obviously, I did. I couldn’t bear to consider what she might be suffering; I had to focus on the here and now. After tucking my cell phone in my pocket, I got a backpack and started filling it with provisions for a road trip. When Chance arrived a little later, I was still at it. Tia must have let him in; I didn’t hear the bell, but my room had thick walls and was near the back of the house. So, not surprising.
He tapped on the door and then came in before I answered. Because he knew me so well, he took one look, drew me against him, and said, “Tell me.”
It felt good to be in his arms, familiar, even with the differences. I was slimmer than I had been at any point in our relationship. Rubbing my cheek against the smooth fabric of his shirt, I explained the situation succinctly. He let go of me then, but not in rejection. He picked up the note to examine it, and studied the writing.
“So you think demons have Shannon?”
“The spell suggested as much. Certainly they’re involved on some level.”
“What do they mean, ‘claim the crown’?”
He knew I’d handled my business with Montoya, but he didn’t know the particulars. And this wasn’t the time to tell him.
“I’m not sure,” I prevaricated. “But I
Chance nodded. “Let me get my laptop. I’ll input the coordinates and figure out where we’re going. It’s a good thing the shop isn’t finished yet.”
Gratitude warmed my smile by ten degrees. I wasn’t ready to sleep with him, or move in with him, but I remembered why I’d been with him in the first place, before everything went wrong. Maybe second chances made more sense than I thought. By and large, I’d thought that if something failed, it was best to put it in the rearview mirror and try not to think about it. I cut ties like a professional swordsman, and only Chance refused to let me go. Maybe that meant something after all.
He dropped a quick kiss on my upturned mouth and then loped off. His smooth grace captured my eye, as it ever had, and I finished packing while waiting for him to return. Twenty minutes later, he was back in my room, laptop in hand. Tia didn’t have Internet, so he had a USB wireless card, convenient for travel. Chance took the note and brought up a program. A few keystrokes and clicks later, he had a map on the screen.
“They want you in the Sierra de Juárez in Oaxaca.”
I studied the topography. “That’s about five hundred miles southeast of here.”
“I could drive that in less than eight hours,” he said confidently.
While I had the utmost confidence in Chance’s maniacal skill behind the wheel, the roads might not be good enough to support the speed he preferred. I said so politely, and he laughed.
“Don’t worry. I won’t get you killed.”
“I wasn’t worried about that at all.”
At least not since I started getting regular cleansings. It wasn’t a perfect solution to his infernal luck, but as long as I had the bad karma scraped off on a regular basis, we rubbed along well. Tia was happy to do it, if I bought the eggs. Maybe one day we’d figure out a permanent fix, but until then, this kept me alive. Chance’s unique ability gave him the best possible luck in all circumstances, but since the universe liked to keep things in balance, the person closest to him got whacked with the most terrible shit imaginable. He could use it in the most interesting ways, dowsing for the sense of what direction would solve any given problem. It reminded me of focused coincidence; Chance’s luck could make the most improbable factors come into alignment.
“If the roads get bad, I’ll slow down,” he promised. “Chuch would kill me if I broke the Mustang’s axle.”
“Where we’re going, we might need a truck or an SUV.”
“It’s remote, I take it?”
“Incredibly.”
“Is the El Camino reliable enough?” He didn’t love the idea of driving my car, but it made more sense for a trip like this.
“I had a friend go over it after we got home. It doesn’t look fabulous, but he’s got it running like a Swiss watch.”
“He?” His brow rose.
Surely Chance wasn’t jealous of my mechanic friend. But I could tell by his steady look, he really wanted to know who I had fixing my ride. My nights since we got home had belonged to him. Apart from the errands I ran during the day and my studies with Tia, there hadn’t been time to date anyone else.
“Julio lives four blocks over. He’s fifty years old, married, and has four kids.”
His expression eased from tension to sheepish relief, and he lifted his shoulders in a half shrug. “It’s like you said in Laredo…I don’t know you that well anymore. I don’t know your friends. I want to, but you’re different that way too. You don’t share like you did.”
Yeah, I’d learned to be closed, self-contained—and the irony of that? I’d gotten those tendencies from him. Now it felt oddly like he was an open book, and I had figured out how to hide the lines that revealed everything about me.
“I got good at being alone,” I said softly. In the old days, I’d have called him first thing instead of packing a bag on my own, ready to handle whatever came my way without asking for help.
“I know.” Awkward silence.
He needed me to make a move. So I added, “But I’m remembering how to be half of a couple. I thought we were doing all right.”
He’d promised to tell me about his dead ex. Maybe this road trip would be a good time for that. Since our return, we’d danced around the edges of intimacy, two steps forward, one step back, a particularly self-conscious waltz.
So far, Chance wasn’t rushing me. He didn’t push for sex or commitment. Emotionally, he was more accessible than he had been when we were together. From the vantage point of hindsight, I suspected he shouldn’t have been with me so soon after Lily died. I’d been a light against the loneliness, a body in the dark, and our jobs kept him from having to think or grieve or heal. But I hadn’t known about her. Or his loss.
If I’d had more experience with relationships, I’d have known something was wrong sooner. Before Chance, I had only hookups, nothing real. I hadn’t understood how it should be, and I’d so desperately wanted it to work, had needed him to love me, that I hadn’t seen the problems staring me in the face. I don’t think he loved me at all in the beginning; maybe he did in the end, or he realized how he felt too late, after I’d gone. Now, I
For him to be willing to dodge out on a rescue mission at the drop of a hat, no questions asked? That boded well for our future together.
“Tia,” I called.
“Is Chance staying for dinner?” she yelled back in Spanish.
“No. Neither am I.” I went into the kitchen, and in a few words summarized where I was going and why.
She listened with no judgment, and then she shuffled into her bedroom. I was used to her ways, so I waited. When she returned, she had a charm bracelet in one hand. It was dull and tarnished, didn’t look special at all, but when she wrapped it around my wrist to fasten it, I felt the thrum of magick emanating from the trinket.
“It is the best charm I ever made,” she said softly. “Wear it well.”
“I can’t take this. You could sell it at the market—”
“Corine.” Her tone was dangerous, and though she came only to my shoulder, I knew not to cross her.
So I yielded gracefully, thanked and hugged her. Chance joined us with my things in his hand. In short order, he stowed my backpack in the El Camino parked in front while I prepped Butch for travel. Most dogs would be excited at the prospect of a road trip, but this Chihuahua was not a normal animal; he’d saved my life more than once with his warnings. He whined his misgivings at me, and he tried to tell Tia that this trip was a bad, bad idea, but she only laughed and scratched behind his ears. With a final whine, Butch settled in my purse, heaving a despondent doggy sigh. It was funny how well he could express his thoughts, even without Scrabble tiles. I had packed those too. Just in case. I had been astonished to learn he could use the letters to communicate with me when the matter was too crucial to trust simple yes/no questions.
“Let me cleanse you,” Tia said.
Though I’d had a cleansing the previous week, it was a good safety precaution, as I didn’t know how long I’d
