by Holley Trent
“Dee?” he whispered into her hair.
“Hmm?” She turned her face up to him, and her lips were right there, and he could have just taken them without her knowing anything had transpired or that anything was amiss.
He couldn’t afford to cut her out of the decision like that, though, because he wanted to keep her so bad. They already had too many bridges to rebuild, too much late getting-to-know-you to do, for him to alienate her that way.
He didn’t know which words to use—didn’t know how to ask her to give up her privacy in exchange for his peace of mind.
He still hadn’t figured out which speech to make when she said, “I’ve gotta get back. If I leave soon, we should be back to Tucson in time for me to make my shift tomorrow.”
“But you can’t.”
“I have to. I’m a grown-up.” She straightened up and stretched her arms over her head. “Gotta pay bills.”
“Don’t you think it’d be best if you took some time off until we deal with the new threats against you and Cruz?”
She pounded her thighs with her fist. “Damn. I think I almost let myself forget that things here aren’t normal.”
“You could always move here, like Ma said.” He’d decided that he preferred that over chasing her off to Tucson. Keeping her close was stupid, but his little girl deserved a father.
“No. I can’t.” She strode toward the truck, stuffing her phone into her pocket as she went.
“Why not?”
“Because that would just complicate things too quickly. I didn’t come here for that, and now things are moving too fast.” She stopped walking, turning to face him. “I shouldn’t feel like this. I should have higher walls up and be more hesitant about saying yes to anything, but I want to say yes to everything, and that’s not normal, Tito. Is it?”
He couldn’t respond, because she was right, and if he confessed, he’d probably scare her even more.
He would never refuse her any reasonable thing, either. Hell, he’d even do plenty of unreasonable ones if he’d thought she’d be happy. Their love had the potential of being a dangerous thing, and not just because of the whims of outsiders. History was cluttered with the fallout of gods’ and demigods’ relationships getting too hot, too intense, too chaotic. The evidence was in the ruined cities and the “natural” disasters that befell them.
He hooked his thumbs into his pockets and stared at a crack in the red earth in front of him.
“Do you want to say goodbye to Cruz before we leave?” she asked.
He didn’t want to say goodbye at all. Hi had been hard enough.
He nodded anyway, though, and started walking. If she had to go, he was going to send one of those angel assholes with her until he could convince her to move. He didn’t care how big a favor they asked in return.
chapter NINE
December was in the motel room packing up the few things she hadn’t taken with them to Mrs. Perez’s when Sean poked his head into the open door and cleared his throat.
“I don’t like that sound coming out of your body.” She stuffed the wallet into her purse; sans the check Mrs. Perez had written her. As soon as Cruz wasn’t watching with her usual hawkish intensity, December planned to rip it up and flush the evidence. She’d wanted help, but not like that. There were too many zeroes in that sum and, goddess or not, December didn’t believe the lady could afford to give the money away.
“Just wanted to let you know Tarik’s about to leave,” Sean said. “You know. To do that thing.”
“Where’s he going, Mommy?” Cruz didn’t look away from the cartoon she had her gaze pinned on, but she’d always had a scary knack for dividing her focus. She could be sorting through a pile of crayons for her favorite shade of pink with one hand and dialing a phone with the other.
“Probably just to visit friends. Be right back.” December hurried outside onto the walkway and shut the door behind her.
She’d talked to the angel herself and asked if he could do what Tito had suggested—to check on her parents and see if all was well in the home. Tarik had thought briefly on the proposal, and said he’d get back to her before she left.
She whispered to Sean, “Tito said he’d want to bargain for something. What do you think he’ll want?”
Hannah, who was evidently never very far from her husband, said, “Um, Tito made the bargain.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t tell him I was going to talk to Tarik. I didn’t decide for myself until late last night.”
She shrugged. “I guess Tarik went behind your back and offered to transfer the deal.”
“Why would he do that?”
“You’re asking me to get inside the head of a fallen angel?” Scoffing, Hannah fiddled the end of her braid. “Sugar, I’m not that kind of psychic.”
December mashed the heels of her palms to her eyes and rubbed. “You’re psychic?” she whispered, dropping her hands.
Hannah shrugged again. Apparently, such a condition wasn’t a big deal in Tito’s circle, but December couldn’t possibly be so cavalier. She had her daughter around these people, and she needed to know what they were capable of.
Given Hannah’s anxious stance and the dark shadows under her eyes, December didn’t think the lady was in the mood to patiently explain the abilities of the various eccentrics in the Circle of Foye.
Still, she needed one thing answered for sure. “What’d Tito promise Tarik?”
Hannah furrowed her brow. “Oddly, he wouldn’t say. Can’t be anything so bad, though. Tarik’s got a pretty chilly disposition, but he’s not particularly malicious.” She added in a mutter, “I don’t think, anyway.”
“That’s not comforting.”
Sean grunted. “More than likely, he’ll ask Tito to do something that Tarik is personally unable to do in this realm.”
“Like what? He’s a fallen angel. He can probably rip holes into time and space. What does he think a mild-mannered demigod who uses duct tape to hold his truck seats together can do for him?”
“You’re sounding kind of defensive, Dee.”
“I’m not.” December crossed her arms.
“You totally are.”
“Maybe I just don’t want him to be taken advantage of.”
Hannah chuckled and canted her head toward the room door. Her smile fell away, and then she pushed in the door.
Cruz scampered away, shouting, “I wasn’t listening!”
Sighing, December closed the door.
“At some point, she’s going to overhear something that you won’t be able to explain away,” Sean said. “You need to tell her why you came here.”
Hannah stepped closer to the two of them and said even more quietly, “You assume she doesn’t already know. We’re not talking about a normal child. We have no way of determining right now how much like Lola she is or how sensitive she is to what’s happening around her.”
“How am I supposed to ask her that?” December waved off Tarik who was on approach, wearing dark sunglasses and a trench coat—the latter of which was certainly meant to conceal the sword he probably had strapped to his back. December wasn’t fully integrated into the paranormal world, but she’d read enough urban fantasy to suspect the sword wasn’t something he’d travel without.
He pushed up an eyebrow, probably his standard greeting.
“You wait,” she said.
He made some emphatic sound that could have been either a simple scoff or him coughing out a new star.
“I’ve dealt with worse than you, bub, and you’re not even drunk like they were.” She turned back to the Foyes. “Should I give her a pop quiz with a bunch of true or false answers?”
“Maybe you could ask her what she knows,” Sean said. “See what she tells you as certainties. Don’t respond any particular way whether she’s right or wrong.”
“But how do I start that conversation? How did your mother have it with you?”
“She never had to. My father tried to shield us from the gla
ring as much as he could when we were young, but Mom always thought he was doing us a disservice. We needed to be better integrated into the group. We always had an awareness of what we were. They couldn’t prevent us from seeing things. Dad always had his lieutenants hanging around, and they weren’t exactly shy about what they were and what their roles were. My father had to give up on trying to pull the curtain around the mysterious stuff. It was better that he guide us through it than to wait until some arbitrary age for us to discover all the truths on our own.”
“So maybe letting Cruz see some things would be better than simply talking to her,” Hannah whispered.
Tarik cleared his throat. Apparently, the first star needed company. “Do excuse me for interrupting your little conference, but I require information so that I can accurately target my teleporting.”
“Oh.” December cringed and turned to him. “Do you need an address or something? As far as I know, they’re still in the same place. Hold on, I can get a pad and pen out of the room.” She reached for the door handle.
“No.” He pressed one of his giant hands to her forehead, and she froze, not because she was so stunned by his touch, but because she literally couldn’t move. She couldn’t blink. She couldn’t breathe. She was pretty sure her heart had ground to a halt, too.
And then everything rebooted.
“That’ll do.”
Her limp body went careening toward the ground before she noticed her equilibrium was off.
He pulled her upright as if she were just a rag doll that had fallen off a store shelf.
Jeez.
Shuddering, she put her hand on her head where his had been and rubbed. Although his palm had been warm, her skin was ice cold and numb.
He slid his hand into a leather glove and then both hands into his pockets.
“What the heck did you just do?” she asked, rubbing.
“As I told you yesterday, angels have ways of knowing things.”
“Can you, maybe, warn me next time before you do something like that? I’d like to have a defibrillator handy or something.”
Sean snorted, but Tarik didn’t respond. He probably didn’t give a shit.
He turned in a slow circle, his eerie golden gaze flitting everywhere as if he was itemizing every atom in the air, and then he stopped. His attention was fixed straight ahead of him at the window Cruz happened to be peeking through the blinds of.
He pulled his hands from his pockets, gripped his lapels, and then vanished.
“December?” Hannah queried.
Some sort of sickly, wheezing sound was coming out of December’s open mouth as she stared at the spot where Tarik had been standing.
For a moment, she worried she was experiencing simultaneous organ failure of her heart, lungs, brain, and even her legs. The compulsion to just go ahead and lose her ever-loving shit wasn’t quelled any by Hannah’s hands on her shoulders. That just made her cackle manically and point to the window. She didn’t stop cackling until Tito, with both eyebrows raised, stepped onto the curb.
She grabbed him by the collar and gave him a jiggle. “He just vanished. Poof!”
“Yeah, he does that.”
“I said poof. Right in front of the window, Tito.”
Cruz suddenly appeared in the doorway, because of course.
“Oh,” he whispered, nodding slowly as if he’d suddenly caught the gist. She was glad she wouldn’t have to scream it at him. She was glad he was there so that he could be the one to explain to their daughter why a guy who looked like an extra from a post-apocalyptic action movie had vanished into thin air.
Tito looked to Cruz, and so did December.
The child should have been screaming or running—December would have been—but she didn’t do either.
She didn’t look afraid at all. She stood, working the toe of her sneaker against the cement and fisting the hem of the brand new “There’s Magic in Maria!” T-shirt December had bought from the gift shop after Cruz had spilled chocolate milk all over herself.
December knelt in front of her, and Cruz gazed over her head, ostensibly at Tito.
“Hey,” he said.
Cruz canted her head in that suddenly shy little kid way, and swayed.
He waved at her. “Me again. Hoped you hadn’t gone yet. You left your hat in my truck.” He held up the little baseball cap.
The hat hadn’t cost much, but Cruz got attached to her things. She would have missed it.
She took the hat and muttered a quiet “Thank you.”
December stood, and squeezed one of the hands Hannah put on her shoulders.
Leaning in, the blonde whispered, “Just wait.”
“Where did Tarik go?” Cruz asked Tito.
“Tarik?” Tito shoved his hands into his pockets. His posture was casual, but December was coming to recognize the way he wore his worry. It was in the slight furrow of his brow and the tightening of his lips. “Where’d he say he was going?”
Cruz shrugged. “They won’t tell me.”
“Maybe where he’s going isn’t so important, then.”
“Then why are they whispering?”
“’Cause that’s just something grownups do sometimes. I wouldn’t take it personally.”
Cruz narrowed her eyes, and looked so much like Lola in that moment that December’s blood felt suddenly like frozen margarita slush.
Hannah rubbed her shoulders, and made the quietest shushing sound.
“He’s good at that,” Cruz said.
“Good at what, princess?”
“Going away. Mikey could do that, but he was really slow.”
“Cruz?” December pulled away from Hannah’s grip and knelt in front of the child again. “Who’s Mikey?”
Cruz shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Where did you see him?”
Cruz shrugged again. “Everywhere. Sometimes we play games.”
“That doesn’t sound like past tense to me,” Hannah said.
“When’d you meet him?” Tito asked.
“I dunno. He’s always been there, like Mommy.”
Tito, Hannah, and Sean all turned to December.
She put up her hands and waved them off. “No. Don’t turn to me, I swear, I have no idea who this Mikey person is.
“And yet here you are running back to Tucson.” Tito jammed his hands into his pockets and worked his jaw side to side.
“Don’t take that accusing tone with me. I wouldn’t have some random weirdo around my kid!”
“I believe you, Dee. I’m just thinking.”
“You didn’t sound like you were thinking. You sounded like you were blaming me. I do the best I can.”
Hannah shushed them all and rubbed her temples. “It’s probably natural to think of the mundane, but my gut says you should think outside the box here.”
“Imaginary friend?” Sean asked.
“Nah,” Hannah said. “She’s too specific, right? Was your imagination that good as a kid?”
“I didn’t have time for imagination. I was too busy being a junior worker elf at Foye Woodworks.”
Brow now deeply furrowed, Tito knelt in front of Cruz like December had been. “Hey princess, you said this Mikey guy disappears? Does he pop into rooms just like that, too? Anywhere he wants?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you say you’ve always known him?”
“I think so.”
“What’s he look like?”
Cruz scrunched her nose. “A boy like Frankie.”
Tito looked to December.
“Frankie lives down the street. He’s twenty-two, I think, and graduating from college this year. He sometimes helps my brother-in-law with car stuff.”
“Ah.” To Cruz, Tito said, “Can you be a little more specific about Mikey? Is there anything else you can say about him?”
She pouted, and then slowly shook her head. “No-o-o,” she drawled out. “Not really. Sometimes he brings his guitar, though, but he’s not really any good. He always
goes away when Mommy comes home and the babysitter leaves. He says I don’t need him then.”
Tito turned his head and rolled his eyes where Cruz couldn’t see. Then he stood.
“Um, Tito?” December asked.
He grunted.
She sighed, pushed her hands against his lower back, and guided him far, far away from the room, almost to the street.
“Ideas?” she whispered.
“Shit, I wouldn’t worry. I think a lot of kids have them.” He rubbed the stubble of his five o’clock shadow and grunted again. “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised she has one. After all, her daddy has a freakin’ target on his head.”
“She has a what?”
“Guardian angel. Tarik probably saw him at some point, and that could be why he didn’t bother hiding the disappearing act. He knew she had to have seen it before.”
“Kind of Tarik to tell me.” She stomped her foot in frustration. “So, this Mikey could be here right now, and we just can’t see him?”
“Probably not here. He might have come out after Tarik left if he had been, though. Best I understand the hierarchy, he probably would have steered way clear of an angel of Tarik’s rank.”
“Fallen angel.”
“Still powerful.”
Apparently.
December’s head had started swimming again, and not just from the memory of Tarik fishing around in her brain for GPS coordinates or something. She closed her eyes, and whispered hoarsely, “My kid has a personal angel?”
“Named Mikey, apparently.” Tito laughed, but December couldn’t find the humor in the situation.
“I hope he’s not a hipster,” he said. “Supernatural hipsters are the worst. Those assholes’ll have you wanting to fall on a sword. They get on these obsessive kicks and never stop talking about their new hobbies, you know? Actually … ” He chucked her chin.