“Where are we?” Ryder sat up, caught in the seat belt for a moment, then working his way out. Running his fingers through his hair, he straightened the gold metallic strands, pulling them away from his face. “I’d say this looks familiar, but it all kind of looks this way—big rocks, brown ground. More big roc, but these are flying and hopefully far enough away that they don’t think we’re lunch.”
I ducked my head a bit to catch a glimpse at the birds to the right of the freeway. “Those aren’t rocs. They’re lesser golden thunderbirds. Usually fish eaters. Although I’ve seen one pluck a Minnesota lake monster out of the water like it weighed nothing. They’re good for the lakes, especially around fishing villages, because they keep the big predators down. They don’t go after anything smaller than six feet, so they leave salmon and trout alone. So long as I don’t drive the Mustang into some water, we’ll be fine.”
Ryder stared at me for a long moment, then said, “You have an amazing retention for details about all of the wildlife we encounter. I never thought about it until just now.”
“I’ve got Dempsey to thank for that.” I tensed my thighs, looking for a telltale ache in my muscles to see if we needed to stop and stretch. Ryder was usually good for a long haul, but too many hours sitting down meant we would both be cramped up when we did finally stop. “There is a turnoff up ahead with a general store we can stop at to grab cold drinks. Take us about fifteen to twenty minutes to get there, but it’ll be a chance to walk around. We’ve been going solid for about six hours now. I would’ve stopped sooner, but you were off in la-la land and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Do you always deflect a compliment?” Ryder’s attention was sharp, pinning me in place. Not like I had anywhere to go, seeing as I was driving a couple of tons of steel down an old asphalt freeway. “I’ve noticed whenever I tell you something good about yourself, you give credit to somebody else. Like Dempsey or Jonas.”
“The animal thing is important if you’re going to be a Stalker. You’ve got to know what’s a threat and what isn’t, and if it is, you’ve got to know what’s going to take it down.” I gave him a quick glance, but it didn’t seem like my answer was good enough for Ryder, because he continued to stare at me. “And it’s not like I keep everything in my head. SoCalGov has a lexicon, and there’s people out there who have their own lists. If I run into something new or find out something’s weakness, I sometimes add what I know. This isn’t the kind of job where you can hoard your knowledge. That’s as good as killing someone if they’re out in the field and run into something they don’t recognize. It’s kind of one of the rules your mentor teaches you. If you don’t know what it is and it’s growling at you, get the fuck out.”
Ryder laughed—a soft low sound husky and smooth enough to send a tingle down my spine. “I guess I never thought of you going back to your warehouse and updating a database about the monsters you run across.”
“Like I do it every single time. Just every once in a while, and mostly only if I find out something new. The Underhill brought a lot of trouble with it, and things have gotten twisted a bit. I was kind of hoping Alexa getting her apprentice license would mean she could feed some information to the databases, but you guys seem to operate on an ‘if it doesn’t bother us, we don’t look at it’ basis. Which doesn’t exactly help when something’s trying to eat your face off and you go look it up, only to find out there’s not a damn thing about the six-eyed, blue-tongued lizard living in algae in the shallows of a freshwater lake.”
“You’ve run into something like that?”
“Yeah, about five of them. Bastards are about the length of my arm and can jump like five hundred feet from under the water. And they’re all teeth and tail. Not sure if they can see well or if they’re reacting to motion, but they sure as hell are fast, and a mouthful of flesh is a good hunt for them.” I shuddered, remembering the job we’d been on. “They didn’t get me, but I can tell you Nickel-Nose Ned didn’t have that nickname before we took the contract. After that, I walked around the lake with a baseball bat and a twitchy right arm.”
I was hit with a wave of sorrow before we went another few feet down the road. So much of my life had Dempsey woven into it, and the encounter with the snapping blue lizards had been one of the first times he told another Stalker they had to work with me or get off the job. Some left but most stayed. Dempsey had a reputation for taking on the very worst of contracts and earning high payoffs. I was just a condition of working with him, and soon enough, I could stand on my own name and pull in enough money to support us both.
“I never really understood your relationship with him. Dempsey, I mean. I’m closer to my mothers than my fathers, but I really don’t know how Dempsey raised you.” Ryder must have seen something in my face, because his voice gentled, the teasing falling away to something sweeter and poignant. “The two of you always bickered and fought, but it seems like you have a lot of affection for him.”
I never thought about how my relationship with Dempsey might look to somebody on the outside of it, but then again, I hadn’t really cared either. Shrugging, I replied, “Some people think it might’ve been a little bit complicated, but it was simple enough for us. He taught me everything I know and kept me alive. So when he couldn’t be on the job anymore, I owed it to him to keep him going. Plain enough.”
“I think there’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m not going to push,” Ryder said in a way that told me the pushing would come at a later date, when I least expected it. “I didn’t know a lot about him. Maybe tell me about something good, something you and Dempsey shared, even. All I hear is how antisocial and bossy he was, but you’ve got to have some good times with him. I can hear your affection for him in your voice, and don’t give me the excuse that he was better than Tanic, because your loyalty goes deep and I know it’s hard to earn. So tell me something good about Dempsey.”
“Something good about the old man?” I snorted, trying to figure out what angle Ryder was taking this into. “He was an argumentative asshole who pushed until you thought you’d break and then gloat when you didn’t.”
“He kept you safe,” Ryder replied softly, then tilted his head. “Relatively. I’m not sure teaching you to be a Stalker was exactly the wisest profession you could have followed, but….”
“It’s all he knew, and he was damned good at it.” The sky was beginning to cloud, pockmarked with dark gray dots and a promise of more clinging to the mountaintops on either side of the road. I slowed down when the first heavy raindrop struck the Mustang’s windshield, not knowing how long it’d been since the asphalt got a good soaking. There was always a chance of hydroplaning on a wet oil slick if the roads were left dry too long. “Like that thing about knowing the animals. We all operate within certain areas, so it makes sense to know the common threats or even the stuff that might look like a threat. People get all worked up about the creatures that came through the Merge, but there’s a lot of stuff that was here beforehand that could tear apart a man before he saw it. It’d be stupid to go out there without doing your homework. The more you know—the more you study—the longer you’ll live.”