by Holley Trent
“Nice logic, kid. I’m so glad you’re smarter than your mother. She’s really one notch above the evolutionary cut-off.”
John rolled his eyes and piled some snack cakes into Gulielmus’s arms. He scanned the room and found Ariel pointing out some menu items to the clerk behind the hot food counter. He had a couple minutes, at least.
“It’s not about what you are. It’s about how much power you have, and kid? You have a lot. I didn’t know how much until I talked to your lush brother.”
John ground his teeth. Traitor.
“He was drunk off his ass, muttering about how much he hated life. Fell asleep in his own vomit again. That guy could command legions, and what does he do? Passes out and pisses himself nearly every night. I zapped a bit of sobriety into him and he said he’d relayed my message to you.”
“Yep.” John picked up a hand basket and relocated all the snacks from Gulielmus’s arms to the carrier. Still, he followed. John wondered if there were any pocket bibles available for sale. Maybe near the motor oil and antifreeze. He scanned the aisles in search of them.
“Said you shocked him.”
“Big deal.” Skittles. Is that what she eats? He picked up a large bag and tossed them into the basket. “So what? There was a little tingle.”
“You kids don’t really swap juice like that unless the energy is compatible. It’s like a circuit trying to complete during a handshake.”
“And?”
“And — ” Gulielmus stilled him by pressing his palms against John’s chest. “If the drunkard can sire a child with some demon juice, so can you.”
John suddenly felt like that breakfast burrito had been a bad move. He hadn’t really considered the genetics. But then again, up until a couple of days ago, he hadn’t thought he wanted kids at all. To him, it seemed logical that by the time you got to the second generation removed from the power source, there wouldn’t be anything left. It wasn’t like plugging an extension cord into another extension cord. It was more like getting to the bottom of a jug of fruit punch and filling it to the top with water. There’d still be some flavor in there, but minimal. And when that got drank down to the last inch and more water was added, you might as well not count the fruit punch composition. It’d be too concentrated to consider.
What Gulielmus was saying, however, was that he was the lucky recipient of some crazy-ass demonic recessive gene shit.
Yay.
“Move on, Hitch,” Gulielmus said, thumping his son on the back. “I’m sure it’s a very noble thing for you to be so persistent, but this business is about productivity. More and more babies are born every day, so you got to play catch-up with all the adults. Are you savvy?”
“Yeah. Savvy as hell.”
“Cute pun. I’ll check in later. Ditch the brunette. Maybe find a redhead to screw. They’re evil. You won’t care so much about their souls … I’m still not convinced they have any.” The pocket-sized demon walked around the aisle’s end cap in his designer duds, and probably escaped into the bathroom to disappear.
John joined Ariel at the cash register with his basket of junk. She carried a couple of wrapped submarine sandwiches and brandished them at him like fencing foils.
“You’re gonna love it,” she said. “Salami and provolone with tomato and lettuce on toasted bread.”
“That does sound good.”
“I wouldn’t steer you wrong, Johnny.”
Gulielmus probably wouldn’t agree.
• • •
“You are so evil for not stopping in Nashville for us poke around, and now you’re not even gonna let me explore Knoxville?” John said the next morning as he laced up his boots.
Ariel narrowed her eyes at him. “There might have been some time for exploring this morning if you hadn’t gotten so distracted.”
Distracted was an understatement. When the alarm clock went off, he’d reached across her body, slapped it until the incessant buzzing ceased, then pinned her shoulders to the mattress. She’d ended up with her ankles around his neck and they’d almost missed breakfast.
“Come on, sweetpea. When are you ever going to come this way again, huh?”
She laughed. “I’m a state away from home now. I can come whenever I want.” Her cheeks burned when she heard her own unintentional double-entendre. Yeah, with him around, she sure could. “Assuming I have the vacation time. I’m more likely to go somewhere tropical. Somewhere with soft sand and cheap alcohol.” And water as blue as your eyes.
“Well, if you insist on rushing … ” He put his hands up in a defeatist gesture.
She stopped packing her toiletry bag long enough to really think about it. She’d be home with another eight hours of driving. Eight measly little hours. If she drove straight through, that’d put her arrival at her grandmother’s house at around five. If they dallied a bit, had a leisurely lunch? Maybe seven.
Then what? Drop John off at the closest Walmart and wave goodbye? See you later, sucker? Thanks for the dick?
No. She couldn’t just …
She zipped her bag and planted her fists on her hips. “Do you have plan, John? Where’s the construction work you have waiting?”
His fingers paused over his laces a moment, then resumed their knotting. “Myrtle Beach, I think they said. I need to call and see where, exactly.”
She perked up. “Oh! Well, that’s not too far a drive from us. Maybe I could take you.” A few hours’ drive was nothing, in the scheme of things. She’d just driven days. If he was going to be so close, there was no reason they couldn’t date or … maybe more, if he was open to it.
“That’d be nice of you.” He cast that bright gaze up to her and grinned. “You’ve been doing a lot of driving for me the past few days, though. You’re gonna have to let me make it up to you when I get settled in someplace.”
She pulled up her suitcase’s handle and dragged the bag to the door. “What’d you have in mind?”
“I dunno.” He stood and hiked his bag onto his shoulder. “Maybe I’ll hogtie you and force you to go sightseeing since you hate it so much.”
“You’re right. I do hate it. In all that time I lived in California, I never really got much further than the shopping mall. Visited wine country a couple of times for some campaigns I was working on and had to make a bunch of trips to San Francisco for … well, damn. Everywhere I went, pretty much, had to do with work.”
She hadn’t realized that until then. How had that become her life? Back in college, she’d been so outgoing and eager to socialize. She and her sorority sisters went out and explored all the time. They’d take daytrips from the university in Greenville and visit all kinds of sites, sometimes just for the food. Once, they’d driven all the way to Chapel Hill just to try the hushpuppies at a restaurant they’d seen profiled on Food Network.
She didn’t have that kind of peers in Los Angeles. Hell, she wasn’t sure if she had any real friends at all. So many of the women at the agency shunned her once she started dating her ex. Maybe if she’d had some friends, she wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to leave. It was good reminder for her to reach out to some of her old sorority sisters when she got home. See if they were still around.
“Your expression went really serious all of a sudden. What’s wrong?” Hitch asked.
“Nothing. Just … thinking too hard. Hoping my homecoming isn’t one big cannonball.”
“You’ll be great. You have pie to look forward to, right?”
Her eyes went wide and she thumped the steering wheel. “God bless that memory of yours. I did tell my grandmother I’d get her pie stuff when we got near.”
“What are you in the mood for?”
“Honestly? Blueberries. We’ll have to see if we can find any this late in the summer. Usually by now, the vines start to dry out. Wouldn’t do to take her fro
zen fruit.”
“I guess not.”
John didn’t even bother to ask her to slow down. The most he could do was keep his eyes on the rearview mirror and warn her about any approaching cops, but there hadn’t been any. They were approaching Asheville when he looked up from his phone and said, hey, “Can you do me a big favor? I know you hate to stop, but I have a brother nearby. Mind if I say hello?”
She cocked a warning brow up at him. “Will you be fast?”
He put a hand over his heart. “I swear it.”
Half an hour later, she parked her car in front of a small coffee house and unbuckled her seatbelt while John scanned the lot.
He seemed to be stalling.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing, I just … I don’t know what he’s driving. He might be in there already.”
“Well, let’s go. I wonder if this’ll be my last cup of coffee of the drive.”
“I doubt it.” John perked up suddenly and hurriedly unclipped his seatbelt. “Hey, you go on inside. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“What’s wrong? Don’t want to explain to your brother how you got here?”
“Nah, he knows I hitchhike. He just likes pretty girls a lot, and I don’t want him getting any ideas.”
“Uh huh.” Bullshit. Still, she locked up and watched him walked toward a caramel-colored man leaning against a battered old Jeep. Must be a half-sibling, she thought as she stepped into the shop. With the strange way he’d grown up, he probably had siblings of every stripe.
Chapter Eleven
“You look like him,” Claude said, opening the driver’s door of his Jeep and bobbing his head toward the other side. “Even more than Charles.”
John took the cue and walked around. He climbed in and endured his brother’s scrutiny.
Claude looked around thirty. He was tall and thin, with short-cropped black hair, tanned skin that’d come naturally, and eyes some shade between Gulielmus’s blue and … red? They seemed to shift as he turned his head.
Claude laughed, obviously understanding the source of John’s discomfort. “My mother dabbled in the black arts. I was born cursed. Doubly so.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“It is what it is. You let your woman go in there alone?”
John shrugged. “Why not?”
“Papa may not be everywhere at once, but he gets around. Let him think you’ve become too attached and he’ll swoop in and do the job for you.”
“Ariel wouldn’t — ”
“Sure, in most circumstances, she probably wouldn’t. I saw the way she watched you walk away. That wasn’t like a woman looking after some stranger. That’s a woman who wants to get her claws into you.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
Claude put his hands up. “Bad. Good. Not for me to judge. I’m just saying, he did it to me once. It was around the war. I took too long with this beautiful Haitian and he cracked the whip. I never made that mistake again.”
“But was it a mistake? Really?”
“How would I know? I’ve been like this — ” Claude held up his left palm and on command, it seemed, some archaic hieroglyph glowed as blue as his eyes at the moment. “ — since I was a child. He claimed me when I was a baby. My mother could summon him, you know? And he’d appear. He did what she wanted, because a woman who had that kind of control over a man is a terrifying thing. A woman like that could lead you to your death.”
His gaze indicated he didn’t only mean his mother.
“Ariel’s not like that.”
“If you say so. I don’t know much about love,” Claude mused, closing his hand into a fist and pulling it to his lap. “Some people say I’m not capable of feelings at all. I am. I just choose to guard them.”
What a terrible way to live life — feeling nothing. John shifted in his seat and cut his gaze to the coffee shop window. Ariel was still in line. Looked like she’d be a while.
“How do I get rid of this thing?”
Claude held out his hand and made a give-it-here gesture.
John placed his left hand in it, palm up.
Claude stared.
“Well?”
Claude shook his head and dropped the hand. “It’s not the same. That one’s quite different from the rest I’ve seen. The girls — theirs are a little different, of course, just being female, but this … I don’t understand it.”
“Why would mine be different? What would that serve?”
“I don’t know. I don’t pretend to understand why a demon does what a demon does. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t take, or maybe you were harder to mark.”
“Why would I be harder?”
“There are a lot of reasons. Genetics. Surroundings. Who knows? Hold it up again and I’ll take a picture. See what I can find out.”
John held up his palm as if to wave. “How exactly does a person become equipped to research such a thing?”
“My maman left me her books. I do a bit of practicing on my own.”
John’s expression must have been very telling, because Claude laughed and put down his phone. “Nothing too dark, baby brother. I’ve got a black enough soul as it is to accept money for that kind of thing. My day job doesn’t pay so well, so I freelance.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to see how that would be a necessity.”
John put his hand on the door handle and prepared to pull. “Well, thanks anyway. Let me know what you find out and whether it’s not too late to reverse it.”
“I’ll do you one better,” Claude said. “I’ll come to you when I find out. I like you.”
“Thanks?”
Claude laughed again and slapped him on the back. “I’ve lost count of how many of us there are. Most go rotten the moment they get their marks. A few try to hold on to some fragment of their humanity, even if it drives them insane.”
“Like Charles?”
“I keep an eye on him like I’ll keep an eye on you. Maybe one of us will get lucky and find some balance one day.”
Luck. Luck would have been his mother never taking her cross off. But then, he wouldn’t have been born.
“Is there any way to … shut off the … ” John waved his hand in a waffling motion.
Claude raised a brow. “You mean, during sex? No. Be happy it’s not on all the time, little brother. That’s why Charles drinks. It’s always there for him. He risks affecting every person he touches from bartender to barber. It’s a hell of a way to live.”
To John, it didn’t sound much like living at all.
• • •
Around five o’clock, Ariel received a fresh jolt of energy as she pulled her car onto the shoulder at a roadside stand just outside of Garner. John, for the first time all trip, had fallen asleep while she drove. He’d been oddly quiet since they’d left Asheville, responding to her questions with not much more than a nod and an mm-hmm, but never being outright rude. He’d stopped responding at all at some point on the I-440 beltline. She figured he was just tired. The riding had to be just as grueling as being behind the wheel. Even if the scenery had improved, their accommodations hadn’t. She looked forward to sleeping in her old bed after so long and letting her grandmother spoil her.
But, then there was the matter of John. What lie would she tell? She couldn’t just drop him off at some sleazy motel — not after they’d come this far.
She got out of the car and bumped the door closed without latching it all the way. She didn’t want to wake John.
She waved to the vendor who’d started packing up her wares for the day, probably to head down the long path to the farmhouse. The table — a couple of long wooden planks propped up on milk crates and shielded by a beach umbrella propped into a stand — bore a variety of late-summer fruits and vegeta
bles.
“All organic,” the woman said. “I grew it myself. My own garden.”
“The beans look great, but I’m really looking for something to fill a pie.”
The woman held up a finger and said, “Be right back.” She shuffled to her pick-up truck and leaned over the back gate, reaching for something. With a grunt, she heaved out a half-bushel of peaches.
Ariel heard herself squeal.
“Some of them are kind of bruised. I picked them this morning, and a few were on the ground, but they just fell overnight. I hate to charge full price for ’em.”
“They’re perfect. My grandmother used to have a peach tree until it got struck by lightning. Planted a new one but it hasn’t started bearing fruit yet.”
“Oh, honey, you take ’em, then.”
“No, I can’t just — ”
The woman waved a hand, dismissing her. “Take ’em. I done lost two trees that way myself. Give your granny my regards.”
“I will. Thank you.”
The woman nodded, and Ariel carried the peaches to car, wondering where the hell she’d put them. The back seat was piled high. The trunk was out of the question. The front seat was occupied.
Sheepishly, she walked around the car and tapped on John’s window with her fingertips.
His eyes opened slowly, focusing on her, and he sat up quickly and shouldered the door open. “Give them here.” He scooped the basket by the bottom and wedged it between his long legs onto the floorboard.
Back inside the car, she waved goodbye to the peach lady and eased back onto the road.
“Peaches, huh?” he said, a grin stretching his cheeks for the first time in hours.
“I’m feeling pretty darn lucky. I bet she’ll get a bunch of pies out of that. If I weren’t her only grandchild, I’d certainly be her new favorite.”
“I’m sure you’d be her favorite even without the peaches.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Think about it, Ariel. I bet she’s proud.”
She looked out her window at the countryside passing by. It was so good to be home. She’d never been so happy to see miles upon miles of cornfields and pine forests. A cardinal had even swooped down in front of her car, pivoting upwards again before she got too near. It was like an omen — “Honey, you’re back where you belong. You shouldn’t have left.” She never knew how much she’d miss a silly bird until she realized there were no cardinals in California.