"Like I said, leave," he said. "Or join the Ma'at. They can protect you." The Ma'at were his own creation, a kind of low-wattage version of the Wardens-there weren't any true powers in it, except for Lewis himself, and one or two others. Its strength had to do with its ability to negate power, not generate it. It was designed to restore balances that the Wardens-wittingly or unwittingly-had knocked out of whack.
Useful suggestions. However, I wasn't generally fond of them, either. Wardens, Ma'at... none of them had gone out of their way to make sure I was taken care of, in the end.
Everybody had their own agendas. I'd quit because I was sick of being at the mercy of everyone else's priorities but my own.
Speaking of that, Lewis was right. I should just go my own way. I should toss stuff in a suitcase, leave Sarah the keys to the apartment, and head out of town, David in the passenger seat and the road in front of me. But God, how long had I been doing that? Since the night that Bad Bob and I had fought, and I'd started running, I hadn't had a home or a place in the world, and I was tired. I wanted... I wanted to rest.
I wanted to belong again, and to be part of the world.
"I'm staying," I said softly. "I'll be careful, okay? But I'm staying. I don't want to live like that for the rest of my life, looking over my shoulder."
Lewis reached out and took my hand in his. Big hands, scarred and a little rough in places. Strong fingers and a tight grip. "I'm your friend," he said. "I'll do what I can for you, you know that. But Jo, if it comes down to it, you have to be prepared to run. I don't want to see you destroyed, but I don't want to have to choose which side I'm on."
I leaned forward and put a kiss on his forehead. "You won't have to." He was still holding my hand. His grip tightened, just a bit, and I felt that power humming between us again. We had a kind of complementary vibration to our talents, something that built in waves. Powerful. Dangerous. Kind of sexy, too.
It had always drawn us together, and at the same time, driven us apart. We'd had exactly one truly intimate encounter, and that had been pretty much earth-shattering, in a literal sense.
Lewis wasn't a safe date, even if my heart didn't already belong to David.
Sarah knocked on the bedroom door. "Hey! Don't do anything I wouldn't do in there!" she yelled. "And the tomatoes and onions are chopped already. Do you want me to brown the meat?"
"Yes!" I yelled back, and rolled my eyes as I stepped back.
Lewis let go of my hand, stood up, and said, "You know, your sister reminds me a lot of you."
I gave him a dirty look.
"What?"
"Nothing."
I opened the bedroom door and went out to help make dinner.
It turned out to be okay, really. Lewis was pleasant company, Sarah more or less behaved herself, apart from grilling him mercilessly about the nature of my relationship with him, and going on and on about David, whom she hadn't actually met, which sort of set my teeth on edge.
Lewis kissed me good night chastely on the cheek and strolled off into the night air, hands in his pockets, looking as if he might be planning on kicking back at the beach and doing nothing much. In reality, he was probably off to save the world. That was Lewis. False advertising in battered hiking boots. I wondered what Rahel and the Ma'at were up to.
Decided firmly that it was none of my business.
Sarah didn't do dishes. Apparently they didn't teach that particular skill in snobby culinary classes for bored, rich housewives. I did the dirty work and got to bed at about my normal time, set the alarm, and settled in for a short night's sleep. I tossed and turned and missed David, missed him a lot. Hugged my pillow. Reached in the drawer, took out his bottle, and ran slow fingers over it.
But I didn't call him back, and in the end I fell asleep touching the cool glass, imagining he could feel my hands on him.
Which led to a very nice dream. Which was cut short by the ringing of the telephone. I rolled over in bed, flailing, knocking over small, knockable things-luckily not the bottle still lying on the sheets next to me-and squinted at the red digital numbers on the bedside clock after combing the mess of tangled hair out of my eyes.
Three thirty in the morning.
It took six rings to remember where the phone was and fumble it to my ear; when I finally did, I heard a conversation already in progress.
"... a good day, then?" A velvety-smooth British voice, spiced with a lilt. Liquid and fast and a little spiked with adrenaline. "Sorry to be calling so late. I promise not to call you at this ungodly hour again; I was just on the phone with New Zealand and I forgot what time it was here. Will you forgive me?"
It took my sleep-fuzzed brain a minute to figure out why that voice was familiar. Oh, yeah. Eamon. I started to tell him to call back at some hour when people were actually awake, but Sarah's voice interrupted me in midbreath.
She sounded languid and relaxed and very glad to hear from him. "No, not at all. I wasn't really asleep." Liar, liar, panties on fire.
My inner Miss Manners, who was barely awake and bitchy as hell, told me to hang up the phone before I heard something personal. Which I was going to do. Any second.
"Did you enjoy your day out with your sister?"
"Jo? Oh, yeah. She can be sweet, you know?" That was surprising. It threw me off track for a second, until she continued, "Well, when she wants to be. She's been a total bitch to me most of our lives, though."
Well, fine. Then I felt no guilt in listening, and besides, who the hell did Mr. Sexy English Guy think he was, calling up my sister at oh-dammit in the morning? I had to get up in an hour! And it was my apartment!
Miss Manners woke up a little more and reminded me that I'd be pretty damn pissed if she'd picked up the phone and listened in on, oh, say, me and David having intimate moments. I debated about it long enough to hear Eamon say, "No more trouble from the ex, though? Not got anyone else looking for you, has he?" He sounded genuinely concerned. "I just worry, you and your sister all alone. It's a dangerous town, for two beautiful women on their own."
Trouble? What trouble? There'd been trouble with Chretien? From the version Sarah had given me, the trouble had been with the lawyers. Nothing about physical danger.
But then Sarah sometimes omitted facts. Such as the initial significant detail about two-timing Chretien with his business partner. That hadn't exactly been up-front information.
"You're sweet," Sarah said, in that half-asleep, breathless tone. I heard sheets rustling. If I could hear them, Eamon was hearing it, too. Sarah always had known how to work the flirt better than anyone I'd ever met. "No, I think he's given that up. He just calls me, when he can find me. And says... cruel things."
"I'm sorry."
"At least he isn't actually doing the cruel things anymore. Just talking about them."
Chretien? Cruel? New idea to me. I mean, he'd always been shallow and supercilious; I just couldn't see him as abusive. And she'd have told me, right?
Even if I was a total bitch. My sister would have told me if she'd been married to someone who hurt her.
Right?
"Sarah, he has money and a grudge," Eamon said. "Bad combination. Does he know where you went?"
"He can guess. I haven't got a lot of family."
"Still worried, then?"
She sighed. "A little. About Jo. She's-she doesn't know when to quit, sometimes. I'm afraid if he does send someone, she might get hurt."
"It may sound forward, but... you know that you can call me. Any time. Day or night. I'll come right over," Eamon said, and it was delivered in a half whisper, low in his throat. And yeah, I had to admit, my instant answer might have been Oh, yes, please, come on over right now, baby. But that would have been my silent internal answer. Right before I calmly told him no, thank you, right out loud.
Right, I reminded myself from the lofty moral high ground. Because you've never done anything like that. Hell, I'd picked up David as a hitchhiker on the side of the road. The lofty moral high ground and I were the proverbial slippery slope.
Sarah gave a low-voiced laugh. "You're an awful flirt."
"Not at all," he said. "I'm an honorable man. I'd sleep on the couch, love. Completely platonic. Pure as the driven snow." His voice dropped even lower. "Sarah. I know all of this is really sudden-but I like you. And I want to get to know you better. I hope you don't think that's inappropriate."
"No."
"Good." I could almost hear the smile through the phone. "Then you don't mind if I call again? Or see you in person?"
"Not at all," she purred.
Not at all, I mocked silently, making a face at the phone. And held my breath as I slid it into the cradle and hung up, finally convinced that maybe I was a little out of line.
As I did, warm lips touched my shoulder, and David said, "What are you doing?"
I yelped-loudly-and twisted around in the sheets, ending up wrapped like a mummy, and saw him up on one elbow, stretched out in the moonlight. Gorgeous as a midnight dream, with those eyes burning like low-banked fire. "What are you doing?" I demanded breathlessly. "Hey! You should be-"
He put two fingers on my lips to hush me. "I should be here," he said, and replaced fingers with his mouth, a warm, liquidly intimate kiss that melted me into butter-warm contentment from the inside out. There was tongue, and hands sliding under the sheets, and oh my God, it was nice. My sleepy nerve endings came awake with an electric hum.
Outside, the rain was still falling, a steady whisper against the glass, and it reminded me that I had an hour before I had to shower and drive to the studio to be humiliated again by Marvelous Marvin and his horse's-ass predictions that seemed way too lucky to be true.
"I have to get up soon," I said, and worked my way down his bare chest with slow, damp circles of my lips and tongue, over the trembling, velvet-warm planes of his stomach...
I heard the breath come out of him in a slow, moaning rush.
"Then we should hurry," he whispered, and stroked the curls from my hair.
In the morning-well, the predawn darkness-the rain finally stopped just in time for me to pull into the parking lot. My carefully straightened hair looked glossy and gorgeous when I checked it in the mirror; I did makeup fast, forbade Genevieve to backcomb anything on me, and then got a look at the outfit she had hanging on the rack next to the door.
"You've got to be kidding," I said. She shrugged massive, muscular shoulders.
"Oh, God, I'll pay you money if you say you're kidding."
"You can't afford me, darling," she said, and lit up a Marlboro. There was no smoking in here. She never had cared. I held my breath and got out of the chair to take my costume off the hanger, and held it up to the light.
Apparently, Marvin's prediction was going to be sunny and warm. I was going to be wearing a huge, clownish, foam rubber yellow sun, with a hole cut in it just big enough for my face. Armholes and legholes, and yellow tights.
"No," I said. "I'm not wearing this. Tell Marvin-"
"Tell me what?" Marvin walked up and threw a heavy arm around my shoulders, leaned in, and looked down my shirt. He smelled like bad cologne and breath mints and a sour aftertaste of alcohol left over from the night before. His hair implants still looked like seedlings, but he'd cover them up with the toupee before going on the air, Visine the reddened eyes, and do a quick white-up on his teeth. Marvin knew television the way other, better meteorologists knew their way around a satellite graphic. "What's wrong? Don't like the outfit? Should have come to breakfast with me yesterday, heh heh."
I forced a smile and reminded myself that I needed a job, and this one paid better than working the register at the 7-Eleven, with a slightly smaller chance of being robbed. "I'd rather not wear it," I said. And tried to sound professional about it. "How about something else? Something less-"
"Kids love Sunny," he said, and squeezed the foam rubber, right about where my chest would be. "She's just so huggable. C'mon, Jo. Be a sport."
The jovial tone wasn't fooling me; his eyes were mean and bright, and he wasn't taking no for an answer. The news director, a harried young guy by the name of Michael, wasn't going to be taking any moral stand against foam rubber, and so far as I knew, there was no Weathergirl Union to protect me from this crime against fashion.
"Fine," I said, and forced a smile. "No problem."
He winked, swear to God. He did.
I had to sincerely fight the impulse to channel a lightning bolt.
The segment went about as badly as I could ever hope. My lines were stupid, the foam rubber sun suit was hot, Marvin was obnoxious, and Cherise was notoriously absent from the moral support trenches. They threw more water on me, this time to warn of some unusually big waves. One of the stagehands giggled.
As I was stripping off the sticky, sweaty tights, Genevieve took time off from her smoke break to toss me a towel and say, "You know, you're better than he deserves. You actually make him look good. Me, I'd forget my lines and throw up on him." She raised an overplucked eyebrow significantly and flicked her Bic on a fresh cancer stick.
I dropped the damp tights into the laundry basket-three points-and wriggled my toes in the ecstasy of freedom. "Would that work?" I asked.
"Sure," she said. "Worked for the last two girls. Well, okay, one of them went postal and beat him with a rubber fish. But actually, ratings went up, so maybe it's not such a good idea to go that direction, especially with the fish. Hey, you know what? Your hair looks good. You ought to take a beach day. It's supposed to be sunny."
We both laughed, and I smacked palms with her and left her to backcomb the noon anchorwoman into submission.
The weather was clearing in the east, but as I stood and felt the wind, I knew that it wouldn't stay that way; another wave of damp, cool air was moving in over the ocean, and the collision with the existing high-pressure system was going to drive more clouds. Rain today. Rain tomorrow, probably. Sunshine, my ass. Marvin had to be wrong, or else he had a Warden in his back pocket. But who? Not me, obviously. And since the local office here was run by John Foster, one of the few truly honest Wardens I'd ever known, I couldn't see it. But John had a flaw. He trusted people, until they let him down.
I wondered if I should start seriously looking around for the culprit. In self-defense.
You have power, I reminded myself. You can call storms and lightning and water. You can kick ass if necessary. Yeah, and get my ass dragged in for a magical lobotomy for my troubles. Not a good situation. I was too aware of what Lewis had said. I hadn't used my powers at all, and even so, the Wardens were turning against me. If I used them now, even in self-defense...
As I rounded the corner heading for my car, I spotted a depressingly familiar white van. It was sequined with leftover rain that glittered orange in the rising sun.
Dammit.
Rodriguez was sitting in the driver's seat, eating the last crumbs of a Danish.
He had a tiny little LCD television plugged into the lighter on the dashboard, tuned to WXTV. He'd been watching-and no doubt enjoying-my morning's humiliation as Sunny the Wonder Idiot.
Somehow, that didn't make me feel any better.
"Having a good time?" I asked him. He wiped Danish from his mouth with a napkin, licked his lips, and sipped coffee. "Because this is getting old. Go home. I can't tell you anything."
"Sure you can," he said. "Hop in. Explain to me how you knew Tommy Quinn, and what happened to him. Confession is good for the soul."
"This is a waste of time. Yours and mine both."
"Well, I'm on extended leave, so my time is my own," he said. "And about your time, I don't particularly give a shit. You are going to talk to me. Sooner or later."
I was tired, pissed off, and felt violated by the morning in general; nothing like being the foam rubber butt of bad jokes to put you in a great mood to start the day. But even more than that, I was just tired. I felt... heavy. Exhausted. Gray.
And maybe that was why I made the snap decision to shoot my mouth off.
"Fine," I snapped. "Thomas Quinn was not a nice man, and if he was your friend, I'm sorry, but believe me, you're better off without him. He'd have stuck a knife in your back in a second if he'd thought it was worth the trouble. And I don't mean figuratively."
Rodriguez had gone still and very, very cold, watching me. Cop-cold, with a human fury burning somewhere underneath.
"Tommy was a good man," he said with deliberate calm. "A good cop. Good husband, and a good father." The fury underneath burned its way to the surface. "I saw him pull a six-month-old baby out of a burning building and puke his guts out when it died in his arms. You don't know a fucking thing. He was a good man."
I remembered Quinn, all those facets and impressions I'd had of him. I'd liked him. I'd feared him. I'd hated him. I hadn't known him at all, and neither had Armando Rodriguez, regardless of what he might think. People like Quinn weren't really knowable. They never showed you their true faces.
"He was also a murderer and a torturer and a rapist," I said. "But you know, nobody's ever just one thing."
I was walking away, digging for my car keys, when Rodriguez said from behind me, "Hold up. You said was. Past tense."
I kept walking, cold settling in between my shoulder blades. I heard the creak of metal, heavy footsteps on wet pavement behind me, and I had time to think oh, shit just before he grabbed hold and shoved me forward into the wet, slick finish of the Viper's passenger-side door. The breath puffed out of me; partly shock, partly the impact, and before I could even think about resisting he had both my arms behind my back, gripped in one huge hand, and the other hand holding my head down, pressed painfully against the roof of the car. My hair had fallen in a black curtain over my face, and it puffed in and out with my fast, scared breathing. I was off balance and shocked and my arms felt like they were about to be ripped right out of my sockets.
I felt myself reflexively reach for the air and water around me, and forced myself to let go of it. I had bigger problems than Detective Rodriguez.
