himself on his forearms. He smelled of the harsh soap he used to clean his hands at the shop. He dipped his head and kissed my jaw, then my neck. “Come on,” he whispered in my ear. “No rescue missions on an empty stomach.” He rolled off the bed and brought me with him.
We ate pan-fried redfish with Lionel and Bruce while we waited for the sun to go down. When it finally grew dark, we dressed in black clothes and brought our bag full of cheap wireless cameras to the most expensive neighborhood in the city.
We hopped over the wall the same way we had before and snuck into the elaborate landscaping of the place next door, a mock-antebellum mansion with a white columned porch and a three-car garage. They’d planted some conveniently enormous ligustrum on the property line.
“How many?” Shane sent. I took a moment to scan the house and the lawn for minds that weren’t asleep.
“Three, I think. Same as before. Two on the lawn and one in the house.”
“That’s what I’m getting too.”
The one in the house wasn’t moving, and I suspected again that it was Diana.
“This is probably a good spot. Up in that tree.” Shane pointed toward a smallish oak a few yards from the property line. It had plenty of crooked branches.
I nodded, and he sent the first of the cameras floating into a high branch. He followed it with a brown nylon tie-down and secured the camera in place. I cut off the hanging tail of nylon with a focused mental jab. Shane extended the stubby antennae on the camera and took my smartphone.
“Explain to me again how this won’t get us sent to prison?” I said.
“Easy. We don’t get caught.”
I laughed quietly and watched as he worked. In a few moments, I had a green-tinted image on the screen of my phone. It showed a nice view of the back garden, which featured a stone fountain with one of those half-naked Renaissance-era women pouring water out of an urn.
“Next?” Shane said. We had three cameras left.
We found two more trees, one closer to the front yard alongside the garage and another on the opposite side of the house. I held my breath when one of the guards moved in our direction, but he was only smoking a cigarette.
“Do you think she’s in there?” Shane pulled the third camera feed up on my phone.
I made another gentle pass through the structure, but I didn’t know her well enough to recognize her sleeping mind. “I can’t tell.”
Shane frowned as he set up the fourth camera. “I wonder—”
My phone gave a loud chirping noise. I nearly dropped it. Shane and I both ducked and held our breaths while I fumbled for the silent switch.
“What the hell was that?”
“Motion alert—look.” He pointed toward the house. “Someone’s driving up.”
A black SUV pulled up the driveway. The two guards converged on it, but not in an aggressive way. The driver got out and opened the back door.
A woman got out, stepping easily to the concrete. She was about my height, and slim, but it was hard to make out much else. She was wearing long sleeves, long pants, a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses. She said something in the driver’s ear, and he nodded once and trotted for the house. The two guards stayed on either side of the driveway. I turned my phone off for good measure.
The small woman didn’t speak to the guards. She watched the front door of the house without moving, her hands folded behind her back. It took an interminable fifteen minutes for the door to open again and the driver to come out. He had Diana with him.
Chapter Six
“That’s her!” I whispered it, too nervous to mindspeak.
“Diana?”
I nodded. The driver helped her into the back of the SUV, handing her in like old-fashioned royalty. The small woman stood back and watched until the back door closed, and then she got into the passenger seat. A moment later they pulled out of the driveway. It took all I had not to sprint after them.
“We can’t help her if they see us.” Shane’s mental voice was controlled and calm.
I nodded even though my whole body seethed with energy. Wherever they were taking her, it couldn’t be good. I flexed and clenched my hands, and the air grew cold around me. Frost rimmed the leaves of the ligustrum.
“Cassie.” Shane put his hand on my shoulder, and I relaxed.
I took deep breaths and waited. The guards seemed to sta
nd there forever. One bummed a cigarette from the other and lit it, and they talked in low voices while my heart pounded. It felt as though hours had passed when they finally went back inside, but by my watch it had only been a few minutes. Shane and I crept back through the ligustrum and took off down the street for the wall. We leaped over and raced for Shane’s car, startling a young guy in a bathrobe out walking a Pomeranian. The SUV was already blocks away.
I could feel her, though. I could definitely feel her.
If Diana had been a telepath I would have tipped her off. As it was, we could only follow. We stayed a few blocks back and tailed the SUV out of Uptown. They stayed off the main roads, and several times we had to cut over to the next block to avoid being seen. The vehicle finally stopped a few blocks off Magazine Street in front of an overgrown playground. Shane kept driving until we were out of sight, then parked on the shoulder. We didn’t have to discuss it—we got out of the car as one and silently closed the doors.
The neighborhood was a mixture of early craftsman-style bungalows, new construction and a couple of small apartment buildings. A handful of places were nearly falling down from rot or termites, but most were neatly shabby, paint peeling a little, lawns a week in need of mowing. We speed-walked past them, staying in the shadows wherever we could.
The playground was surrounded by chain-link fencing, so we couldn’t get too close without being seen. Next door was what looked like a four-unit apartment building. Shane and I exchanged a glance and headed for the narrow space between the building and the fence. It was clotted with vines—morning glory and wisteria tangled with weeds—and we were able to slip into hiding without being seen.
A single streetlight illuminated the playground. Through the gaps in the leaves, I glimpsed a swing set and a beat-up wooden picnic table. Diana was sitting at it, right next to the small woman we’d seen at the house. Across from them was a man. Big guy, looked like a former football player who hadn’t seen a gym in a while. He had on a baseball cap pulled low over his head, dark jeans and a light colored polo. Something moved at his feet—a dog. One of the small, yappy types.