I’d have punched the asshole if he hadn’t been with our nieces when I found him, so instead, I spent the afternoon wincing when one of the mini-banshees let loose her ear-piercing sonic blast and trying to match their laughter when they giggled. It was alarming how tired I got chasing after a pair of barely sentient twin Sidhe babies, but I’d returned to the tower the Court made me, fed the cat, then face-planted on the bed, not bothering to take off my clothes.
I’d oddly gotten used to waking up in the middle of the night with Ryder wrapped around me and Newt someplace on my legs. In the half week since Dempsey’s funeral, I’d fallen into a numbness, coming up for air only for a Sidhe Lord and the occasional feline demand for ear scritches and belly rubs.
Today was the first day I felt halfway normal and mostly… human, still shuddering a bit when the Sidhe chatter in the halls played havoc with my nerves, and my stomach knotting in anticipation for the glut of whiskey I longed to pour down my throat.
Drinking was out. It was a crutch too many Stalkers used to wipe away the blood, guts, and gore splattered over their memories. I’d pulled Dempsey out of more than a few bars, dragging his argumentative dead weight behind me before both of us got our faces punched in. During every single one of those times, I thought he was drinking to somehow dull the loss of his mobility and the end of his Stalker career. Now I wondered if it wasn’t because of me. I was the reason he’d become an outsider in the only community that embraced his irascible, hardheaded personality. Three—no, four—days wasn’t enough time for me to get over Dempsey’s death, and I still hadn’t wrestled with the demons left in my brain from his final words to me.
I couldn’t pull a scent off of the person standing behind me, but the wind was toward my face and some of the elfin didn’t always register with me, the light hint of fragrance from their skin too delicate for me to catch. The midmorning sun was a splash of warm amid the cool shade of the surrounding forest, and while the Court’s main cobblestoned square often soaked in the heat, the retreating storm left it stripped of any warmth, dampening the bricks and the chill so deep they practically shivered in their mortar. If I’d been smart, I would’ve brought something to sit on besides the tarp, but the cold creeping through my muscles kept me alert and the tingles of pain along my nerves reminded me I was alive.
“Dempsey would’ve scolded you for sitting on the cold stone.” Cari’s voice wavered as she spoke. “He used to tell me doing that would give me hemorrhoids.”
The carb’s choke valve had been sticking, and I wanted to see if it could be cleaned or if I was going to be stuck with rebuilding the damned thing before I headed back out. Turning the parts over in my hand, I tilted them up one by one, ignoring Cari’s approach.
Her legs appeared at my left side, and I caught a glimpse of her fingers reaching for my shoulder. “Kai—”
“What do you want?” I didn’t trust myself to glance up at her. There was still anger in my blood at everything, including her giving Jonas her link to call me. She was my little sister, or at least the closest thing I had to a sibling, and something small and dark in me ached every time I thought of hearing Jonas’s voice when I’d expected to hear hers.
“At least you give me credit for hunting you down and not asking how I found you.” She crouched, her dark hair curving around her strong jaw.
I knew every inch of Cari’s face, having watched her grow from a swaddled lump of crying meat to the woman she was now, and somehow I’d missed the faint lines beginning to form at the edges of her eyes. I’d blinked and the years were now in her face and hands, a stretched dryness along her skin, chafed red from the cold wind cutting into the courtyard’s open expanse. Dressed in one of my old jackets I’d outgrown years ago, she’d shoved up the sleeves until they rode her upper arms, the worn leather scrunched up over her ropey muscles. She was still vibrant and strong, but there was an earthiness to her face and demeanor, one I’d missed her gaining over the years.
“You’re a witch, remember?” I curled my lip at her. “Pretty sure you could have sliced open a pigeon and it would have led the way. Lots of damned pigeons around here. They like to crap on cars as much as the trees do.”
“Like I’d waste the meat looking for you,” she sniped back. “Still got that folding chair in the Pony’s trunk? Because if I’m going to talk to you, it’s not going to be crouched over like some auntie picking through peas.”
I couldn’t hold on to the kernel burning hot in my belly. No matter how much I tried. I’d learned how to be human with Cari, taking each mental footstep with her as she grew. I was still pissed. That wasn’t going to go away, but her coming to poke at me was… so normal, and at the moment, I needed a bit of normal after quieting the raging shitstorm through my head.
There were more birds taking flight above the canopy, but they were too far away for me to identify. Not enough to alarm, but certainly something to take note of. I listened with half an ear as Cari wrestled the metal chair from the Mustang’s trunk, gauging the size of movement through the forest beyond the Court. It didn’t seem large enough to startle more than a few flocks, and I couldn’t hear the telltale thunder of a heavy animal breaking through the underbrush. The woods around the Court were largely unexplored, left to grow feral and heavy with roaming wild animals.
“Still think something’s going to come up and snatch someone from the forest?” Cari asked, shaking the chair out until the seat locked down.
“Lions’ territories go out to more than a hundred miles sometimes. It’s not that far from here to Kearny Mesa, even with the river cutting across the valley. And as far as I know, the damned pandas have gotten a taste for flesh after years of chewing down bamboo. No sense being stupid and losing someone when having a lick of common sense will keep everyone alive,” I retorted, going back to scrubbing at the crevices of the Mustang’s carb. She got settled, hunched over in the leather jacket, and gave me owl eyes from under its upturned collar. I snorted, too used to her wheedling ways. “Don’t give me any shit, mija. Speak your piece—”
“You never sounded more like Dempsey than right now.” Her words went in smooth, sharpened with the keen edge of someone who knew every single one of my weaknesses. I felt the cut down deep, but I had nothing more to give her. I’d bled out days ago, left white and lifeless in front of the Presidio’s Death Wall. “Listen, I’m sorry about giving Jonas my link, but he’s going crazy thinking you hate him, and I’m pissed as hell at Dempsey for dragging that stuff out when it didn’t need to be. These are your people, Kai. I’m your people. Yeah, they were assholes for one little moment in your life, but they changed. If you can’t see that, then you’re more of an ass than they ever were. What the hell are you thinking? And why the hell are you hiding here? Don’t tell me it’s because of the food, because I’ve eaten with Alexa. They’ve got bug burgers. I spent five hours one time trying to pick some damned leg prickles out from between my teeth.”
“It’s sure as hell not for the bug burgers,” I confessed, making a face. I’d eaten a lot of things over the years. There were times when hand-sized larva plucked from the insides of fallen trees fed me and Dempsey for a month while tracking down a large pack of black dogs in Colorado, but if I had to choose, I preferred my meat to have four or two legs. “I’m not pissed at you. Well, a little bit. I get why you did it, handing the link over, but sometimes, Cari, I need some space to figure stuff out. I just buried Dempsey, dammit, and there’s all the crap he dumped on me that I’ve got to deal with. You all have to listen to me when I need time. You can’t come picking at me until I’m ready to blink.”