by Rhys Ford
“You’ve had his hands on you, his pain in your bones, and I’m standing here right now to tell you, Kai, I will not sit down for that fight.” In that moment, Ryder was as imperfect as I was, a bit of spit flecking over his upper lip as his canines flashed, his passion dusting a golden pink flush over his cheekbones. “And I’m not staying behind on this one either. You need to have someone by you. And I will be that someone. I won’t let you talk me out of it like you did Cari. You don’t get a say in this.”
“And if you get killed? Who’s going to go sit at the frilly chair they’ve got for you in the Court chambers? Alexa? One of the twins?” I rounded on him, but he wouldn’t let go of my wrist, his fingers tightening down when I tried to pull away. We were still shoulder to shoulder, our faces close enough for me to finally take that bite, but I wasn’t sure if anger or fear drove that creeping thirst in my belly. “Is there going to be anyone left to sit on it?”
“Alexa will. The Court calls to her as well. Not as much as it does you and I, but she can hold it. And she will if she has to. Cari will be here to help her. Someone else who wouldn’t just let you fall either.” Ryder jerked his head over toward the bed. “After all, Alexa has a fierce defender in her reserves. All she will have to do is put them between Newt and food to win any battle she might need to fight. I’m going, my Chimera. You will not do this alone. I’m not letting you shove me away like you’ve done others. It’s time for you to accept I will not leave you. Even if I have to step on your shadow to do it.”
“This is a simple ride to New Vegas. Nothing’s going to happen. I’m going to find Kenny, hand him the ashes I set aside for him, and get whatever Dempsey gave him to hold. I don’t need a babysitter.” The ride would be long and mostly empty, past small townships barely big enough to see. I’d been dreading the silence, left alone with my thoughts, but I’d planned on listening to music loud enough to make my ears bleed and to find crappy motels along the way until I hit the glittering jewel in the middle of Nevada’s wastelands. My mind whispered about all the trouble I could get into with Ryder in New Vegas, but I shut those thoughts down before they could take hold. “Besides, the place isn’t like San Diego. I want to get in and out quickly. Stay too long in that stew and you begin to think you can live in it.”
“Good, if the trip’s going to be nothing, then we can go and come back without any trouble. But I am going.” Ryder finally released me and peered into my duffel. “Although, from the amount of underwear you’ve put in there, are you sure it’s only going to be about a week? Because if not, I have severely underpacked or you’re lying about how spicy food doesn’t affect you.”
Six
WE LEFT before the sun cracked apart the black on the horizon. Draped in a glittering veil of lights, San Diego never truly went dark, holding back the night with a soft, gentle golden push, but to the east, the mountains were stygian, crags of blue against a scatter of stars. The marine layer was already moving in by the time I fired up the Mustang, its snaking tendrils undulating into the valley and canyons, filling in the Court’s nooks and crannies until only the towers’ peaks poked up out of its misty blanket. There was a promise of rain in the air, but we wouldn’t be there long enough to see it hit the ground.
I pushed the Mustang toward the sunrise, leaving the remains of my life and family behind me.
Oh, except for the damned Sidhe lordling who’d decided he would be my green-eyed, pointy-eared golden shadow on a run I was doing for no money and pure sentiment.
It was hard to ignore Dempsey’s harsh scold rising up out of my memories—Only reason to burn gas and time is if someone is paying you to do it, boy. Other than that, someone’s just trying to bleed you dry.
“Yeah, well, suck it up, old man. I’m doing this for you,” I muttered at the road unfurling out under the Mustang’s high beams. “Anyone bled me dry, it was you.”
Glancing over to see if Ryder heard me, I discovered he’d already fallen asleep against the passenger-side window, a small pillow tucked under his head. There was a brief moment of chaos tingling in my thoughts, and I itched to blast a thrash-metal mix out of the Mustang’s powerful speakers but thought better of it. I needed a bit of alone time, and the brightening blue skies would be on us soon enough. For right now I wanted to simply fall into the black road snaking out in front of us and sip at the tumbler of creamy sweet coffee I’d gotten from the Court’s kitchen.
I was pushing to get as far north as I could before stopping. The plan was to drive long days, running on cell fuel instead of gas, mostly because the cells could run for months without being recharged, and since we weren’t going through Pendle, I wouldn’t need the punch of acceleration from the combustion side of the hybrid engine. Truth was, it’d been more than a few years since I’d been up to New Vegas, and the gas depots along the way might have fallen on hard times, disappearing into the landscape like so many of the small towns did following the Merge. Unlike the constellation of ghost towns around it, New Vegas thrived in its mutated desert setting. The dying bones of a gambling mecca had resurrected itself and now glittered with wealth, a siren call to anyone with a spare credit or two, promising to make them rich beyond their dreams.
Perhaps it wasn’t so much a resurrection as a desert vampire getting a new shot of blood to add flesh to its withered corpse.
The sun was pretty high up in the pale blue sky when the Mustang screamed past Rainbow, and Ryder woke up with a groggy smack of his lips. Disheveled and slightly perplexed by his surroundings, he blinked a few times before figuring out where he was. It was easy enough to see the comprehension dawning in his deep green eyes, reason returning to wash away the confusion he’d woken up in. I liked him asleep. It meant he was quiet and I could sneak a few looks at him as I drove, caught between the hate of wanting a Sidhe Lord in my bed and recognizing my own tangled thoughts on having him close.
There was too much change in my life right now, and I needed—longed—to keep things as simple as I could. But there was no going back to the life I’d led before. Dempsey was dead, the family he’d pulled around me was uncertain now, and I asked Ryder to stay with me, to hold me when I felt cracked open. There was no pushing anything back through those open doors.
“Where are we?” Ryder sat up, caught in the seat belt for a moment, then working his way out. Running his fingers through his hair, he straightened the gold metallic strands, pulling them away from his face. “I’d say this looks familiar, but it all kind of looks this way—big rocks, brown ground. More big roc, but these are flying and hopefully far enough away that they don’t think we’re lunch.”
I ducked my head a bit to catch a glimpse at the birds to the right of the freeway. “Those aren’t rocs. They’re lesser golden thunderbirds. Usually fish eaters. Although I’ve seen one pluck a Minnesota lake monster out of the water like it weighed nothing. They’re good for the lakes, especially around fishing villages, because they keep the big predators down. They don’t go after anything smaller than six feet, so they leave salmon and trout alone. So long as I don’t drive the Mustang into some water, we’ll be fine.”
Ryder stared at me for a long moment, then said, “You have an amazing retention for details about all of the wildlife we encounter. I never thought about it until just now.”
“I’ve got Dempsey to thank for that.” I tensed my thighs, looking for a telltale ache in my muscles to see if we needed to stop and stretch. Ryder was usually good for a long haul, but too many hours sitting down meant we would both be cramped up when we did finally stop. “There is a turnoff up ahead with a general store we can stop at to grab cold drinks. Take us about fifteen to twenty minutes to get there, but it’ll be a chance to walk around. We’ve been going solid for about six hours now. I would’ve stopped sooner, but you were off in la-la land and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Do you always deflect a compliment?” Ryder’s attention was sharp, pinning me in place. Not like I had anywhere to go, seeing as I was driving a couple
of tons of steel down an old asphalt freeway. “I’ve noticed whenever I tell you something good about yourself, you give credit to somebody else. Like Dempsey or Jonas.”
“The animal thing is important if you’re going to be a Stalker. You’ve got to know what’s a threat and what isn’t, and if it is, you’ve got to know what’s going to take it down.” I gave him a quick glance, but it didn’t seem like my answer was good enough for Ryder, because he continued to stare at me. “And it’s not like I keep everything in my head. SoCalGov has a lexicon, and there’s people out there who have their own lists. If I run into something new or find out something’s weakness, I sometimes add what I know. This isn’t the kind of job where you can hoard your knowledge. That’s as good as killing someone if they’re out in the field and run into something they don’t recognize. It’s kind of one of the rules your mentor teaches you. If you don’t know what it is and it’s growling at you, get the fuck out.”
Ryder laughed—a soft low sound husky and smooth enough to send a tingle down my spine. “I guess I never thought of you going back to your warehouse and updating a database about the monsters you run across.”
“Like I do it every single time. Just every once in a while, and mostly only if I find out something new. The Underhill brought a lot of trouble with it, and things have gotten twisted a bit. I was kind of hoping Alexa getting her apprentice license would mean she could feed some information to the databases, but you guys seem to operate on an ‘if it doesn’t bother us, we don’t look at it’ basis. Which doesn’t exactly help when something’s trying to eat your face off and you go look it up, only to find out there’s not a damn thing about the six-eyed, blue-tongued lizard living in algae in the shallows of a freshwater lake.”
“You’ve run into something like that?”
“Yeah, about five of them. Bastards are about the length of my arm and can jump like five hundred feet from under the water. And they’re all teeth and tail. Not sure if they can see well or if they’re reacting to motion, but they sure as hell are fast, and a mouthful of flesh is a good hunt for them.” I shuddered, remembering the job we’d been on. “They didn’t get me, but I can tell you Nickel-Nose Ned didn’t have that nickname before we took the contract. After that, I walked around the lake with a baseball bat and a twitchy right arm.”
I was hit with a wave of sorrow before we went another few feet down the road. So much of my life had Dempsey woven into it, and the encounter with the snapping blue lizards had been one of the first times he told another Stalker they had to work with me or get off the job. Some left but most stayed. Dempsey had a reputation for taking on the very worst of contracts and earning high payoffs. I was just a condition of working with him, and soon enough, I could stand on my own name and pull in enough money to support us both.
“I never really understood your relationship with him. Dempsey, I mean. I’m closer to my mothers than my fathers, but I really don’t know how Dempsey raised you.” Ryder must have seen something in my face, because his voice gentled, the teasing falling away to something sweeter and poignant. “The two of you always bickered and fought, but it seems like you have a lot of affection for him.”
I never thought about how my relationship with Dempsey might look to somebody on the outside of it, but then again, I hadn’t really cared either. Shrugging, I replied, “Some people think it might’ve been a little bit complicated, but it was simple enough for us. He taught me everything I know and kept me alive. So when he couldn’t be on the job anymore, I owed it to him to keep him going. Plain enough.”
“I think there’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m not going to push,” Ryder said in a way that told me the pushing would come at a later date, when I least expected it. “I didn’t know a lot about him. Maybe tell me about something good, something you and Dempsey shared, even. All I hear is how antisocial and bossy he was, but you’ve got to have some good times with him. I can hear your affection for him in your voice, and don’t give me the excuse that he was better than Tanic, because your loyalty goes deep and I know it’s hard to earn. So tell me something good about Dempsey.”
“Something good about the old man?” I snorted, trying to figure out what angle Ryder was taking this into. “He was an argumentative asshole who pushed until you thought you’d break and then gloat when you didn’t.”
“He kept you safe,” Ryder replied softly, then tilted his head. “Relatively. I’m not sure teaching you to be a Stalker was exactly the wisest profession you could have followed, but….”
“It’s all he knew, and he was damned good at it.” The sky was beginning to cloud, pockmarked with dark gray dots and a promise of more clinging to the mountaintops on either side of the road. I slowed down when the first heavy raindrop struck the Mustang’s windshield, not knowing how long it’d been since the asphalt got a good soaking. There was always a chance of hydroplaning on a wet oil slick if the roads were left dry too long. “Like that thing about knowing the animals. We all operate within certain areas, so it makes sense to know the common threats or even the stuff that might look like a threat. People get all worked up about the creatures that came through the Merge, but there’s a lot of stuff that was here beforehand that could tear apart a man before he saw it. It’d be stupid to go out there without doing your homework. The more you know—the more you study—the longer you’ll live.”
“One good thing, Kai.” Ryder’s chuckle was a soft roll of heat, tickling at parts of me I didn’t have the time or inclination to scratch. “There must be something.”
There were a lot of things—moments and times I didn’t think a Sidhe lordling would understand. I knew nothing about his childhood, and here he was poking at how Dempsey raised me. Bringing that point up would have Ryder saying I was avoiding his question, and he wouldn’t have been that far off the mark. Especially when the road seemed a bit filmy until I blinked against the sting in my eyes.
“He always made sure I had books.” I grinned, remembering the excitement of discovery while digging through the boxes he would dump on my lap. “I mean, some of them were shit. Don’t get me wrong. Like really crappy books, because he’d go through abandoned houses, places the black dogs or something else with teeth cleared out, and scavenge what he could find. Shit, a lot of my clothes when I was younger came from places like that. His too.”
There’d been boxes of books stacked up behind the seat in the old truck we rattled around in. They took up valuable weapon and supply space, but he hadn’t minded. I worked to keep the number I kept down to a minimum, and he kept shoveling more at me, forcing me to cull my collection. I thought about something personal—something I hadn’t thought about in years—and debated sharing it.
Ryder was so earnest. So dedicated to—not trying to normalize me but trying to understand who I was and how I got there. First time I met him, I thought his sole purpose for meeting me was to use me. Meeting his grandmother and nearly dying under her clenched-fist magic didn’t change my mind about the elfin being manipulative and selfish. If anything, it only confirmed my suspicions, but Ryder kept at me, aware of the growing attraction between us but not pushing at me. He worked instead to make sure we were friends at the very least. I’d never been friends with anyone I slept with. Relationships were a tangle I didn’t need, and I never had any hope anyone would want me for longer than one or two nights.
I wasn’t somebody you kept forever.
I’d never been somebody anyone really wanted in their life. Not that way. Never someone to wake up next to more than a few mornings in a row, and sure as hell not someone who became part of a daily routine, much less a presence in their hearts.
Ryder was asking for something different, and I shoved him away each time, keeping him at arm’s length with my suspicion and doubts, but the truth was I was afraid—afraid to wake up next to him for two mornings only to find out I was unwanted on the third.
What he was asking for now was for me to trust him. To trust that someday—on t
he third morning—he would still want me in his bed.
And in his life.
I took a long breath and leaped into the unknown.
“After Dempsey got hurt and it looked like he wasn’t going to be able to work, he asked me where I wanted to make our home base. The idea was always that he’d retire one day and I’d pick up the slack, supporting him like he’d supported me. That was always the plan. Just… the end date moved up a bit once his knees blew.” Shrugging at Ryder’s noncommittal hum, I continued, “So when that time came and he asked, I told him I wanted to go down to San Diego, because that’s where the truffula are.”
“What are… is the truffula?” Ryder shifted, wedging himself against the door and the seat, facing me as much as he could in the Mustang’s bucket seat.
“They’re plants. Real ones. Sort of. But the first time I heard of them was in one of the really old books Dempsey got me. The guy who wrote them was from San Diego, and when I heard that, I wanted to see them. Just to see the fields of truffula.” I eased around a dip in the road, slowing the car down. A bit of crackling lightning sparked across the clouds to the right, and the clouds flexed and darkened, promising to unleash something onto the rough brush before pounding into us. “He wrote about these trees and flowers, fantastical things that couldn’t exist but did. Or at least in some way, but he’d seen them as different and more than what they were. We hadn’t really explored San Diego. Not really. I mean, visiting Cari’s family down south and then Jonas when he moved onto the ranch, but not the outskirts. So there he was doped up to the gills with me driving, and we were heading to Jonas’s place to stay for a bit when I made a wrong turn and we came across this hillside covered in pink-and-purple puffballs… the truffula.