Garrett said something, but I found myself drowning in the apprehension that saturated Reyes’s liquid brown eyes. It was almost as if I’d betrayed him somehow, stabbed a knife into his back. But hadn’t he just done that very thing to me? And besides, I rarely carried knives.
“How do you know that name?” he asked, his voice soft, dangerous, as if it were more a threat than a question.
I gathered all the bravery I could muster to answer him. “A friend told me,” I said, praying I wasn’t inadvertently putting Pari’s life at risk. “She said she summoned you when she was young, and you almost ripped her leg off.”
“Charley, I’m trying here, but maybe we could take this somewhere else.”
It was Garrett. He was apparently trying to intervene, to make it look like he and I were having a conversation instead of what it would look like to the casual observer, a psycho girl talking to air. For a split second I focused on my periphery, noticed the odd glance here and the frown of disapproval there. But for the most part, people ignored us. We were on Central in the middle of Albuquerque. It wasn’t like the natives hadn’t seen such behavior before.
When I felt two hands push me softly, leading me back against the brick wall of a sidewalk cafe, I refocused on the being in front of me. “Was that you?” I asked, returning to our conversation. “Did you hurt Pari?”
He braced both hands on the wall behind us and pressed his body against mine. That’s what he did. When threatened, when intimidated, he pushed. He shoved. And he chose his opponent’s weakest point. Went for the jugular every time. Used my attraction against me with the skill of an artist. It was fighting dirty, but I could hardly blame him. It was what he’d grown up with. It was all he knew.
“That was nothing,” he said, his tone deceptively calm, “compared to what I could have done.”
“You hurt her?” I asked again, unwilling to believe it.
“Perhaps, Dutch,” he said into my ear, as if anyone else could hear him anyway, “I don’t like being summoned.”
And just as his mouth came down upon mine, just as the tingling of his life force lifted me from my body to be enveloped in his warmth, he was gone. The chill of late October slammed into me and I sucked in an icy breath, coming to my senses instantly.
He had hurt Pari. I was just as shocked by that as the fact that he would threaten to hurt an innocent man, namely Garrett, who was in front of me at once, and I realized I had fallen into his arms. I clutched on to him just to be safe as he led me away from the curious onlookers.
“That was interesting.”
“I bet,” I said, trying my best to figure Reyes Farrow out. Was he angry that I knew his name? His real name? Why would knowing his name make any difference? Unless … maybe it gave me some kind of advantage. Maybe I could use it against him somehow.
“So, I take it he doesn’t want me looking for him?” Garrett said.
“To put it mildly.”
We walked around Calamity’s, my dad’s bar, to my apartment building behind it. I was still clutching on to Garrett’s arm, not quite trusting my legs yet, when we arrived at my second-floor apartment.
Garrett waited while I fished the keys out of my pocket. “I saw his picture,” he said, his voice suddenly grave.
I inserted the key and turned. “His mug shot?” I asked, assuming we were still on the subject of Reyes.
“Yes, and a couple other photographs.”
That made sense, since he was supposed to be on the lookout for him. “You coming in? I just need to change real quick.”
“Look, I get it,” he said, stepping in behind me and closing the door.
“You do? Well, thank goodness someone does.” I really didn’t want to talk about Reyes with him now, his spine being so unsevered and all. “There’s soda in the fridge.”
I tossed the keys onto the snack bar and headed for my bedroom. “Hey, Mr. Wong.”
“He’s attractive, right?”
I paused and turned back to him. “Mr. Wong?” I looked at my perpetual roommate, at his utter grayness as he stood in my living room corner. He’d been there since I rented the apartment, and since he did have seniority, I’d never had the heart to kick him out. Not that I’d know how. But I’d never actually seen his face. He hovered 24/7 with his back to me, his nose in the corner, his toes inches from the floor. He looked like a cross between a Chinese prisoner of war and an immigrant from the 1800s.
“Who’s Mr. Wong?” Garrett asked. They’d never been introduced. This was all very new to Swopes, and I figured I should bring him into the fold slowly, let him absorb the new information at a comprehensible rate and save all the bells and whistles for later. Then again, he’d asked to be brought in, insisted on it, so screw him.
“He’s the dead guy who inhabits the corner of my living room. But I’ve never seen his face. Not a full-frontal anyway, so I really couldn’t say if he’s handsome.”
“Not him,” he said, “Farrow. Wait, you have a dead guy living in your apartment?”
“
“Yes, Farrow,” he said, eyeing the corner I’d greeted, a mixture of curiosity and horror playing on his face.
“Oh, then damn straight he’s attractive.” I checked messages on my phone. “Wait a minute, are you coming out of the closet?”
A loud sigh echoed against the wall as I traipsed into my room and closed the door. It was funny. “I’m not gay, Charley,” he called out to me. “I’m trying to understand.”
“Understand what?” I asked, knowing full well what he was getting at. How could a girl like me get mixed up with a guy like Reyes? If he only knew the whole story. Not a good idea, though, since he’d have me committed for falling in love with the son of Satan.
“Look, I get the bad boy thing, but a convicted murderer?”
Surprisingly, the oil hadn’t soaked all the way through my pants, so I didn’t need another shower. Since my room was still in disaster-zone mode, I rummaged through a lump on the floor and found a pair of jeans that were tolerable, slipped those on with a pair of bitchen boots, and headed to the bathroom to freshen up.
“I think you need to water your plants,” Garrett called out to me.
“Oh, they’re fake.” He was looking at the plants I had along my windowsill. Either that or my mold problem was getting out of hand.
After a long pause, I heard, “Those are fake?”
“Yeah. I had to make them look real. A little spray paint, a little lighter fluid, and voila! Fake dying plants.”
“Why would you want fake dying plants?” he asked.
“Because if they were all thick and healthy looking, anyone who knows me would realize they were fake.”
“Yeah, but is that really the point?”
“Duh.”
I heard a knock on the bathroom door that exited to my living room and opened it slowly. “Yes?” I asked Garrett as he stood there reading the sign on my door. The one that read
He reached up and pushed against the door.
I pushed back. “Dude, what are you doing?”
“Making sure I’m not dead.”
“Do you feel dead?”
“No, but I thought maybe you had a sign that only dead people could see.”
“How on planet Earth would I have a sign only dead people could see?”
“Hey, it’s your world,” he said with a shrug.
I stepped out of the bathroom ready to face that world again. Or at least a small corner of it. “Look, Reyes is my problem, okay?” I said, grabbing my keys again and heading for the door.
