I handed Jenks a chunk as big as his head. “Soon as I check in with the coven, I’ll have Al pop you up there,” I said around my full mouth. “QED.”
The noise that came out of Trent was sort of a strangled cough of out-rage caught in a steel trap of fury. I turned from Jenks, who was saluting me with his brownie, to Trent, now staring at me. “Want any of this?” I asked, holding my brownie higher in explanation.
“You could have jumped me there at any time?” Trent said hotly.
“Yeah,” Jenks said, voice muffled from the brownie. “You just click your heels and think there’s no place like being pwned.”
Trent clenched his jaw and corrected for the truck we were barreling toward. “Rachel,” he said, that one word holding an entire argument. He was pissed, his grip tight on the wheel. Our speed, too, had gone up by about fifteen miles per hour.
“No, I can’t do it at any time I want,” I said with a huge grin, lips closed so I didn’t look like a goober with brownie in my teeth. “The magic doesn’t work until you learn a life lesson,” I teased. “Wasn’t it fun, though? Only two hundred miles left. We can do that on our heads! Unless it violates your elf quest? I mean, if I’m your sword, your shield, and your mirror, then it’s fair if I’m the one who gets you there, right?”
There was a snuffle from the back. Clearly Ivy was still awake, but I think that had slipped Trent’s notice. “Two thousand miles, Rachel,” he said tightly, and I guessed that no, it didn’t violate the rules of whatever he was doing out here, because he sure wasn’t out here keeping the coven from attacking me. “I have eaten nothing but slop for two days and used facilities I wouldn’t let my dogs urinate in. And what about that couple in the RV outside Texas? I’ll never get that memory out of my head.”
I nodded, working the brownie out of my teeth. “I could’ve done without that visual myself.”
“I could have done without the entire trip,” Trent grumbled, but his anger was slowing as he realized he was going to be in Seattle in a matter of hours.
I tucked my foot under me and turned to him. “You want me to work with you, right?” I said as I crumpled up the cellophane and tossed it into the bag. “Consider the trip your interview.”
Jenks choked on his brownie, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind, red faced as he alternated his attention between me and someone in the back, probably Ivy. I shifted my lips in a soft grimace at the pixy. What was I going to do here, realistically? Either I cozied up really close to Trent to get him to say the right things at the meeting in two days, or I wound up first in Alcatraz, then the ever-after when I admitted I’d lost my bet with Al and fled to his protection. Some choice, but really, Trent was the better of the two. Even if he had let Ku’Sox out of his box. Stupid elf.
Trent made a huff of noise. “You were interviewing me.
I stifled a shiver. “Maybe.” I could feel Ivy staring at the back of my head. It almost hurt.
His lips turning up, Trent smiled at the road, his expression becoming one of confidence and satisfaction. Not surprised, I collapsed in on myself and rolled my eyes. He was going to milk this forever. “So you’re saying you might work with me?” he asked, apparently needing to hear it. The tone of the engine dropped, and for the first time since leaving Las Vegas, the speedometer dropped into double digits. “How did I do?” Trent asked, a smile in his voice. “On my
Damn it, he was laughing at me, but a knot had loosened in my gut. I might work with him. I’d said it— admitted it to myself. I wasn’t going to sign his paper—become his witch—but a job…I might do a job. I was going to need something while I earned the trust of Cincinnati back and the work trickled in. “You’re not much of a team player,” I said as I scraped the last of the sticky cake off my fingertips with a napkin so stiff it was nearly useless. “Inclined to take on too much and not let other team members know what you’re doing, which causes problems that could easily have been avoided.”
Trent’s entire demeanor had changed. Relaxed, he let one hand fall to his lap and drove with the other. It just about pegged my attraction meter, but I frowned when he said, “Sounds like you.”
“But on the whole, a good risk,” I added sourly. “If the benefits were there. And I felt like it.”
Jenks dropped down to his ashtray, burying himself under a tissue and a doughnut napkin. “All this good feeling is making me sick,” he said, hidden away. We had the mountains to get through. It was going to be a rough couple of hours.
“I can’t believe you let me sweat over this. Rachel, I ate fast food,” Trent complained.
“And tomatoes in public,” I said, remembering the soup. “It felt good, didn’t it? Not hiding what you are?”
A slow smile came over him, hard to see in the dim light. “It did,” he said so softly I might have missed it if I hadn’t known it was coming.
“And you got to see the Petrified Forest,” I added.
From the ashtray came Jenks’s voice saying, “And pixies being eaten alive.”
“Totally his fault,” I said, and Jenks poked his head out, not looking that good. “And you got a vacation,” I offered, my own mood brightening. It had been a long, tiring run out here, and I’d be glad to see it done.
Jenks laughed, sounding like wind chimes in the snow. “Vacation. The Tink-blasted arch fell on him.”
“Again, his own fault,” I said, blinking innocently at Trent. “Gee, Trent. Maybe we should have left you at home after all.”
Trent said nothing, his gaze fixed on the road stretching out before us, and I fiddled with the heat until it blasted out to warm Jenks. “I think you enjoyed this,” I said, and Trent looked askance at me, appearing charmingly irate. “You had the chance to see what it was like to be in a family,” I added, and his eye stopped twitching.
“And to answer your question, yes, it was exactly like being in a family,” I said as I leaned to dig out one of Ivy’s bottled waters from the bag at my feet. I’d rather have had a coffee, but I knew he wouldn’t stop. “And really, I couldn’t just pop you there whenever I felt like it,” I said as I opened it. “Al owes me big. He wouldn’t have done it before.”
Silent, Trent shifted in his seat as he angled the vents away from himself. Sighing, I looked in the back at Vivian, slumped between my vampire roommate and my black-magic-using, shunned, demon-familiar beau whom I didn’t trust.
All the black magic that I’d done in front of Vivian—asked her to help with; maybe now that she’d seen what they faced if they ignored the coming problem with the demons, they might think more kindly of me. Maybe having Ku’Sox attack us would help my case. Would they really try to kill me if there were worse uglies out there, uglies they couldn’t handle? People had died in the last few days, but not because of my magic, and more would have died if I had feigned ignorance and let Ku’Sox do whatever the hell he wanted.
“You sure you know what you’re doing, Trent?” I whispered, hoping he knew I was talking about Ku’Sox, and his fingers stiffened slightly. “I won’t say it’s not like you, because using dangerous things like they’re flash paper has you written all over it, but do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Jenks was basking in the new warmth, but his eyes flicked from mine to Trent.
“Is it Ceri?” I guessed. “Are you trying to impress her? Be the elf she thinks you should be?”
Lips twitching, Trent ran a hand over his head to get his vent-blown hair to lay flat. It was one of his tells, and he caught himself, lowering his hand to grip the wheel. “I have my reasons,” he said simply.
“Yeah, because you don’t trust me to keep you alive.” I set the bottle in the cup holder and put my boots on the dash, knees bent as I tried to find a comfortable position.
“Trust has nothing to do with it,” Trent said as he glanced at my boots, and Jenks made a rude noise. “I trust you, Rachel. I never would have left Cincinnati if I didn’t. I trust you, though you’re quick tempered and jump to conclusions too fast. God knows why.”
My brow smoothed out, and I took my feet down. “Really?”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “It’s important to you, isn’t it?”
I looked out at the world starting to go from black to gray. “Yes, it is. No one likes to be given a compliment, then find out it’s fake.”
A small noise came from Trent, and he frowned. “I never thought of it like that. Sorry.”
“Tink’s a Disney whore,” Jenks swore from the ashtray. “Did he just say he was sorry?”
Trent glanced at him in irritation, but I was grinning. “Shhhh, don’t ruin the moment, Jenks,” I said. “It might never come again.”
