The Trickster's Strings: A Superhero Adventure-Romance (Godsongs Book 2)

by Jax Garren

  It took Coyote a moment to respond, then, 7’s good. See you at the lair.

  Thx again for having my back. *high five* Best partner ever.

  *high five back* You know I am.

  Coyote was such an arrogant thing. But was he so smug without the mask? “Do I act different when I, I mean, you know?” she asked her roommate as she switched back to Rafael—checked it—and typed, Ur place? Or where should we meet?

  Poor Rawan’s voice was nearly inaudible as she said, “No, not really. Braver. And you take charge more. That could just be that desperate situations require brave and decisive action, though—something we don’t tend to get a lot of normally. I think I act the same. But I like having claws...” The last word drifted into nothing as Rawan let out a tiny snore.

  Giselle pulled the blanket over her roommate a little more securely, then smiled when her phone vibrated.

  My place is good. Thanks again.

  Be brave. Treat him like a person. If it was Coyote, she’d text him something else. But it wasn’t Coyote, and she put the phone down.

  It pinged again. What are you doing tonight? Her breath caught when she realized that wasn’t Coyote. Rafa-freaking-el was DMing her about nothing important. Her heart picked up. Wait, it was already night in Malverde. Eleven was what Rawan had said earlier.

  She glanced at the screen in front of her and the ridiculous pose the main character had been paused in. Watching a bad action movie with Rawan but lazy girl’s falling asleep. Seriously, if anyone tried to kick like that in the middle of a fight, they’d have their ass handed to them, not win. U? She erased it before sending, remembering his earlier rebuke. You?

  Staring into space debating if I want a drink or to just fall asleep. What’re you watching? Maybe I can find it.

  She stared at the phone screen for a moment. Was he offering to watch a movie together? She texted the title. Im only 7 minutes in. I can start over. Maybe that wasn’t what he’d meant and she’d just embarrassed herself.

  Cool. I haven’t seen this one. Don’t make it to a lot of movies.

  She started to type, We could go to one, but quickly erased it.

  Queued up. Ready to hit play? he asked a few seconds later.

  She was watching a movie with Rafael Marquez. Sort of. Close enough. Ready. Treat him like Coyote. Be brave. She kept typing. Do I have to be quiet? During bad movies Rawan lets me make running commentary but shes asleep and I have no one to be sarcastic for.

  The next text came quickly. MST3K challenge accepted. Hit play.

  Chapter 22

  THE NEXT DAY, GISELLE nervously shuffled from foot to foot outside Rafael’s door, Freyja’s backpack, stuffed with notebooks and her math book, slung over her shoulder. Monday she’d been in the underworld fighting gods and accidentally resurrecting her birth mother. Wednesday she was a math tutor. The calm after the hurricane—sandstorm?—was giving her whiplash.

  She pulled out her phone and looked at her messages again. Ande had sent a video of Bryn laughing as they cut off her matted hair and turned the pale blonde mess into a super short style that brought out Bryn’s blue eyes. There was so much joy on her mom’s face as she waved at the camera and blew Giselle a kiss, then patted her hair in appreciation.

  Her mother had four earrings on one side and one on the other, runes tattooed on her wrist, and she liked dark eyeliner and bubblegum-pink lips, details Giselle had forgotten.

  They were shockingly cute together, Ande and Bryn.

  And as shady as Ande could be sometimes, she’d been there for Giselle during that first year out of the group home. Though not nice, Ande had been steady and calm, if sarcastic, with a confused and angry teen. Bryn was in good hands.

  A muffled “Coming!” sounded from inside, and she shoved her phone back in her pocket as the door opened.

  Mouth dry and hands clammy, she forced a smile up at Rafael, who was not even looking her way, his attention back toward someone in his apartment. The sight of him—the face she’d postered across every space she moved through in high school, and now the face she sat across from in English—grounded her back in reality. No more Freyja and her dangerous and magical life. Time to be Giselle.

  “Math tutoring? Already?” a woman’s voice said, sounding peeved, which sent Giselle into a fit of curiosity. The brown-eyed girl? A fan? Someone he’d just met?

  Finally Rafael turned to her with a smile and an exaggerated eye roll. He looked alert and well put together, clean-shaven, with his hair in perfect disarray—the intentional kind. His thick-rimmed glasses, black on the top and clear on the bottom, drew attention to his beautiful eyes.

  Man, it was one thing to snark over text message and a totally different thing to look him in the eye when the full force of his magnetism was directed her way. Any intelligent thought she might’ve had tore off, leaving nothing but babbling stupidity. “I like your glasses. I mean, I like you in your glasses. I mean, glasses pretty.” She slapped a hand over her eyes as her face turned fiery hot. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw the door open farther, like he was still allowing her in after that bit of stupid.

  “Oh,” the woman’s withering voice said, before turning fake cheerful. “You. From the party. Hi.”

  Giselle removed her hand enough to see Lyssa standing behind her brother with a smile that didn’t hide her frustration. She didn’t seem mad to see Giselle specifically, more aggravated that somebody had interrupted them. “Is this a bad time? We can do another day...” Giselle said, trying to be polite but desperately wanting to stay.

  Lyssa threw an arm around her brother and squeezed. “No, I dropped by without texting first. My bad.” Her smile turned wry, almost conspiratorial toward Giselle. “If he’s going to make all of us rework our lives around this stupid thing for four years, he’d better succeed with flying colors. You got your work cut out for you, though. All the spots in his brain that should contain math facts are filled with eighties pop lyrics and Santana guitar riffs.”

  Rafael practically shoved her out the door. “I was going to invite you to stay, but I’m not anymore.”

  “I should know,” Lyssa continued, ignoring her brother’s amused discomfort. “I tutored him in high school.” She kissed his cheek in passing, then waved at Giselle, her good humor restored as she headed for the elevator.

  Before she was totally gone, Rafael grabbed her hand to stop her. “I really do want to hear your news, though. Sorry it’s been so...” He waved his other hand about, indicating the tornado of life.

  “Yeah, yeah. Big man on campus. I’ll catch you later.”

  Giselle turned back to Rafael’s condo, interested to see what his place looked like, but stopped when she heard the hissing consonants of whispering behind her. But by the time she’d flipped around to try and catch what Lyssa was saying, she was done speaking.

  “No, she’s not... Go! I have math!” Rafael practically yelled at his sister before grabbing Giselle’s elbow and pulling her inside. “Sorry about my sister. She’s a mess.” He shut the door behind them, then seemed to realize he’d manhandled her arm, and he let her go. “Sorry.”

  She shrugged. “You don’t need to be so careful around me. I’m hard to injure.”

  He gave her a look like her statement confused him, then turned them toward a high-topped table near the expansive windows. “Well, if I’m an ass, call me on it, okay? I recognize my sense of normal human interaction has been skewed.”

  Because it seemed to be what he wanted, she nodded rapidly but couldn’t help adding, “I’m not sure I have a good sense of normal human interactions either. I spent most of the last five years in a group home—not exactly normal. At least, not to people around here.”

  With a remote he turned off the stereo, which had been playing Top Forty, and the room turned quiet. “I don’t know what that is.”

  How to explain? Instead of starting, she turned her head back and forth, trying not to look as f
ascinated by his place as she was. With wood-paneled walls and leather furniture with brass rivets, a general dusting of rustic metal stars, and longhorn horns over the fireplace, the gilded-age cowboy decor didn’t seem like him, but then what did she know? He had grown up on a fancy ranch, and the place screamed old-money Texas. “Yeah, I guess you probably wouldn’t.” She cringed at how sarcastic she sounded. He liked her because she was sweet—like him.

  He laughed. “This place is my grandmother’s. She’s wanted me to enroll at Zavala for a while now—bought it when I was seventeen.” He waved a hand about. “Even at that age I wouldn’t have done it up like this, but whatever. It makes her happy.” He sat at the table and opened then closed his math book. “What’s a group home? Do you mind telling me?” He looked at her again with a focused gaze she could get lost in, and she sat before she tripped on something and fell over like a graceless klutz.

  “It’s, um... well, we’re not supposed to have orphanages anymore in the US, like in Annie, right? But there aren’t enough foster parents to house all the kids who need a place to stay. So they have these... well, they’re orphanages, but they call them ‘group homes,’ or ‘emergency shelters,’ or some other thing. It’s where they stick kids who don’t have a place to go.” She shrugged, trying to keep things from getting too heavy. “Like me.”

  He patted her hand, his expression turning sad. She couldn’t decide whether to yank away from the sympathy or revel in the fact that Rafael’s hand was on hers.

  And for some reason she kept talking. “Nobody wants to take in teenagers, right? We’re scary. And so group homes are typically filled with teens and medically fragile kids and kids who have the really big problems—like, you know, they rape people and set houses on fire—so nobody wants them either.” At the now wide-eyed distress on his face, she did take her hand back and started pulling supplies from her bag. “So, I’m just saying, I don’t think I have a really good sense of normal human relations either.”

  “But you’re good at math?”

  Her temper got the better of her, and she shot him the angry look his question deserved. “Yeah, foster kid doesn’t equal stupid.”

  “No!” He threw a hand up as his face crunched into an embarrassed moue. “No, I didn’t mean...” He glanced up at the ceiling and blew out a breath like he was very carefully considering his next words.

  She tipped her head, wondering how deep he’d dig this hole, as her hand moved, sketching random doodles in her notebook to help keep her temper from escalating.

  “It sounds like you didn’t have help. I needed all the help I could get with school just to pass.” He ran a hand through his hair and laughed without much humor. “If it hadn’t been for my parents, I’d have probably dropped out to play guitar, and at this point I’d be a homeless busker, definitely not tutoring other people in math like you are. You must be really smart.”

  She stared at what she’d drawn, cartoon animals—including a coyote—interwoven with flowers and raindrops. His awkward fantasizing about the struggle was the other reaction people had—either she was a classless nobody or a saint who’d overcome. Nobody looked at her like she was a normal person fumbling through as best she could, just like they were. “You’d probably be doing better than you think, as talented as you are.” Awkward... “We should probably do math.”

  “Yeah. Let me retrieve my foot from my mouth and let’s do math.” He pulled out a notebook and flipped to his class notes, then flipped in his textbook to the assignment. “You’re a good artist,” he commented as he scooted his chair closer to hers. “Nice coyote.”

  Her cheeks heated as she turned to a blank page. “Oh, thanks. It’s a nervous habit. Drawing calms me down.”

  He nodded and shot her an expression of eager hopefulness that made all her frustration with him go away. “Playing the piano calms me down.”

  “More than guitar?”

  “Yeah.” He put his hands in front of him like he was playing and bounced them hard. “More banging.” When she laughed a little, he grinned like he’d been hoping for the reaction. He looked over at the baby grand on the other side of the room with a deep affection, like they were friends. “Also, piano is more full body.” He moved his arms in and out, eyes closed like he could play the air in front of him.

  “I’d love to hear you play one day.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Maybe after math, if you’ve got time, I’ll play you a song? It’s the least I can do.”

  He was one hundred percent forgiven. She gave him an excited smile. “We should get to math then. What are you guys studying?”

  He shrugged and passed her his notes. “This?”

  “This?” she mimicked, amused. “Well, give me a moment to figure out what this is, and we’ll get started.”

  LEARNING ALGEBRA WITH Giselle was surprisingly easy. Unlike Lyssa, she was patient and never made fun. His parents had always said he’d be good at it if he tried hard enough, and they’d trotted out the old wives’ tale that musicians were supposed to be good at math. But all through school, he’d stared at numbers on a page and couldn’t for the life of him figure out how they were connected, while everyone told him it was easy and he just needed to apply himself.

  Giselle, though, would explain something in a methodical way, often with sketched cartoons, and the cobwebs seemed to shake off in his mind as everything made a little more sense.

  Maybe what he’d really needed was a different teacher, one with a lot of patience, who didn’t assume he was goofing off.

  It was cool, too, the way the fangirl shut off when she was focused on numbers. Every now and then she’d still look at him, pause, and blush, but with a little prompting he could get them back on track. Maybe one day she’d entirely quit.

  He never had to redirect Freyja. Granted, she didn’t know who he was, but she wouldn’t care, right?

  Nah. Not her.

  “Rafael,” she prompted softly, and he realized he’d drifted.

  She was blushing again. He wondered if it was because she’d said his name. People were weird that way. “You can call me Rafe, you know. Pretty much all my friends do.”

  Her blush got darker, and then she stared past him, with an uptick in her breathing, like she couldn’t look him in the eyes.

  Great. Back to fangirling. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, uh, Rafe. That’s...” Another breath.

  “Or call me whatever works for you.”

  “No, that...” She pointed toward the back of the room. “What’s that?”

  He glanced over to see what she was talking about, then did a double take. The corner of the room farthest from the windows had a sootlike quality that was slowly coalescing into...

  “Shit.” A galla. She wasn’t fangirling, she was legitimately afraid. “I don’t know,” he lied as the torso and shoulders of a man and the head of a bull came into view. Giselle stood, and he popped up in front of her. This thing was his problem. He looked down at the ground, as if Ereshkigal could hear him. I’m supposed to have a week to write the song. Unless she was pissed enough about him leaving to send her demons to fetch him back. “You should probably get out of here.”

  “No! I’m not leaving you. There’s a... a thing in your apartment. You don’t know what it is?”

  “No clue. You?”

  “No!” She sounded genuinely panicked. “I need a weapon or something.”

  Freyja probably would’ve thrown his math book at the demon by now—she was good at utilizing whatever was handy. Well, he had a weapon. A pretty serious one. Using his body as a shield, he shuffled them backward toward the safe where Abuela kept a pistol.

  The galla charged, hoofbeats clopping against the hardwood floor as it ran.

  “Knife block!” Giselle yelled and dashed away from behind him.

  “What?” Sure enough, she’d found his kitchen knives. He ran the opposite way, heading for the safe by the balcony door. The galla ploughed right into his bar, knocking
stools over, then turned left and right as if it couldn’t decide who to come after. “Over here!” he yelled, waving at it as he typed the code into the safe.

  The beast turned toward him and charged just as the safe opened.

  “No!” Giselle yelled. Her feet pounded against the floor as he swiped the gun and a loaded magazine and dropped to the floor out of the way.

  The demon pounced, its three-fingered claws grasping for Rafael’s chest. He flinched, bracing for pain.

  It never came. The demon was yanked backward as Giselle shoved his best kitchen knife into its side, coating his poor cooking utensil in black blood.

  Better the knife than him.

  “You okay?” she yelled, sounding desperately panicked.

  He slammed the magazine into the gun. “Can you get it on the ground?” The floors were concrete beneath the oak; they’d stop a bullet.

  Somehow she manhandled the thing down. It screamed at her, jaws dripping saliva. Giselle rolled away from it with a yelp. As the beast tried to rise, Rafael stomped on its shoulder, forcing it back to the ground, and fired a round at its forehead. The thing’s massive head fell back to the ground, eyes wide in shock.

  Then it dissipated into mist, leaving a puddle of black goo spilling out of a hole in his floor.

  “Are you okay?” Giselle demanded, rising. He held his arm out, and she collapsed against him.

  “Am I okay? Yeah. It didn’t touch me. Are you okay?” Her weight against him felt nice, so like Freyja’s, the few times he’d touched her. But unlike her, Giselle didn’t immediately pull away.

  “I’m fine. Just scared the shit out of me.”

  “Me too.” He put his other arm around her, and she let him pull her close, then wrapped her own arms around his waist in a stabilizing hug he really needed.

  She pulled back a fraction. “Oh, gun.”

  He dumped the magazine, ejected the chambered round, then tossed all of it on a barstool cushion. When the metal was gone from their embrace, she fell back against him, her heavy breath bringing them tighter with each exhale.