“I’ll talk to Liam,” he told Layne. “If there is anything we’re missing, he’ll find it.”
That night found Charlie back at the studio with Maggie. He was actually happy to be returning to the tiny room with its industrial floors, cinder block walls, and inch high layer of dust coating every possible surface. It was beginning to feel like home.
“Here we go,” Maggie said, unlatching the door of the kiln. She opened it about an inch and then stopped. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her chest was rising and falling with slow, deliberate breaths. “I can’t look,” she finally admitted.
“What? Why not?” Charlie hadn’t actually fired any ceramics before, but he didn’t expect this to be a big deal. What could have possibly gone wrong? “You know they’re going to be perfect.” It was one of the benefits of being able to manipulate clay with Thaumaturgic skills.
“I don’t know. I just have this really bad feeling—“
“Like maybe you’re over-stressed from an extremely emotionally taxing week? That kind of bad feeling?” Charlie knew all about that feeling. Liam had given him a long, heartfelt talk about it earlier.
Maggie gave him a tiny smile. “Yeah. Kinda like that.” She rolled her shoulders and stretched her neck as if preparing for a fight. “My brain is just being stupid. Nothing happened in the kiln.” She threw open the door. “That would be—“
Maggie froze, her face twisted into a mask of horror. He had to physically move her aside to see the damage for himself.
“What the hell?”
It looked like a bomb had gone off. Debris was everywhere. The lucky pieces were riddled with holes. The unlucky pieces were completely shatter.
“I… I…” A single tear dripped down her cheek. “Oh, my God. Oh. My. God. Who would do this?”
“How did this happen?”
“Wet clay. It had to be wet.”
“Wet clay?”
“Mine was all dry. I know it was. And Chase has been doing this for twenty years. She knows you can’t put wet clay in a kiln. It’ll explode, and…” Instead of finishing, she fished her phone out of her pocket and started pacing.
“Chase?” Because he was a Shifter and the moon was growing in the sky, he could hear their teacher’s confirmation, and Chase swearing the only thing she’d put in there was two little turtles she was making for her nephew. He could see both turtles had mostly survived, although they were missing their heads. Maggie asked if the mysterious Pepper might have put something in, and that was when they learned she was in jail on a drug charge.
“What were the little balls supposed to be?”
Maggie stopped pacing. “Balls?”
“Yeah, the balls of clay you placed on each shelf. Are they supposed to be something, was it wadding, or were you testing air flow around your pieces or something?”
“I didn’t—“ She closed her eyes and Charlie could almost see her thinking through different scenarios. “It was an experiment,” she finally said. “And it went all kinds of wrong. I’m sorry, Chase, but your turtles are kinda dead.”
Chase tried to tell Maggie it was no big deal and her nephew would probably prefer a box of Legos anyway, but Maggie insisted on apologizing for a full five minutes and paying her for damages, which Chase estimated to be a grand total of five dollars. The moment the call was over Maggie slumped down onto the floor and buried her face in her hands.
“Someone sabotaged your pieces on purpose,” Charlie said.
“Fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Five. Five dollars.” Charlie squinted at one of the little turtle figurines. “And that’s for the two of them together, not each. Although, looking at these things, I think she might be swindling you.” He picked one of them up, trying to figure out if paint would make them look less or more like turtles instead of six circle of various sizes stuck together, seemingly at random. “Are you sure Chase knows what she’s talking about? I mean, I would expect the person who is supposed to be teaching me ceramics to actually know how to do ceramics, at least enough to make a kid a turtle.”
“My pieces. The dishes.” Maggie looked up, and even though he hadn’t heard so much as a sniffle, her cheeks were wet with tears. “My stuff was worth fifteen hundred dollars.” She wiped her cheeks and stood. Charlie had the urge to hug her, so he shoved his hands in his back pockets. “It was a commission,” she said, walking over to stand beside him. “It was going to be a complete set of Hulk dinnerware. The buyer was going to pay me fifteen hundred dollars, but they had to be shipped by next week.”
Tears ran down her cheeks again. Somehow the silence with which she wept made it all the more heart-breaking.
“I can’t get it done now. I’ll have to message them and let them know.” She used the back of her hands to dry off her cheeks, although it didn’t do much good. New tears took the place of the discarded ones almost immediately. “Do you think there is any chance they’ll not write a horrible review about my lack of professionalism?”
“We can fix this.” There had to be a way. He couldn’t stand much more of her quiet tears.
“I can’t. Once the clay is set, it’s set. Even I can’t undo what the fire has done.”
“So you make new ones. Big deal. You can have that many plates and bowls thrown by midnight.”
She picked up a plate that was almost usable. “But I have to fire them, and I can’t do that until Saturday.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have to be with it all day, and I have classes Monday through Friday. You should probably remember that since you’re taking them with me.”
Charlie curled up one side of his mouth and raised his eyebrows. It was a practiced look, one that was supposed to say, I’m-about-to-talk-you-into-doing-something-wonderfully-naughty. He’d perfected it as a teenager trying to get to second base with whichever girl would give him the time of day, but he hadn’t put it into practice in a very long time.
“Maggie McCray, haven’t you ever heard of the concept of skipping?”
She swiped her cheeks again, this time succeeding in getting them dry. “It’s only the third week of school. No one skips during the third week of school.”
“Why not? It seems like a perfectly good time to skip, if you ask me. We’ve got a few weeks before our first exam, so we’re probably not going to miss anything they won’t cover again.” He could see his logic wearing down her defenses. The spark of hope he saw in her eyes turned his half-smirk into a full-on smile. “Come on, Magpie. We can do this. I’ll clean up this mess while you throw, and then tomorrow we’ll stay here all day and fire.”
“The clay won’t be dry enough—“
“Can you make it dry enough?”
“Maybe.” She ran a finger around the rim of the plate she was still holding. “No, I mean…” She lifted her lashes and met Charlie’s eyes. “Yes. I can do it.”
“Well, then,” Charlie said, grabbing a bowl out of the kiln and silently cursing himself for not realizing earlier that it would be hot, “let’s get started.”
He made Maggie start throwing while he emptied the kiln and took care of the mess. Two plates and one bowl came out undamaged, and Maggie brightly said that she could paint those on Monday while firing the other pieces. Once the kiln was empty, Charlie sat and talked to Maggie while she worked. He told himself it was just because he’d left his computer at home, thinking they wouldn’t be gone long, but he knew he would have done the same thing even if he had it and an entire stack of new comic books with him. The coyote had woken up at the first sign of her distress, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to subdue him. So, instead of fighting it, he indulged that side of himself by talking to her, coaxing smiles and laughs when she began to feel overwhelmed.
It was nearly midnight when they made their way back to the parking lot on the other side of campus. They were both too tired to talk, but it was a silence Charlie welcomed. His coyote had settled, but for once he didn’t feel empty in its absence. Instead, he
felt content for the first time in a long, long time. His therapist had been harassing him to go out and make friends outside the Alpha Pack, and he’d resisted, thinking he would never be comfortable around someone who hadn’t trudged through hell beside him, but the exact opposite was true. He was comfortable with Maggie because they weren’t haunted by the same memories. He didn’t have to worry about what dark corner her mind had wandered into, and even though she might ask him something that would make him uncomfortable, it was only his discomfort he had to contend with. There was no shared pain threatening to break through the surface with a single thoughtless comment.
He’d parked the Humvee, his official work vehicle, on the edge of the lot, beneath a light pole. It was a good habit for anyone, but especially for people who were the target of a crazy psycho killer. Constantly being aware of your surroundings was another one of those good-for-everyone-but-especially-potential-horror-movie-extras things Charlie was very into these days, which is why he noticed there was no light shining down on the Humvee the moment it came in view.
“Maggie.” His voice was barely above a whisper as he slowed his strides. She didn’t ask questions. She just fell in step beside him, close enough he could grab her if need be, but not crowding him so much he couldn’t move if he had to. “Taser in one hand; pepper spray in the other.” She located both in her bag within a matter of seconds. Still, she didn’t say anything. Her eyes showed fear, and the hands clinging onto the weapons Joshua gave her trembled, but she kept walking with an even, confident gait. “Remember, a Shifter’s hearing is sensitive, especially with the moon getting closer to full every night. If someone grabs you, scream loud and high. You may be able to shattered his eardrum.”
They were about ten feet away from the Humvee when the scent finally hit him. Strong. Chemical. A dozen perfumes piled on top of one another.
The exact same scent he’d been following on the day they found Barros’s body.
Charlie steered Maggie towards a burger shack well known for their cheesy tater-tots and 24-hour operating schedule while punching an emergency code into his phone. Ten minutes later, Talley and Scout were standing at the edge of the booth they had procured.
“Liam has called a Bronies meeting across the street,” Scout said, snagging the Cherry Coke Charlie had bought so they wouldn’t get kicked out of the restaurant, which had a very strict no-eat-no-stay policy. “They need you, Apple Blossom. They need your pluck and good ol’ southern common sense real bad.”
Charlie looked at Maggie, who hadn’t said much in the past ten minutes. He wasn’t sure if it was because she was freaked out, or if she realized anything they said to one another might be overheard. He knew staying in the restaurant where she was surrounded by a crowd of college students clinging desperately to the last hours of the weekend was for the best, but still he hated to leave her alone. She wasn’t a Shifter. She wouldn’t know if there was a danger until it was stabbing a knife into her chest.
Even though she wasn’t touching him, Talley saw the direction his thoughts were going. “You and Twilight Sparkle run along. Maggie and I will stick around and finish off your cheesy tots for you.”
“Are you sure? What if something—“
“We’re covered,” Talley said, patting the purse where she kept her carry-and-conceal. “Anyway, Liam thinks whoever was there is long gone. The danger is less than clear-and-present.”
Charlie had come to the same conclusion earlier, but he still thought it was best to be overly cautious. He was living with enough what-ifs and I-wish-I-would-haves already. He wasn’t about to add onto the list if he could help it. Leaving Maggie with Talley, whose love of handguns was only a little alarming, seemed safe, but he still felt a bit like he was abandoning her as he slid out of the booth.
“Wait for one of us to come back and get you,” he told her as Talley took his spot. “I’ll text you to let you know what’s up as soon as I can.” And then, because he thought he might do something crazy, like kiss her, he turned around, linked his arm with Scout’s, and said, “To Ponyville!”
Chapter 19
“Someone cut your brake line,” Jase cheerfully told Charlie when they reached the parking lot.
“Someone human,” Scout clarified since she could smell them underneath the stench of perfume. Once, when they were eleven, she had accepted Jase’s dare to go through a department store and spray a sample of every perfume they had on her arm. She ended up with a headache for two days and they were both grounded for a week. The way her arm had smelled the entire drive home had been tame compared to the stench surrounding Charlie’s Humvee.
“Two someones human,” Joshua added. He was crouched down beside the driver’s door, doing something with what appeared to be a make-up brush.
“Did you know our in-house Immortal has a fingerprint kit and knows how to use it?” Liam asked, either noticing where her attention had turned or picking up on her thoughts the way he sometimes did.
Not that he ever picked up on the right random thoughts. Or maybe he did and just ignored them. She really wasn’t sure which way was worse.
“It’s Joshua. He’s like two hundred years old,” she said, leaning against her mate as he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “He’s had like five lifetimes to learn all this crap. Try not to be impressed. It only makes his gigantic head even bigger.”
“One,” Joshua said, whipping out a black light, “I’m less than a hundred, thank you very much. And two, it’s not arrogance if you’re actually that damn good.”
Charlie crouched down by Joshua, scenting the area around where Joshua was working. “Getting anything?”
“Other than prints I’m almost certain will match yours? No. It seems our humans know how to cover their tracks.”
Charlie nodded, probably picking up the faint smell of latex Scout could tease out of the other scents surrounding the vehicle. “Which begs the question, how the hell do humans know how to cover their tracks from Shifters?” he asked.
“Oh, I know the answer to this one,” Jase said, looking up from the video he was watching on how to repair a brake line. “Abram Mandel.”
“Mandel is hiring out humans to do his dirty work?”
Scout mirrored Charlie’s look of disgust. Since she’d spent the majority of her life as a plain, nothing-fancy-happening-here-under-the-moonlight human, she didn’t think of them as inferior like some Shifters did, but she did think of them as very breakable. It was both cowardly and stupid to send humans to take on the Alpha Pack. Any one of them could easily take on several humans at noon on the day of a new moon and still come out on top.
“When Imogen heard what we suspected her dad of doing, she shared some information about his business dealings,” Liam said. “It seems our fine, upstanding Mandel Pack Leader was working with the mob, so hiring out a couple of human thugs to make a few hits wouldn’t be as hard for him as your everyday citizen.”
“Are you sure there is really a mob?” Scout asked, not for the first time. The first time had been when Imogen came to find her and tearfully explained about the way her father managed to turn the Mandel Pack from one of the poorest packs in the country to one of the richest in less than a decade. Scout didn’t have trouble believing Mandel was a ruthless bastard, but she was so unconvinced mobs were an actual thing in the real world she made Talley use her Seer abilities to confirm what Imogen was saying. “I thought mobsters only existed in the 1930s and had names like Babyface and Big Ugly. They ran booze and flirted with flappers. Now you can get booze at Wal-Mart and I haven’t seen a flapper outside of Halloween in my life.”
Liam looked down at her. “Haven’t you ever watched The Sopranos?”
“No,” Scout said, “but don’t even try to convince me I should use HBO as evidence something exists unless you’re willing to argue that Bon Temps, Louisiana, is overrun by hot vampires and the Stark family is out there somewhere preparing for winter.”
A smile teased the edges of Liam’s lips a
nd a burst of warmth blazed through their mating bond.
My Liam. My mate.
“What was that all about?” she whispered.
His finger trailed down her nose and then lightly tapped the tip. “You make me happy,” he said.
Thankfully, Jase interrupted that revelation with a muttered curse word. Otherwise she might have done something truly embarrassing, like throw herself into her mate’s arms and cry like a baby.
“What is it?” Liam asked Jase, not taking his eyes off of Scout’s. She imagined he was entranced by the little animated fireworks exploding there.
“I’ve got something.” Jase was standing on the passenger’s side of the Humvee, looking through the open door, his temper flaring.
Don’t let it be a dead body. Don’t let it be a dead body. Please, God, don’t let it be another dead body.
If she would have been thinking, she would have realized she hadn’t smelled a corpse, but she was too freaked out to be thinking, so it was with great relief she stood in the doorway and saw nothing more than a leather seat which would need to be replaced.
“Oh, look,” she said. “Someone engraved my name on the seat. How lovely.”
Not that she really tolerated being called a bitch, but since she was part canine, she figured she couldn’t get too upset over it.
“That wasn’t meant for you.” Charlie shouldered past her. The muscles in his jaws flexed with barely contained rage as he took in the slashed upholstery. “You’ve ridden in this vehicle, what? Three times in the past six months?”
“If not me, then…” It took a second, but then she understood. “Maggie. You think this is for Maggie.”
“I think whoever is doing this is gunning for her. Someone purposefully ruined all of the pieces she’d been working on this week, and now this.”
“But why would Mandel care about Maggie?” Jase asked. “I mean, it’s our guts he hates for dragging his daughter out of the closet in public and then releasing her from his pack, right? What does Maggie have to do with anything? She’s just a cute, hippy-dippy art chick. She’s about as offensive as sunshine and butterflies.”
Fragile Brilliance (Shifters & Seers) Page 16