Tantalize (13 page)

W
hen I finally escaped the nurse’s office — guest-starring the school counselor as “I thought I’d say ‘Hi’ and see if you wanted to talk” — Kieren was leaning against the manila hallway outside the door, his backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Shouldn’t you be in calc?” I asked.

He took my English book. “I thought we’d cut out for the rest of the day. Do you need to stop by your locker for anything?”

I glanced at the text in his hand. What was this, the 1950s? He didn’t usually carry my books. Of course he didn’t usually cut school either. I had been planning to hit chem before taking off, but so what? “I guess not.”

“Good.” Kieren turned toward the front door. “Let’s go.”

Passing the fountain next to the administration office, we fell silent and walked together out of the school. Not one secretary had looked up.

“You feeling better?” he asked halfway down the walk.

“Better?” I spread my arms, soaking in the freedom, the sunshine.

“Than you were in class this morning?’

Oh. “It was nothing. Cedar, I guess. My eyes started watering.”

“You don’t have allergies. I do, and I’m fine today.” Stepping onto the parking lot, he added, “If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”

It was my second offer to talk in the past hour. Inside Kieren’s truck, I tuned the radio to a Los Lonely Boys song and listened to that instead. I had no idea where we were going, but I was so glad to be with him and not in chem that it didn’t matter.

The mystery held while we stopped by his house. Miz Morales waved to me and handed him a picnic basket at the front door. Brazos bounded out behind Kieren and leaped into the truck to sit between us. Then I rolled down the passenger-side window, changed places with the overgrown pup, and scratched behind his ears as he panted out the window. I’d always wanted a dog, but Uncle D had said we worked too much. Brazos loved me though, and it was mutual. “Your mama doesn’t mind that we’re cutting?”

“No, not at all. She sends her love.”

When Kieren turned into the white-stone pillars at the entrance, I understood.

It was September 6, my parents’ wedding anniversary, the day I’d set aside to honor them. The day they’d become a family. Kieren had remembered when I’d forgotten. He must’ve assumed I’d been emotional in English because of today’s date.

Last year I’d counted down the days, starred the box on my September monthly calendar page in Frank.

This year,
nada.

What kind of an excuse for a daughter was I?

The cemetery was small, lined with a wrought-iron fence, located about twenty minutes from my house. The older tombstones stood upright, many faded, several guarded by stone angels or lambs. The first year, Kieren and I had taken a bus, and last spring, he’d driven us. The picnic basket and Brazos’s company were new.

My parents’ graves were shaded by a magnolia tree, marked with a single flat stone. It had a built-in vase, and before I could feel worse about not bringing flowers, Kieren reached into the basket for a plastic-wrapped bouquet of pink sweetheart roses and a bottle of water. I knelt down to scratch Brazos’s belly while Kieren busied himself. He set up the flower arrangement, spread a moss green blanket, put out a snack of sliced apples, pecans, feta, and whole-wheat crackers on moss-green paper plates, and handed me a moss-green paper cup with matching napkin. Our names had been written in curly silver metallic ink on our cups, both with hearts over the respective
I
’s. We sat side by side, and Kieren poured me some sparkling cider before noticing the panting dog.

“Sorry, boy.” He opened the basket again for another bowl and a bottle of water.

“I take it your mama packed the basket for you.”

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

I laughed.

Instead of talking about Wolves or vampires or Sanguini’s or the murder investigation, Kieren and I remembered my parents. Remembered how Mama could eat a heaping plate of Vaggio’s calamari all by herself. Remembered how Daddy would spend hours combing the beach in Galveston for seashells. Remembered how long they’d debated over what colors to paint the house before settling on green and purple. Remembered how often they’d held hands. It was the best I’d felt all day, but then I realized, who would come here with me when Kieren left for the pack? From the way Miz Morales had been talking, it sounded like he’d be gone long before next year.

During an electrical storm later that night, watching the news with Uncle D, I learned that there was a flash flood warning for Westlake Hills and that a dead body had been found near the Four Seasons Hotel on the hike-and-bike trail.

It wasn’t far from here to that new murder scene. Within walking distance.

Walking distance from my house. Walking distance from Kieren’s.

I thought back to Detective Sanchez’s warning and hit MUTE on the TV remote. “It was Mama and Daddy’s anniversary today. Kieren went with me to the cemetery.”

“You could’ve asked me,” my uncle said. “Or Brad.”

“Brad?” He’d never even known them.

Uncle D glanced at the coverage of college football. “He’s ‘Bradley Sanguini.’ That makes him family now. Like you said about Vaggio.”

Remembering the fuss he’d made when I’d hung Vaggio’s photo, I was surprised to hear my uncle say that. “You and Brad really seem to have hit it off,” I said.

“And you’ve had a tough day,” Uncle D observed, “visiting your parents’ graves and all. Can I get you something? A glass of wine?”

I thought about the body just found, about loved ones lost. About Kieren. I wished I could mute my emotions the way I had the TV. It would be easier not to think at all, at least not for the rest of the night. The wine could help. “Sounds good,” I replied.

I
understood that Brad had to get the food order in, but did he have to look at his watches every minute? The restaurant supply shop on South Lamar wasn’t that far away after all. Flipping through the rack of classic uniforms, I asked, “Do you have to
do
that?”

“Do what?” he asked, all innocence.

I didn’t bother to bicker about it. “I wish you could just turn into a bat. Like
poof
! Very dramatic. That would solve all of our problems.”

“Would it?” Brad looked amused. “I’m sorry to inform you that only the Old Bloods can do that. Changing into a wolf is easy, a beginner’s trick. Any well-established vampire — say, between fifty and a hundred years old — can dissolve into mist or dust, too. But a bat is harder. The extra mass has to go somewhere. It’s a bigger, more powerful magic.”

He sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

I paused, giving him my full attention. “Is that true?”

Brad’s fang-filled smile had become familiar. “I did my homework, remember?”

He had mentioned that.

“Oh! Oh, wait,” I said, back on task. “Check this out.” Holding my breath, I pulled out a men’s large tall uniform. Black with red piping. Cotton, not polyester.

He shook his head. “Too ‘Iron Chef.’”

I exhaled.

“Try not to take it too hard,” Brad told me. “My faith in us is eternal.” He reached out and tucked a stray hair behind my ear. “How’s that broken heart doing? That boy going out of state to school?”

“I don’t have a broken heart. It’s . . . he’s still my friend.”

“Quincie, we all have first loves,” my chef replied. “At the time, they seem more significant because we haven’t had anything to compare them with yet. But there’s a reason they’re called ‘first.’ More often than not, there’s a better love yet to come.”

“It sounds like you’ve been there,” I observed. “What happened?”

He took my hand in his, and we headed toward the door. “She’s dead.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Does it hurt?” I asked. “I mean, like it did at first?”

“If anyone threatened someone I loved with that kind of pain,” Brad replied, “I swear I’d kill them myself.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s lame, I know —”

“It’s not lame,” Brad replied. “It means a lot. Any other costuming ideas?”

It seemed considerate to let him change the subject, and I gave the question some thought. It was Saturday afternoon, and most shops would be closing in another hour or so. Plus, the U.T. game would be over soon, spilling burnt orange onto the streets.

Was Kieren there with Meghan and his dad? They always ordered season tickets, and his mama usually worked on Saturdays. Kieren hadn’t mentioned football in ages.

These days, attending a college game was probably too normal for him.

He’d never wanted to be normal, I realized. Go to U.T. and study whatever, then get a regular job and marry a girl like me who did something as common as restaurant management. He talked about his inner Wolf, how dangerous it could be. Needing a pack so he wouldn’t hurt anyone, especially me. So he wouldn’t have to worry all the time. I believed that was part of it.

But big picture, Kieren had always wanted a different life, a special life. He’d earned it with his werestudies. He’d been born to it on his mama’s side. He’d become the Wolf pack scholar, mated to some bitch he hadn’t even met yet.

Would Kieren miss me the way Brad missed his first love?

Did Kieren even think of me that way? I’d been so sure, on and off, but now . . .

Brad’s hand in mine felt cool, reassuring. Like we walked this way all the time.

On the way out, I brightened. “There’s this one place, Second Chances, on Burnet. They might have a black trench coat —”

“Trench coats,” Brad said, escorting me to The Banana, “are for gumshoes, perverts, and rainy days.”

U
ncle D had taken off tonight with Ruby, saying he’d be home before 1
A.M.
His good deed for the day: letting Travis off early. Mine: helping Brad clean the kitchen, which had gone faster than we’d expected. We didn’t usually work on Sundays, but with the reopening next weekend, there was so much to do.

Yawning, I shuffled upstairs in the dark, holding fast to the handrail. I loved the house, what had been my parents’ house. It wasn’t big, two stories, built in the 1930s, very art deco, expanded in the ’60s and again when I was five. The furnishings were a combination of pieces passed down from both sides of the family, including souvenirs from my parents’ many jaunts to Central and South America. Mostly of the basket, rug, and figurine variety. Mama had been particular about wanting things just so, and that’s pretty much how we’d left them. Except for her indoor trees and the hanging ferns that had died off over the years, the place hadn’t much changed.

Turning into my darkened bedroom, though, something stank to high heaven. My first thought was sewage leak; my second, decomposing animal. I’d never seen a mouse, or anything but tiny milky lizards. But maybe a squirrel had burrowed into the attic. Still, that didn’t explain the wafting garlic scent mixed in with the ick.

One step. Another. Reaching for the light switch, I tripped over a
body
and, flailing, landed with an
oomph
on a huge hard-shell animal, which hopped three feet into the air, knocking me off, back onto the still body. Screaming, I scrambled against the door, which slammed behind me. It, it . . .

The animal was a shifter. It had to be. It was too damn big not to be. But werepeople were of the furred persuasion, occasionally feathered or scaled. Not hard.

As for whoever on the floor, I had no idea.

Steeling myself, I hit the lights, illuminating the dead-looking body of Clyde — a spray bottle in one hand, something pink in the other — and a five-and-a-half foot werearmadillo. No blood, but pungent fluids of a yellow-and-brown nature on the floor, close to the ’dillo. Even more disgusting, some of the sticky residue was on me.

Kieren had once told me that shifter transformations varied in pain, mess, ease, and smell from wereperson to wereperson and species to species. This guy’s odor was like months-old sweaty gym socks. And the ’dillo himself? He looked like a cross between a huge gecko and a huge hog. Cowering with his head pulled into his shell, tail curling to meet it. Poor thing looked scared to death. Of
me.