Charming (37 page)

“If he identifies you,” Sig corrected, “
I’ll
take him out. No geas will make me suffer for it later.”

I kissed her again. It was made only a little awkward by the fact that we were both still holding guns below dashboard level.

The second time the store entrance opened, I spotted the knight with my peripheral vision. He wasn’t difficult to identify as he walked toward his car. Anywhere from his late forties to his early sixties, he was a broad-shouldered man with gray hair razored down to stubble. His movements seemed restless within his carefully conventional middle-aged-male clothes: a blue jacket, light-blue collared shirt, and gray slacks.

He was a veteran who was being given recon assignments because he had beat the odds and made it to middle age, I decided. A man who was finally slowing down and fighting it day by day, losing the battle by a few seconds here, a blood pressure point there, maybe a pound or two where none had ever existed before. He probably sucked at being an officer or an administrator.

Sig stilled while her face was partially turned toward the store. I turned her face back to mine with my palm and saw that
her eyes were unfocused. She was doing that soul-gaze thing again. It really wasn’t just psychic. She must have been picking up on body language cues, maybe even picking up pheromones through the window without realizing that she was doing it. Whatever she was doing, it involved some kind of hyper-focus.

“That’s what you’ve been running from for decades?” she whispered when she unfroze.

“Yes.”

This time when she kissed me she wasn’t playing around.

“He’s leaving,” she said later as if I couldn’t hear his car receding. “He didn’t even notice us.”

“He noticed us,” I assured her, and leaned past her to adjust the side-view mirror on her side of the car. I could have just asked her to do it, but that wouldn’t have involved as much rubbing.

“What are you doing?” Sig put her fingers on my chin and smiled wryly. “He’s gone.”

“He might circle back,” I said, adjusting the rearview mirror so that Sig would be able to see over her shoulder while facing me.

She was still smiling, and I clasped her straightened fingers in my hand. “I am completely serious,” I told her gravely. “He saw two people who might be staking him out staying in their car and kissing. He probably doesn’t think we’re really up to anything, but it won’t cost him anything to circle around the block and see if we’re still here making out after we think he’s gone, either. That’s how knights’ minds work.”

“You and your whole order are nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, you know that?” she said.

“Kiss me anyway?” Somehow that came out sounding more vulnerable than I’d meant it to.

Sig stared at me searchingly, then with a what-the-hell shrug went back to work.

The next two minutes were a pleasant haze. Then the headlights shone through the back of the rear window.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Sig murmured against my mouth.

“It’s him,” I said. “I recognize the engine.”

He drove past us without slowing down, reassured by the fact that we hadn’t tried to follow him.

“My God,” Sig whispered.

“Come to think of it, he might come back again in half an hour,” I murmured.

Sig laughed shakily and kissed me again, then put her palm on my shoulder and pushed me away so that she could look at me. “You were actually right all along. You’ve got to leave Clayburg.”

“I will,” I said. And then: “Why did you say
actually
like that?”

She smiled but refused to be distracted. “I know you won’t leave before the raid, but after that you leave. And I break up with Stanislav. And then you get in touch with me and let me know you’re alive or I will come after you and kill you.”

“I’ve already made arrangements to drop this car off at a chop shop and get another one there.” I could say that truthfully without agreeing to leave right away. I didn’t trust Stanislav or her objectivity in regard to him.

We’d blow up that bridge when we came to it.

30

C
hoo let us through the front door and we found Sig’s entire war band (well, except for Andro—he was on tunnel-watching duty) waiting for us in his living room. Dvornik and Parth and Cahill were sitting on a wraparound couch with a space left open next to Dvornik, and Molly was sitting all the way back in a reclining chair. In the center of the room was a long coffee table loaded down with those generic white Chinese takeout boxes with red dragons and flowers on them, and everybody was eating off plates on bamboo trays except for Molly, who had both a beagle puppy and a plate of food vying for attention in her lap.

The beagle puppy pressed itself against her and made a low sound that was half whimper and half growl as soon as it got a whiff of me.

Andrej did a human version of the same thing.

He straightened up from where he was leaning over the coffee table and scowled at me as I moved around Choo. “Have a nice ride, lover boy?”

Sig was between us literally before I could speak. Her sudden
proximity caused Andrej to step back and her greater height forced him to look up at her. This bothered him.

“You are one wrong word away from hitting the floor,” she told him.

I wondered if this was how all women would act if they were physically stronger than men, or if there was some sort of essential Signess at work.

“He doesn’t need you to protect him.” Andrej’s voice was defiant, but there was something about it that sounded childish.

“She’s not protecting it,” Dvornik said tiredly from the couch. “She’s protecting you, Andrej. The creature is at least twice as fast as you, three times as strong, and it’s been fighting longer than you’ve been alive. And you’re standing there taunting it as if to prove that you’re not afraid, which makes us all think the opposite.”

Andrej started to protest and Dvornik overrode him, giving me a dead-eyed look as he did so. “You know how to take down a werewolf, Andrej, and it’s not by mouthing off at it from three feet away.”

“Yeah, have backup with sniper rifles,” I retorted. Then I put my hand over my mouth as if chagrined by having said something awkward.

I was jerking Andrej’s chain a little, but Sig wanted to keep her decision to break up with Dvornik to herself for another day, and I didn’t agree with that, but it was her decision and I was mainly just backing her play. If I suddenly started acting mature and conciliatory, Dvornik would know something significant had changed.

“Don’t listen to its mouth.” Stanislav still wasn’t taking his eyes off of me. They were as dark and unfathomable and predatory as an insect’s. “It’s trying to lure you into thinking of it as a human.”

“Would you all just chill?” Sig turned and addressed the room. “John is leaving Clayburg as soon as the vampire raid is over tomorrow. He doesn’t want to talk about it, and our lives depend on how well we work together, so everybody grow up. You know… common cause? Greater good? The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Any of this ring a bell?”

“Great speech, Coach.” Cahill didn’t look up from his plate.

I looked at Stanislav and held my arms open. “What about it, Stan? Want to hug it out?”

“I don’t know if I can drop you or not,” Sig told me through clenched teeth. “But we’re about to find out.”

“Fine,” I grumbled. Sig was a great actress. It was almost as if she were really irritated with me.

Then I had a thought that chilled my blood. What if Sig really was a great actress? What if she had no intention of breaking up with Stanislav? What if she was only saying whatever she had to say and doing whatever she had to do to keep me motivated until her group didn’t need me as cannon fodder any longer?

Grabbing a bamboo tray just to give myself something to do, I began heaping Chinese food onto two paper plates until there were two indiscriminate mounds on my tray. I had been on the run too long. There was no point worrying about whether Sig was faking it or not. I was going on the raid regardless of how I felt about her, and it wasn’t like I was going to emotionally protect myself at this point. If she was playing me, then it was going to be the emotional equivalent of a huge sucking chest wound no matter what I did. But if she was real, and I really believed that she was, then getting paranoid could mess everything up.

Of course, feelings really don’t care whether or not they have
a point. That’s what makes them feelings, not, you know, conclusions or strategies. Now I felt shaky, like I’d just taken a hit. Look, I’m good at a lot of things, OK? It’s just that being in love isn’t one of them.

Wait… I was in love? That was crazy. I hadn’t known her long enough.

Choo had pulled a piano bench out from under the piano that was against the wall next to the entry to the kitchen, and he was sitting on it. There was nowhere else to sit except a rocking chair next to the wraparound couch, and I wasn’t going near that thing. Instead, I sank down onto the floor between Molly’s recliner and Choo, adopting a cross-legged position and setting the bamboo tray across my knees.

Molly’s puppy made a whimpering question of a growl again. “This is Lewis,” Molly said.

I stared at the puppy and growled. After a second it crawled over her lap toward me on its belly while Molly frantically maneuvered her plate out of its way. I let Lewis lick my hand cautiously.

“Hey,” Molly said, watching Lewis grovel. “Did you just break my dog?”

“I let it submit,” I said. “It’s the only way it’s going to feel safe. It’ll be OK after a while. Puppies are adaptable.”

“Well,” Molly said. “I guess I’m still glad you came over to sit at the unpopular kids’ table.”

“How could anybody dislike you?” I asked, forking some sweet-and-spicy chicken off my plate. “You’re a bundle of sunbeams.”

“I’m a mean mother-hmmnhmmnh man of God,” she informed me. “Except that I’m a woman, of course.”

“You just quoted something, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, I did,” Molly agreed. She seemed calm, but her heart was beating fast. “
From Dusk Till Dawn
. It’s a vampire movie with George Clooney.”

“Is it too late to get a different priest?” Choo wondered. “Like maybe one who quotes
the Bible
?”

“I watched horror movies all last night,” Molly confessed while she stroked Lewis’s back. “In a weird way, they help me relax.”

“That’s kind of the opposite of listening to Christmas music, isn’t it?” I wondered.

“It’s like alternating hot and cold compresses on a sore muscle,” Molly explained. “I alternate scary and happy things on my sore mind.”

“Makes sense,” I agreed.

“The hell.” Choo shook his head despairingly. “Maybe letting you two meet each other wasn’t all that good an idea.”

“Too late.” Molly smiled at me.

Another bad thought occurred to me then, and for a second I got uneasy.

Molly reached over and patted my shoulder. “It’s OK, sweetie. I’m a lesbian.”

“That’s it. I definitely want myself a new priest,” Choo said.

“Episcopalians will let anybody in,” Molly agreed. “It’s all the drinking that goes on at our conferences. Half the time when our bishops are raising their hands to vote, they think they’re ordering another scotch.”

I looked at her suspiciously. “You blessed the holy water
before
you started this conversation, right?”

“You have to bless holy water?” Molly asked innocently.

Choo started to laugh and leveled a thick index finger at her. “Don’t. Even. Joke.”

From the lack of conversation, it seemed like things were much less fun over on Sig’s side of the room. Just chewing
sounds, and Parth occasionally talking about aboriginal tribal tattoos, and monosyllabic responses. I didn’t look over, but I knew where Sig was at every second.

Break up with him
, I urged silently. She could tell Stanislav, and we could take him out and sedate him until the raid was over if she didn’t want to hurt him. What was all this really about anyway? One last monster hunt for old times’ sake? Respect? Guilt? I was starting to figure out that loyalty was one of Sig’s primary motivators, but I doubted Stanislav would be loyal to Sig if he thought she had betrayed him, and he would view her not loving him as a betrayal.