She rolled her green eyes. “I don’t scan every person that I run into, Jesse. Next thing I know, you’ll be having Cole run a background check on the guy.” I know my eyes lit up, and when I opened my mouth, she put her hand across it. “No. Do not do that.”
There was a very disappointed little boy deep inside me. “But it would be cool!”
That earned me another roll of her eyes. “Leave it alone. This is the first guy Bridge has dated in forever, and I kinda like seeing her happy, okay? Try to get to know him before you call out the dogs.”
My head flopped back to the pillow and I sighed. “I’m just being a jerk again, aren’t I?”
“I wasn’t going to say that…”
“You were thinking it.” I rubbed my gritty eyes, trying not to think about all the sleep I would not be getting that night. “Maybe I should skip this trip. Stay home, get some sleep, do some stuff around the house.”
Mira sat up and looked down at me, her wealth of sable, curly hair falling around my face like a curtain. “Jesse, I’m going to say something, and I want you to understand that it comes from a place of love, okay?”
Slightly worried, I said, “Okay?”
“If you don’t get out of this house for a few days, I’m going to do you grievous bodily harm.” She leaned down and kissed me once, then rolled over and turned off the bedside lamp.
In the darkness, we curled up together, both of us knowing it was only a matter of time before I woke us both with my nightmares and spent the rest of the night on the couch. Mira’s fingers traced up and down my forearm where it rested across her waist, like she could memorize it just by touch.
She was right. I was being a jerk. I’d been a jerk all summer, touchy and quick to anger. Part of it I could chalk up to frustration at being injured, but… not all of it. I mean, I’d been hurt before, and worse. I’d been blown up, stitched together, taped down, and stapled shut. I couldn’t blame it all on that.
Deep down, I knew it was the fear of the unknown. It was the lingering mystery of who tried to run me off the road a few months ago, of where my last client had disappeared to after the tornado took us on our brief tour of Oz. It was the uncertainty, the inability to do anything. I was great with an enemy to fight. Just point me and I do the slice and dice thing. But with just doubts and what-ifs? Not so much.
That’s where the dreams came from. Always the same one, with silver claws and red eyes materializing out of nothing, killing me again and again because I simply couldn’t see it in time to save myself. He was the Yeti, and the ugly scars down the left side of my rib cage were only a small part of what he’d left me.
I’d tried to find something in my bushido texts, some snippet of wisdom or piece of advice to set me back on track. The Hagakure said that a samurai should never joke about being afraid, lest their true heart be revealed. Since humor was one of my chief defense mechanisms, I was pretty much screwed.
Of course, it also said that in order to ease nervousness, you should rub spit on your ears and kick everything in your path. Hadn’t tried that yet. Maybe next week.
“What did he really want?” Out of the darkness, Mira’s voice startled me, and I jumped a little. She sounded smaller somehow, and I held her tighter without really knowing why.
“Who, Cam?”
“No. Him. The… thing, yesterday.”
“Ah.” She wouldn’t say a demon’s name, not even the mocking one I’d assigned to him. But I knew who she meant. Last night, we’d carefully avoided mentioning Axel and his party crashing, but I guess my reprieve was over. “I don’t know. Like I said, he was being weird, even for him.”
“What did he say?”
I frowned a little, though she couldn’t see it. “Not much. He seemed really excited that I was going on vacation. Enthusiastic, even.” Too enthusiastic. Yet another thing that had bothered me ever since.
“How do you feel about that?” Her hand was still stroking up and down my arm, and it finally occurred to me that she was looking for goose bumps. I was and always would be the magic-less wonder, but my earlywarning system was finely tuned.
“I don’t know. My first instinct is to do exactly the opposite of whatever makes him happy. But then I think, maybe that’s what he wants me to do, and I should go after all, and then I get all confused after that.” I nuzzled her ear a little, hoping to distract her. “Ignore him. He’s a douche.”
She turned in my arms, facing me though neither of us could see in the darkened room. “You’d tell me, right? If you thought something was wrong, you’d tell me?” Her fingers stroked through my hair, combing the strands out straight over and over.
I had to think long and seriously about that. Lying by omission had become all too easy for me of late, and I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t do it anymore-not to her. So, was something wrong?
I really thought about it, bringing Axel’s face to the front of my mind, rolling the idea of the vacation trip through my head. There was no twisting of my innards, no painfully cold goose bumps along my arms. Just my natural antidemon revulsion where Axel was concerned.
“I got nothing, baby. No shivers, no nothing. I think we’re okay. Besides, you’ve got like fifty layers of protective spells on me. What could happen?” That seemed to appease her and we both settled down to sleep.
Well, Mira settled down to sleep. I lay awake, watching the streetlight outside cast weird shadows through the blinds and replaying the strange conversation with Axel over and over. My brain kept coming back to one sentence again and again.
“We always come back, Jesse.”
Then the goose bumps came, peppered over my skin like tiny needles of ice. I didn’t know why that one statement triggered my danger-sense, but I was pretty sure I’d get a chance to find out.
4
Morning comes damn early on two hours’ sleep, especially when “morning” starts at three a.m. But we had a long drive ahead of us, and the early bird gets the… oh screw it. It was freakin’ early.
I kissed Mira’s forehead and slipped out of bed without waking her. Bonus points for me. I’d packed the night before, and left my clothes in the living room so I could dress without waking anyone else.
Walking down the hallway, I poked my head into Annabelle’s room. It took me a moment to locate her head of red curls, pillowed between a giant pink frog and a worn wolf plushie. Even in the darkness, I could see the faintest pink tint to her cheeks, her face flushed with the heat of sleep like kids’ do. Aside from her coloring, strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, she was the image of her mother, right down to the shape of her mouth and her pert little nose. She was the most beautiful thing in the world.
“Sleep well, button. Be good for Mommy,” I whispered, then moved on.
The only other thing I really needed to do would involve waking someone, but considering that someone was living in my house rent free, I figured ten minutes of lost sleep wouldn’t hurt him.
Our spare bedroom had been converted from Mira’s personal sanctuary into Esteban’s room when he came to live with us. Not that the kid had much, but he’d put up a few posters, and some letters from home were taped to the wall above his bed.
Unfortunately, Mira’s computer was still set up in there, mostly for the kid to work on his homework. (Mira was a stickler about grades. Who knew?) But it was also how I kept contact with the other champions, like myself. And since Esteban was nominally one too, he was allowed to peep at my conversations. A little.
Mira’s brand-new, custom-built computer had enough lights and whizzers on it to light up the entire room, so I didn’t bother with flipping the overhead on. I parked myself in front of the green glowing monitor and proceeded to jump through seven kinds of hoops to finally access the Web site I was after in the first place. Our Webmaster was downright paranoid when it came to security.
Just because I could, I left the volume up when the sentry-bot screamed “BOOBIES!” at supersonic decibels.
Esteban said something like “Grnf?” and rolled over, yanking his comforter over his head.
The Webcam window popped up on the screen, and I smirked at Viljo. “Boobies, hmm?”
“I thought you were Esteban.” The hacker-turned-Web-security-expert rattled around on his keyboards without even looking up at his screen. “I do not want him surfing for porn on my baby, and he is surprisingly easy to
