by Barb Taub
“Brother…”
BETWEEN
Impossibly bright, the light-filled room blazes against her sore eyes. She sits in front of the open laptop, but her hands are folded in the sleeves of her robe, the keyboard silent.
She stares at her draft email on the screen, composed but not sent. “Second event target is a fifty-percent loss,” she reads aloud. “The human team has failed to save Raziel, but his ending has prevented creation of a duplicate Book. The original Book of Knowledge still powers Null City. Odds of acquiring the Book if we capture the final target have now decreased to 50.3 percent with error margin of ±4.7.”
Her hand hovers over the Send.
When the elders finally arrive, the room is empty except for the robe, folded neatly across the chair.
Epilogue
August 2011: Seattle, Washington
“Owww! They’re killing me.” Carey’s low moan was pitiful. “I’ve never been in so much pain.”
“Suck it up.” Marley’s expression didn’t change, her lips barely moving. “And get back behind me. It’s not a race.”
Muttering threats and various obscenities regarding the non-human parentage and sexually perverse proclivities of the designers of her spike-heeled shoes, Carey dropped back into position. She glared down at the—talk about stupid!—bouquet in her hands and twitched the excessively long skirt of her dress back into line. Actually, she had to admit, the dress was just fine, a deep rose that matched the color of Marley’s shorter gown. The sleeveless bodice was fitted in a halter that left her back bare before flaring out over her hips to whisper around her ankles, its side slit allowing her usual determined stride. Marley’s lips had pressed together when she saw the tiny train tattoo the dress left visible at the base of her spine, but Yosh’s eyes had lit up when she modeled it for him.
Marley, Carey mused, was enjoying this entirely too much. Why else had she deliberately chosen the world’s slowest piece of music, keeping them crawling at a snail’s pace down the white-carpeted aisle. She dropped back farther and turned her head to look at Claire. She had to admit, even with one arm still in a sling, the girl made a stunning bride. But crap, at this rate, they’d all be ready for retirement before anybody said “I do.”
Claire’s gaze was fixed on Peter. She’d probably never notice if… Carey paused to casually slide one heel strap down.
Claire’s radiant face was serene, her pace steady, her whisper perfectly pitched to just reach her. “Carey Parker, if you try to take those shoes off one more time, I swear by Bygul’s bushy tail I will spell your hair into ringlets forever. Little, fat, blonde ones.” The enormous cat at her side swished a silver-tipped tail and gave a rumbling purr that sounded like laughter.
Carey sighed and resumed her death march down the white runner that marked the aisle. Ahead, Peter was gazing back at Claire with that blinding smile. Next to him stood one of his brothers and Yosh. Carey had to admit that was a surprise. One moonlit knife fight, and suddenly they were BFFs? She would never understand guys. Peter’s brother kept looking around nervously, apparently not used to weddings that included giant cat goddesses, witches, trolls, imps, demons, and Accords Wardens. Carey thought idly about mentioning that the entire third row of guests were actually were-badgers.
But Yosh was staring straight at her and laughing, the bastard. She looked at him again. The gorgeous bastard. Who knew a tux would look so sexy with tattoos? She looked critically at his leg, still healing from the fight on the bridge. But he seemed to be standing naturally, not favoring it. Well, she was not about to let him dance on it, or even do his random-sway thing. Even if he begged. Although, always honest with herself, she had to admit the begging usually worked. They just had to get through this wedding hell, and then she would make sure that leg got plenty of rest. Bed rest. She smiled for the first time. Wedding guests who had turned to watch the bride’s entrance flinched.
Reaching the end of the aisle at last, she waited for Claire to catch up, snatched her bouquet, and stomped over to stand next to Marley while Claire joined Peter in front of the minister guy in the dark suit. Before they started, Marley had tried to tell her something about rearranging the draggy bit at the back of Claire’s dress. After staring to see if Marley could possibly be making her first documented joke ever, Carey replied that if Claire couldn’t manage it herself, even one-handed, she shouldn’t have picked out such a stupid dress in the first place.
She knew full well, of course, that all three dresses—as well as those rose-colored torture instruments referred to as strappy sandals—had been chosen by Marley. Despite both recovering from their wounds, Claire and Carey had also been managing the Accords Agency until a new Director could be appointed, while Peter and Yosh had spearheaded investigations at the other Agency offices to search for Outsider moles. That left Marley to glory in sole possession of the wedding details, without a voice of reason to deny shiny wedding favors or rose-colored foot torture. No, Marley had informed her, Carey’s whining didn’t count, because nobody paid attention to it anyway.
At last everybody was in position. Finally. Shouldn’t be long now, and she could get out of these damn shoes. But…no. The minister guy, who turned out to be Peter’s father—and what was an Accords Warden doing with a father who was a minister anyway?—apparently had some things he needed to get off his chest. As he droned on about the beauty of love and commitment and shit, Carey snorted. Quietly, because she knew Marley was in elbow range.
“Could you look more annoyed?” Marley’s whisper barely reached her.
Yosh smirked. Busted.
Damn. How much longer could Peter’s father possibly carry on? Carey let her gaze wander over the rows of chairs in front of her. They were in the upstairs hall of the rowing club near Gas Works Park, windows thrown open to the gorgeous summer day they were wasting here inside. In the front row, Connor was laughing at her. She stared at him. Laughing! In the days following the fight on the bridge, he looked like he was years younger and almost relaxed.
For now, Connor was living in the little house near U-Dub that she’d bought with Marley. She wasn’t going to live there again herself—no matter how much Marley bitched about her bed in the back room of the office—but she was glad he was there. Carey worried about Marley, who wavered between wedding-obsession and bouts of almost physical pain at the loss of Kurt Jeffers.
Carey felt her own stomach clench as she remembered that night. Yosh hadn’t let her look over the bridge, but told her later that only Jeffers’ body was recovered. Nobody knew what had become of Narcorial.
In the days following the battle, there had been so many details to take care of. All of them were injured, but Claire and Peter insisted on carrying on with the wedding. Marley had snapped out of her dazed sorrow to take over, and somehow nobody had the energy to oppose her. In less than two weeks, she had organized the ceremony, their clothes, the reception, and even that wretched music. Carey shuddered at the memory of the night last week that she thought was going to be another Beer Tuesday, but instead somehow found them packing almonds into little circles of shiny fabric. Wedding favors, Marley called them. Even under torture, though, Carey wouldn’t admit that having the rest of them laugh at her grudgingly attempted nut bags was better than Beer Tuesday without Laurel and Frankie.
Somehow, in between, Marley found time to bitch at Carey about the state of the bookkeeping at their office, and to spend hours talking to Connor. And Carey shopped online for replacement parts for a Paris-Dakar classic BMW motorcycle. Damn, that chrome was expensive.
Carey looked around the packed hall. Zach was at one side in a wheelchair, on dog duty. Bain—finally free of the cone-o-shame that had kept him from picking at the stitches in his side—sat quietly in the aisle next to him, his eyes on Carey. Hell snoozed in Zach’s lap, a huge white bow decorating her collar. Leigh Ann, who had remained in the hospital with Zach until he was out of danger, had disappeared. Zach seemed unsurprised about that. “You know she’ll
be back. We just couldn’t get that lucky.”
Carey was surprised to see Anton sitting next to Pete, the leader of the imps. She thought he’d already gone on to Null City, but she grinned at his impassive face as he lowered one eyelid. Mike and a couple of other imps sat a few rows back. They had taken Moe’s body back to Fallen Court right after the battle. She wasn’t sure if there were funeral rites for imps, but she felt bad about the rest of them still being in the hospital when the imps left.
But even more, she worried. They hadn’t won their pivot point, as far as she was concerned. Marley claimed they hadn’t lost either. Sure, Null City still stood, so apparently the other side hadn’t been able to take the Book. But they hadn’t saved Raziel, Gaby’s fate was still a mystery, and the seer Rian remained an unknown element.
Her attention was caught by Claire’s voice, sounding strangely hoarse. In anyone else, she’d suspect it was emotion. Peter was smiling down at Claire as she whispered, “I do.” He slid a ring onto her finger.
Carey had something in her eye, probably that damn makeup Marley had insisted on. She pretended to cough as she swiped her fingers carefully at the corners of her eyes. Of course, Peter’s father couldn’t resist getting in a few more words. But at last Claire and Peter were heading back down that aisle together.
Yosh met up with her, and this time it was Carey who was slowing down, watching him for any signs of a limp. They were almost to the last row when Hell bounced up to them, her white bow twisted and dragging beneath her. At the fur baby’s insistent yip, Carey bent down to pick her up. Her connections, rusty and unreliable since they had been returned to her, flared as she touched the little Hellhound.
On her game board, Gaby was sitting in a tiny, sunlit office. She was reading over legal documents, something about a trust with Carey and Connor’s name on it. As she put them into an envelope, Carey saw the name of a law firm in California.
She handed Hell over to Yosh. “We have to get out of here so I can go to California. And—” She reached into the center of her bouquet and pulled out the key to Peter’s bike, painstakingly restored by two of Feyala’s friends to its former glory following the crash on the bridge. “—I’m not sure they’ll be needing this on their honeymoon.” She turned back to Yosh. “But first, you need to rest that leg, and I need to get out of these shoes. I think we need to have another fight.”
“Because you want to lose the shoes and steal the bike?” He grinned at her. “Or because of the make-up sex?”
“Two out of three.” She took his arm, snapping her fingers for Bain. “Hell, yeah.”
Without looking back, Claire called over her shoulder. “Carey Parker, you’d better not be planning to sneak out of my wedding reception before I get a chance to toss you this bouquet.”
Tossing the bike’s key ring to Peter, Carey grinned. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
About the Author
In halcyon days BC (before children), Barb Taub wrote a humor column for several Midwest newspapers. With the arrival of Child #4, she veered toward the dark side and an HR career. Following a daring daytime escape to England, she's lived in a medieval castle and a hobbit house with her prince-of-a-guy and the World’s Most Spoiled AussieDog. Now all her days are Saturdays, and she spends them consulting with her occasional co-author/daughter on Marvel heroes, Null City, and translating from British to American.
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