The Awesome (13 page)

He stopped looping his leg behind his head long enough to peer at me. “Your job, Miss Maggie, is to stop your mother from filing that paperwork
without
mentioning our visit. Keeping this conversation quiet helps me, helps you, helps her. I don’t care what you tell her about Matthew, but leave me out of it. Understand?”

I frowned at him, and by association the challenge before me. How was I supposed to explain everything without mentioning the talking to him part? “Hey Mom, the tooth fairy stopped by and said you’re boned if you don’t keep your trap shut about that Plasma kill” didn’t quite cut the mustard, nor did, “Hey, a little bird told me some territory prince has a bounty on your head!” Mom’d want a better explanation than that. Besides, any time she thought I hid something from her she was like a bloodhound sniffing a trail: unrelenting. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust me, more that she was that nosy.

“I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. And you will.”

Sure, I will, Asshole. Sure I will.

I cringed as soon as I thought it, knowing he probably ‘heard’ it, but he said nothing so maybe it slipped by. One could hope, anyway.

“Now then, did you have any other questions? Anything I can do for you?”

“Uhh. No, I don’t think so.”

“Excellent. Lubov will give you my telephone number should you need to contact me. Remember, Maggie, you won’t tell a living soul about our arrangement.”

“Sure.”

I had every intention of bringing him up. I had every intention of telling Mom
everything
and explaining why she shouldn’t go after Max despite his heavy handedness. Too bad I forgot that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

K
IDNAPPED, BROUGHT TO
a vampire prince’s den, and back before two in the afternoon. All in all, it was an efficient crime and, for all that I’d piss and moan about it, far less scarring than it could have been. I had all of my limbs, all of my blood, and I hadn’t peed myself. For reasons I couldn’t understand, Lubov insisted on carrying me into the house. She deposited me on the couch as gently as, say, she’d throw a sack of onions on the floor.

“It was nice to be meeting you. You are good girl.”

“Uhh, sure, Lubov. Thanks. Now get out.”

She waved like we were old friends before heavy-stepping back to the SUV. I scrambled to the front windows to watch the car pull away. As soon as they were out of sight, I rifled through Mom’s desk crap, looking for the slip of paper with her latest phone number on it. I found it stuck to a Post-It note on the back of a pizza menu. I dialed frantically, hoping she’d take the call. After about six rings she picked up, and I heard her turning her Bon Jovi down right as Richie Sambora wailed “WANTED” at the top of his lungs.

“Yeah?”

“Hey. Uhh, sorry to bother you, but earlier today I...”

The rest of the words died, like Max choked them out of me through the phone line. I felt pressure on my throat, invisible fingers squeezing my explanation away. I gasped and rasped, desperate for air. I must have been panting or wheezing aloud, because my mom repeated my name over and over, her tone rising in urgency when I couldn’t answer.

“Maggie? Maggie. Margaret!”

“Mom. I...”

“What’s going on?”

The more I struggled to tell her I’d been taken from the house, the more lightheaded I felt. Blood rushed to my face, my head swam, and I got so dizzy I nearly dropped the phone. Somehow I kept my grip, though I had to stagger to the couch to sit so I wouldn’t puke or pass out in the middle of the floor. My chest constricted and my tongue felt heavy. One time, before I’d been expelled from school, I’d seen a girl get stung by a bee at recess. She was allergic and went into anaphylactic shock. Her face turned blue, she twitched, and her eyes rolled up into her head. That’s how I felt, then—like I’d introduced a toxin to my body and every fiber of my being rebelled against its invasion.

“Can’t... breathe.”

“I’m about twenty minutes from home. Do I need to call an ambulance?”

“No. Be okay. Be okay in a min... yeah.”

The second I stopped trying to talk about Max, the strangling sensation ceased. My breath came back, my head cleared. The change was absolute, from total body collapse to ‘fine and dandy, thanks for asking’. He’d warned me not to say anything, but I thought it was more a suggestion than whatever the hell this was. It was obviously some magic douchery on his part. Not only did it scare the crap out of me, it made me angry. Angrier than I’d been at being taken from the house in the first place.

This bordered on punch-a-bunny angry.

“Maggie? Talk to me.”

“Here. I’m here. Sorry.”

I snagged some paper from her desk and something to write with, which ended up being a hot pink colored pencil because pens disappeared into the great void of Janice when no one was looking. I attempted to write what had happened, thinking maybe I could get around the ‘no sharing clause’ with ingenuity, but my hand cramped, every muscle agonizingly tense as I tried to write Max’s name. I dropped the pencil onto the floor with a frustrated shriek.

“Mom, I’m... come home. I’m okay, come home,” I managed, working my fingers into a fist. Clench, unclench, over and over until the tingling abated.

“All right. Sit tight. I’m almost home, okay?”

“Yeah.”

I flung the phone across the room. It walloped against a chair cushion and skittered onto the floor. It would have been so much more satisfying to whip it against the wall and blast it into twelve trillion pieces, but then I’d have no phone at all, and considering what happened earlier in the day, it wasn’t worth the risk.

T
HE SOLE GOOD
thing about the morning’s shittery was that Mom’s concern for my well-being trumped last night’s argument. Our fight lingered like a bad smell, but we back-burnered it to concentrate on the matter at hand, which was me gurgling like a broken toilet while I was on the phone. I watched her pace the kitchen, warding off her nerves by keeping busy. Score for me, she produced two heaping roast beef sandwiches in the process. I wasn’t hungry, so I picked off the meat, leaving the cheese, bread, and mustard behind.

“You’re fine now. Just like that.”

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

Before she’d come home, I’d tested the lengths of my vocal freedom. I could get away with “I went out today” but the moment I tried to add in anything resembling a detail (“to Boston”, “to the city”, “north”) I locked down. If I lied and said “to a pony farm” or “to store my dead hooker collection in the trunk of your car”, that was acceptable. Writing things down worked the same way. Unless I wanted to get adept with smoke signals, Braille, or Morse code real quick, I was screwed.

This presented a fresh, interesting problem of trying to explain my newly manifested health ailments to a concerned parent.

“You’re sure you don’t want to go to the hospital,” she said for the thirtieth time since walking through the door.

“Totally sure. If it happens again, then yeah, but I think I uhh... I dunno. I’m fine now.”

She watched me dismantle the second half of my sandwich and hone in on the roast beef. It was so rare it would moo in protest any time now. I was cool with that; the tender pink middle reaffirmed my status as upper-crust food chain. Screw you cows, I’m a predator.

“Something wrong with your bread?”

“No. Not hungry.”

“Uh huh.”

She pressed a hand to my head, but I batted her away with a quiet growl. “I’m fine. Seriously. Probably swallowed a bug or something.”

“Right. A bug. And I grew a schlong. Call me Charlie.”

I decided my best tactic would be to change the subject, and fast. I didn’t want to sit around the kitchen all day assuring her I was all right—that sounded about as fun as dousing myself in gasoline—so I had two choices. I could bring things back to Jeffrey and repair last night’s rift, or I could engage her about Matthew and that whole ‘bounty on your head’ thing without giving away any actual details. Option two was way harder than option one and required a lot more thinking. The good news was she was bad about paperwork and wouldn’t get to the report for at least a couple days. I had time yet.

One it was.

I didn’t like that she bumped uglies with a vampire; I found the whole concept reprehensible. But being perfectly honest with myself, she was a grown woman and this was her choice. If she wanted to let the stiff put his stiffy in her...

Gross. Her decision, but gross.

“How does he get a boner? I mean, he has no blood pressure.”

I could have broached the subject more delicately, but Mom didn’t seem to care. She stared at me for a minute before quirking a half-smile.

“All the plumbing works. But if you want the juicy details, he’s good sized with a slight curve to the...”

“THAT’S AN ICK, MOM!”

“What? TMI?”

I threw a piece of mustard-bread at her. She snagged it to take a bite from the crust.

“Nudity’s a beautiful, natural thing. Be proud of your body, Margaret Jane. You only get one this life. No point in getting all hung up about it.”

“You don’t have to share it with everyone!”

“I don’t! Just you, Jeff, and your boyfriend. Oops on the last. Sorry.”

“One date doesn’t make him my boyfriend,” I said.

“Touching his winky does!”

“Gross.”

We bantered like everything was peachy-keen, but it was stiffer than usual. I rolled my eyes at the appropriate times, and laughed when she joked, but I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was clear she did the same; there were thin lines at the corners of her mouth that belied her good-natured chatter. Things weren’t going to get copacetic until we stopped dorking around and approached this thing head on. Which meant, as much as I hated to admit it, eating crow.

“About last night.” I skimmed my hand over the back of my neck, my fingers toying with the ends of my hair. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I was surprised, and freaked out, and I acted like a douche. I’m sorry.”

Her brows shot straight to her hairline. I wasn’t exactly known for my grace when I felt I’d been wronged. Actually, I was kind of a stubborn pain in the ass about stuff like this, so I fully expected her to relish the moment, maybe get smug that I owned up to a failure. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Her countenance softened, and she squeezed my forearm. “It takes balls to admit when we’re wrong, so thank you. And you know what? I screwed up, too. I handled that like all kinds of shit. So let’s call a truce, yeah?”

“Truce. I don’t like it,” I admitted before I could think to shut myself up. “You taught me how bad vampires can be. It’s hard to believe everything’s gonna be cool. I don’t want you mauled or whatever.”

“I know. I ask that you give him a shot. And don’t be a shit when he’s around. I said too much good stuff about you and you’ll make me look bad.”

“Okay.”

She ruffled my hair and then she took off to hit the shower. I gave the MF list a glance to see if there was anything worthwhile to do that afternoon. Outside of the goblin job, there was a minor haunting in Bridgewater and a disturbed grave in Plymouth. I liked disturbed grave jobs; they were always something awesome, like a witch dug up a body for nefarious purposes, a necromancer raised a corpse as a slave, or a voodoo curse had robbed some poor bastard of restful death. Most times we didn’t find what happened to the rotter—whoever raised them usually had a purpose in mind, and it wasn’t to hang around the cemetery for a great big party—but the hunt was always interesting, and success stories paid well. Plus they didn’t pop up all that often, so seeing one on MF was like a deranged treat.

I made my way towards the bathroom so I could holler through the door. “Hey, Mom? Undead thinger in Plymouth. You going?”

“Nope,
we
are. Gear it up. We’re outta here in a half hour.”

T
HE LOVE FEST
in the kitchen was far less indicative that things were back to normal than the going-on-a-job-together thing. We didn’t say much on the drive, but that was mostly thanks to Bon Jovi’s Greatest Hits and rolled-down windows. It was gorgeous out, a balmy seventy degrees, and it seemed a sin to coop ourselves up when we could take advantage of sunlight and fresh air.

The cemetery was on top of a hill, near a stone church at least a few hundred years old. There were hotels and restaurants all around—shops, too—which meant we were dead-center of the tourist district. The man who’d called us was with the sheriff’s department, and he waited for us near an above-ground sarcophagus. That wasn’t where the disturbance was, though. It was two rows back, in front of a new headstone. I glanced at the name carved into the granite, then the date below. Lauren Miller, our missing corpse, buried only two weeks ago. She was twenty-four years old.

The man offered a hand as we neared. He was about 5’4” tall and equally as wide, with a gray mustache and beard, and an embroidered ball cap shielding his eyes and face. “Janice?”

“Officer Tate. Nice to meet you. This is my daughter, Maggie. She’s my apprentice and will be assisting me today.”