6
We headed back to my trailer only after Luc had called off the rest of the search party. The moment I stepped inside Kemen’s space, I yanked off my jeans and shirt and tossed them to the floor.
I wasn’t generally messy, but something about Kemen’s trailer almost demanded I be as sloppy as my best friend had been. Going to the bedroom, I crawled onto the bed, grabbed a pair of roll-up socks I’d kept tucked under the pillow, and yanked them on before turning to look at Luc.
For most people being in the buff in front of an ex might be a strange thing. But Luc understood that my aversion to clothes ran deep. If I could get away with only ever wearing thongs and knee-high socks I’d probably never wear real clothes again.
He leaned against the doorframe. “Getting comfortable, aren’t you?”
I shrugged, running my fingers through my hair. “This isn’t the first time tonight someone’s disappeared on me.”
Narrowing his eyes, he came to rest on the foot of my bed, crossing his leg in front of him. “What do you mean?”
“After I met with Grace I got hungry, so I went to an outdoor market and bought some tacos.”
He lifted a brow in surprise. Again, demons don’t often get hungry, but it wasn’t an earth-shattering confession either. “And?”
I couldn’t just blurt out the pestilence thing, that would require a lot of backtracking which we’d do, just... not yet.
“A guy bumped into me. I’d overhead that same guy in a bar earlier tonight, talking to someone about a friend of theirs that’d been found in the desert.”
“You bumped into the same guy twice? This isn’t a big village, but still...”
“I know.” I pursed my lips. “Coincidences aren’t something I really believe in anymore. But that wasn’t the strangest part. When he bumped into me at the stand, I pushed him back. I didn’t think anything of it, it was just reflex. He fell.”
His eyes scrunched up. “Get to the point here.”
This was where the story got a little tricky, but I gave it my best shot. “He didn’t look right. And then there was another couple that kind of had the same look. But the dude who knocked into me was on the ground and he was pretty much contained. The other two ran off and I chased after them.”
“Why?”
I could read him trying to connect the dots in my story and finding the pieces lacking. Giving half a story was so much harder than just telling the truth.
“Because the way they were acting, I was afraid whatever was going on might spread if they got in contact with anyone else.”
I waited with bated breath for him to call me out on this— Luc knew me like no one else in the world. Not to mention the fact that his nose is a lie detector, but I wasn’t lying. Just keeping certain parts of the story under wraps.
He scratched his jaw, icy blue eyes shrewd with intelligence. “Okay.” He nodded and I almost breathed a sigh of relief when he accepted the story. “What happened then?”
“I caught the couple, made sure they weren’t as sick as the guy in the marketplace had been, and once I was satisfied that they were good, I ran back to the stalls. Guy was gone.” I shrugged helplessly. “I thought I was losing my mind because nobody”—I waved my hands—“remembered him or me. Not even the girl I bought my dinner from.”
“Gone?” He shook his head just slightly, toying with a loose thread on Kemen’s fluffy red thermal blanket. “Just like that?”
I nodded, pressing my lips together. “Just like Juanita. There one second, gone the next. What do you think’s going on here?”
Exhaling, shoulders slumping, he said, “I don’t have a damn clue. What does Grace want you to do?”
“Go in search of some zombies in the Sierra Madres.”
Squeezing his eyes shut, he ran his fingers across his brow bone. “Of course she does. Let me guess, by yourself? Because that’ll never happen again.”
Was he implying he was wanted in on the action? Did I even want that anymore? Honestly, I wasn’t sure.
“No.” I shook my head. “She said I can bring whoever I want.”
“What?” His forehead scrunched. “That doesn’t sound like her.”
“Yeah, well if you don’t think that sounds like her, then you should have seen how she was acting.” Dragging one of Kemen’s sweaters toward me with my foot, I slipped it over my head and inhaled the faint spiciness of his scent, which still lingered on it. I wasn’t cold. But it felt sort of like a hug when I did it, and right now I needed my Sandman’s arms around me.
“How?” Tentatively he reached out, as if unsure whether to do it or not, before eventually tugging on the edge of the sweater.
I could feel us falling into this push and pull all over again. Knowing you needed to cut something out of your life didn’t make it any easier. I wanted the friendship without the drama. But with Luc it was all or nothing. That’s how it’s always been with him.
“I don’t know, not something I can really pinpoint and say this and that, but she was distracted and just... weird.” I gave a helpless shrug.
“Last time we were crawling in vampires, this time people are disappearing.” He frowned, seeing but not seeing, obviously lost deep in thought. I chewed on my thumbnail, waiting on him to work through it. “That woman’s fears were real. I smelled her panic. But...” He rubbed his hands on his jeans, then stood and began to slowly pace back and forth.
“What’s up?” I asked softly, because it wasn’t often that Luc got this worked up over one of my cases. Generally, unless it involved a Neph, he was totally hands-off. Until recently, anyway.
“I dunno.” He twirled on his heel, pinning me with a hard blue stare. Unless we were gripped by Lust, our eye color wasn’t a glowing lavender but rather a cerulean blue. “I don’t know.” He grimaced. “Just this gut feeling I’ve got, thinking back on it. How do two people just disappear like that?”
“Three.” I lifted my fingers because he wasn’t counting the guy at the taco stand. “But whatever it is, I’ve got this terrible feeling that somehow this might all be intertwined. Call it a hunch, but I believe the Order is screwing with us again.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his jaw. “Let the games begin.” Clapping the doorframe, he made as if to leave, then paused and turned to look at me.
And there was a change in his look. A haunted aching filled his eyes and I swallowed hard.
“That night, when you disappeared. I couldn’t find you, Dora.” His brows twitched. “I couldn’t find you. None of them would have survived anyway; I gave them the only mercy I could.”
I sensed it was as close to the truth of what’d gone down that night as I would ever get from him.
I searched his cold, beautiful face and whispered, “I’m sorry, Luc. For everything.”
And for a second I could have sworn the hard shell cracked and that for an infinite moment in time he was as conflicted and unsure as I was. But it was so fleeting it made me question whether I’d seen it all.
He grinned. “Yeah, I bet. Get some rest.”
Then he was gone and I was alone, just me, Kemen’s sweater, and a head full of memories.
***
By two in the morning, I figured out sleep wasn’t happening. And though I was supposed to be scouting for an elusive zombie hive, there was no way in hell I’d be doing that in the middle of the night.
I might be strong, but I’m not stupid.
So I traced to my trailer, just long enough to grab a vintage bottle of cabernet sauvignon and that ratty old book Billy had told me to read.
Billy.
Just the thought of him made my toes curl and a delicious heat spread through my middle. Where was he right now?
Returning to Kemen’s home, I set the wine down on small end table and walked to the window, pushing aside the curtain as I stared out. The night was pitch-dark. We were a few miles outside the village, which meant we had no city lights to mar the splendor of the rugged, harsh beauty of the Mexican desert at night. Barrel cacti and dry sagebrush dotted the landscape. A full moon took up the center of the sky and a million stars winked back at me. And I felt completely alone and small.
“Billy,” I murmured, leaning my head against the cool pane of glass and allowing myself one moment that was mine alone.
One moment to remember his touch, the way he’d felt on me. How his hands had caressed my face. And yes, there was lust when I was around him.
But when he’d died, I’d felt any semblance of humanity inside me bleed out. And though there’d been so many questions hammering in my skull—whether he’d meant to kill me that night or whether he’d been there to save me—I could never let him go. Out of one toxic relationship and into another, it seemed a curse I was doomed to repeat ad nauseam.
I snorted. “You’re freaking sick, Pandora.”
With a slight shake of my head, I walked back to the bed. Uncorking the bottle, I drank straight from it. I wasn’t even trying to play around tonight. The full-bodied red hit my empty stomach like a sledgehammer, but it felt good. Woke me up, gave me the focus I needed to tackle this coma-inducing medieval read.
Cracking open the book, I greedily inhaled the musty scent of old pages and was just ready to flip to the beginning when a sheet of paper that hadn’t been in there before caught my eye.
Grabbing it, I turned it over and my stomach bottomed out.
This is an allegorical work—read between the lines, Dora.
~B
I blinked. Billy had been in my room. Probably tonight. I wet my lips, refraining from tracing back there just to see if he was still around. The man moved like shadow and more than once he’d given me the slip with me only figuring out he’d been there well after the fact.
Clutching the paper to my heart, I didn’t want to analyze why just seeing that B had made the warmth of a thousand flames move through me or why my skin shivered just from my thinking about him.
I’d had these feelings only once before, but never with this type of intensity. Taking a second just to breathe, I started at the beginning.