CHAPTER TEN
June 14
Two years, six months, and seven days to the zero date
University of Texas, Austin
Two years, six months, and seven days to the zero date
University of Texas, Austin
“Hey, Pyro. You
lost?”
The hail startled
Rabbit, who’d been head-down, lost in his thoughts as he’d hiked
across campus. Pausing just shy of the cement bridge that led to
the front entrance of the squat, bunkerlike structure that
ironically housed the art history department, he did a mental eye
roll and glanced back over his shoulder at the lanky, brown-haired
guy who was waving at him. “Not lost, Smitty. Just
slumming.”
“Ha! Good one.”
Anna’s newest grad student loped a few strides to catch up, made
like he was going to punch Rabbit in the arm, then aborted the
motion in a fake-out designed to show anyone watching that the two
of them were buds, without actually making contact. Everyone who
was anyone in the student social structure knew that Rabbit didn’t
like to be touched, except by Myrinne. “Ready to come to your
senses and give up on that science shit?”
It was a running
semijoke among the younger members of the Mayan studies department,
who, after seeing Rabbit ace a few grad- level courses, had decided
that he was the best naturally intuitive Mayanist the university
had seen in forever, and ought to be majoring in their department
rather than physics.
What they didn’t get,
and what he never intended to tell them, was that the whole Mayan
thing wasn’t intuitive at all. It was the way he’d been raised.
Rabbit’s old man might not have given much of a crap about his
upbringing—Red-Boar had been far more concerned about the memory
movies playing inside his own skull—but Jox had taken up the slack,
with Strike and Anna helping off and on. Rabbit had learned the
legends and histories from them, and had picked up a better than
rudimentary understanding of the glyphs and language even before
the barrier—and his own magic—had come alive. So really, the Mayan
studies shit had been fluff classes for him. Cheating, really. Not
that he was going to fess up on that one, though Anna had
threatened to flunk him if he didn’t stop signing up for her
classes.
The mental filters
he’d installed in his own skull to prevent himself from talking
about—or performing—magic on campus wouldn’t let him tell guys like
Smitty what was really going on with him. Even if he’d been able to
talk about it, though, he wouldn’t have. Unlike in high school,
where he hadn’t dared be good at anything lest he get more of the
wrong sort of attention from the Reich High Command that had
dominated the student scene, at UT he’d found that a guy got points
for being good at shit, not just from the teachers, but from the
other students.
Granted, his
popularity hadn’t really taken off until he’d set Myrinne’s dorm
room on fire, thereby gaining his all too apt nickname, but
still.
“Nah,” he said,
playing along. “I’m still into the science shit.” Which remained a
low-grade surprise to him. He’d never seen himself as an egghead,
but ever since his first day of the midlevel physics class he’d
tested into, when Professor Burns had talked about how fire was
nothing more than air molecules breaking the speed limit, he’d been
hooked. And the deeper into it he’d gotten, the more he’d felt like
he’d found something important, something he’d been looking for
without knowing he was looking.
Smitty shook his
head. “Wasting your talent, Pyro. Wasting your talent.” Then he
grinned, his brain shifting lightning-quick—as it often did—to
another, unrelated topic. “You here to see your aunt?”
Rabbit nodded. “Yep.
She around?”
As a shortcut to
explaining his lifelong relationship with the head of the Mayan
studies department, and why he checked in with her on a regular
basis, he and Anna had decided he’d just pretend she was his aunt
and move on. To his surprise, nobody had called him on the absolute
lack of familial resemblance. It didn’t seem to matter that his
eyes were pale blue to her cobalt, that his features were hawk-
sharp to her classical beauty, or that his hair, which stood up in
a pseudo-military brush cut these days, was blah brown to her
chestnut-highlighted sable. When he’d asked Myrinne why that was,
she’d given him one of her looks—this one conveying, You’re kind of cute when you’re being oblivious—and
said that they gave off similar vibes, and that although the
conscious minds of most humans were insensitive to magic per se,
their subconscious minds registered those vibes and chunked him and
Anna together in the category of “powerful bad-ass; don’t piss
off.”
He liked being in
that category almost as much as he liked having a nickname and an
open invite to most everything on campus that might interest him.
But he wished to hell the same could be said of his status among
the Nightkeepers. It seemed that the more functional he got in the
outside world, the more Strike wanted to keep him there, away from
the magic.
“She’s in her office,
last I knew.” Smitty waved in the direction of Anna’s first-floor
window, which was closed and blocked off by the curtains she kept
drawn most of the time these days.
“Thanks. Catch you
later.” Rabbit sketched a wave and headed across the causeway,
which always made him think of the drawbridge leading to a castle,
albeit a short, ugly castle.
Smitty dogged him,
apparently headed the same way. “You coming to the thing tomorrow
night?”
Rabbit didn’t have a
frigging clue what thing he was talking about, but lifted a
shoulder. “Maybe. Hafta see—family stuff, you know.” If he had
anything to say about it, he and Myrinne would be back in New Mex
by the weekend. Screw Strike’s plan for having them stay in Texas
through summer school and on into the fall semester. There were
more important things than class credits, especially when there was
a solid chance that the credits themselves would cease to exist
prior to graduation day, 2013.
“You should come,”
Smitty pressed. “It’s going to rock.”
“I’ll bet.” They
passed through the main entrance. Rabbit turned and made himself
punch the other guy in the shoulder. “Have a good
one.”
As he headed off,
Smitty was standing dead-ass still, looking like someone had just
given him a million bucks. Rabbit nearly shook his head, but
didn’t, because who was he to say the human college set had it
wrong? Theirs was a different culture; that was all. One he was
learning to live inside, and maybe even to thrive
within.
Didn’t mean that was
where he wanted to be long-term, though.
Pausing at Anna’s
door, he knocked. “Professor Catori? It’s Rabbit. I need five
minutes.” Maybe before he would’ve walked right in, or called her
by her first name just to show he could. But before, he’d
admittedly been an asshole most of the time. These days, he tried
to play the little things pretty straight . . . and save up his
asshole quota for the big stuff.
“Door’s unlocked,”
Anna called, her voice muffled by the heavy panel separating them.
When Rabbit pushed through and closed the door at his back, she
looked up from where she was seated behind her desk, working on
what looked like e-mail. She was wearing a soft steel gray sweater
that blended with the backdrop of bookshelves holding artifacts
that he privately thought of as All Forgeries Great and Small. She
greeted him with a smile. “Hey, Pyro.”
He winced, only half
joking. “Great. Now they’ve got you doing it.”
“Fits.”
“No shit, huh?” But
despite the friendly exchange, he stayed standing, not because he
was trying to loom over her—even though he could loom if he wanted to these days—but because
he was twitchy. Silence stretched between them for a moment . . .
and that was enough to give him his answer. “Let me guess. It’s a
‘hell, no.’ ”
Anna sighed. “Rabbit
. . . you know he’s only trying to do what’s best.”
“He” was Strike, and
in the king’s world, “what’s best” was apparently keeping Rabbit
and Myrinne as far away from the action as possible by loading them
with classes regardless of the school year. Except, of course, when
the magi absolutely, positively needed Rabbit’s specific talents,
whereupon Strike zapped in, grabbed him for the job, then dumped
him back in his dorm room as quickly as humanly—or
magely—possible.
“This sucks.” Rabbit
heard his own tone border on whiny territory as a familiar churning
frustration rose within him. Reminding himself that he was better
than the anger, he tamped it down to a low simmer, lost the whine,
and said, “Sorry. I know it’s not your decision. You’re not king.”
Though there were times he’d thought she would’ve made the better
ruler of the two of them, in large part because she wanted nothing
to do with the job. Or really, he suspected, with the
Nightkeepers.
“You’re getting to
him, though.”
Rabbit narrowed his
eyes. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. The
longer you keep your nose clean here, kick it in the classroom, and
generally behave like someone he’d want to have at his back, the
more he’s going to forget why he doesn’t want you
around.”
From anyone else,
Rabbit would’ve figured that for a blatant pitch to keep him on the
straight and narrow, i.e., attempted bribery with no real
commitment to an endpoint. Coming from Anna, though, he was tempted
to believe it was for real. She thought she owed his old man a life
debt, and upon Red-Boar’s death had transferred that owesie to
Rabbit. That was why she’d stepped up and gotten in Strike’s face
over whether Myrinne would be allowed to stay at Skywatch even
though she was pure human, not bound to any of the magi, and had a
history of dabbling in the occult. More, Anna had, for the most
part anyway, tried to be available when Rabbit needed her, and
tried to fix the considerable amount of shit he’d screwed up in
past years.
All that made him
want to believe her, as did his desire to think that life was fair,
that he’d be able to work his way into the fighting core of the
Nightkeepers by proving that, six months shy of being legal to
drink, he was ready to do a man’s job as a warrior. But he’d
learned early and often that life wasn’t fair . . . and when Anna
looked at him now, she didn’t quite meet his eyes. Maybe it was her
vibe, maybe his blunted mind-bending talent, but he suddenly knew
she was lying. He wasn’t sure about what, but she was definitely
hiding something. Maybe not about Strike’s opinion or the school
stuff, but there was something important going on that she wasn’t
telling him about, no doubt because Strike-out had decided it was
need-to-know and Rabbit wasn’t on the list.
“Anything big going
on back there?” he asked casually.
She shook her head.
“Nothing really. They’re gearing up for the solstice. Strike’ll
pick you and Myrinne up for the day, like we planned.”
The lie was still
there. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t going to wait for the
solstice, or else the solstice was part of it, but there were
already major plans being made . . . without him. Anger flared, hot
and hard and feeling like fire. For a second, he thought about
yanking down his mental blocks and getting inside her head, looking
for what she’d chosen—or been ordered—not to tell him. What is it? he wanted to scream at her.
What’s going on? Why doesn’t he want me
there? But he held it together. Barely.
She looked at him for
real, finally, and he didn’t see the lie anymore. It had been
there, though. He was sure of it. “Be strong,” she said softly.
“Your time will come.”
“Thanks,” he said.
But inwardly, he was thinking, What-the-fuck-ever.
“Was there something
else?”
He didn’t know if
that was a hint, or if she really wanted to know the answer, but
either way, he wasn’t in a sharing mood anymore. Maybe he’d hiked
over to the ugly castle rather than called because he’d been toying
with asking her about the Order of Xibalba and some of the stuff
Myrinne had been bringing up lately, sort of get Anna’s take. But
now? Forget it.
“Nah. Just wanted to
check in with some face time, so you can report back to big brother
that I’m behaving myself.”
She smiled, the
expression reaching her eyes. “I’ll do that. And,
Rabbit?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m proud of
you.”
Under other
circumstances—like if she hadn’t just lied to his face—that
might’ve caught him hard. Gods knew he was working his ass off not
to fuck up these days. Given the scenario, though, he just faked a
smile. “Thanks. Some days, I’m proud of me too.”
But as he headed back
across campus, he didn’t know what the hell he was, other than
torn. For a change he was doing his damnedest to think through all
the possible outcomes and talk to the right people, rather than
going off half-cocked and burning up on impact. Literally. But it
wasn’t easy to talk things out when he didn’t know who the hell to
talk to anymore.
Anna had said time
and again that she owed him, but he didn’t trust her not to blab if
she thought it was in his best interest. She wasn’t a stickler for
the writs, but if it came down to a choice between Rabbit and her
brother, Strike was going to win out every time. Same applied to
Jox. Michael was a possibility for a go-to guy; he’d gone to the
mat for Rabbit the previous winter, when the gods had demanded his
execution and Michael had refused. But Rabbit figured he owed the
guy big for that one, and wasn’t sure it was kosher to dump
something on top of that debt. Besides, although Michael had
ruthlessly followed his own path in the beginning, now that he and
Sasha were together, his path paralleled the party line more often
than not. Which left Rabbit . . . where? Who could he go to when
his usual go-to girl was the one he needed to talk
about?
A name ghosted
through his brain, one he’d long ago told himself to forget, at
least in that context. Not that he’d ever actually managed to
forget her.
Patience. The youngest of the Nightkeepers, she was
only six years older than him, and after Red-Boar’s horrific death,
she’d stepped in as his friend, his sister figure, his mother
figure, and his first massive crush, all wrapped into one. She and
the twins had let him into their lives, made him feel like he had a
family, like someone gave a shit whether he woke up each morning,
and whether he descended into the same sort of funk his old man had
turned into an art form. Brandt had let him in too, but only
because Patience had insisted. And after the twins were sent away
and the problems in their marriage had gotten more and more
obvious, Brandt had wanted less and less to do with him, until the
day the shit finally hit the fan: Rabbit had been on guard duty
during an op and got distracted, and Patience had paid for it.
Terrified, Rabbit had bolted. By the time he’d made it back to
Skywatch, he’d had Myrinne with him. He’d meant to apologize to
Patience, but somehow that never happened, and then it got to a
point where it was too late to apologize, too late to try to fix
things.
“Which is why you
shouldn’t go there,” Rabbit told himself as he crossed a parking
lot and sent a couple of waves at guys who “hey, Pyro’d”
him.
But deep down inside
him, a voice was saying, Why not go
there? It’d been a while since he and Patience had been
tight, but she had an open, generous heart. She might be willing to
forgive him for being an asshole. More, although she was loyal to
the Nightkeeper cause, she wasn’t too keen on Strike, who still
wouldn’t tell her where the twins were hidden. It was for their own
good to stay incognito with their winikin, it was true. But still . . . not letting
her see her kids for going on a year now? That was harsh. Rabbit
figured that’d make her likely to keep her own counsel rather than
run straight to the king if she thought he was in danger of making
yet another Rabbit-size mistake.
In fact, the more he
thought about it, the better it sounded. Or was he talking himself
into something stupid? Gods knew it wouldn’t be the first time. But
it wasn’t like he could ask Myrinne her opinion. Yeah, that’d be
smooth: Hey, babe. I’m not sure whether I like
where you’re going with this whole “You should look into the other
half of your heritage, because your old man might’ve been a real
son of a bitch, but he doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who
would’ve slept with the enemy. So maybe the Xibalbans aren’t
inherently bad. Maybe Iago is an outlier with his own agenda, and
the Xibalbans themselves could prove to be allies instead of
enemies.” Which sounds good when you say it, but feels pretty
cracked when I think about it on my own . . . so I was wondering
what you thought about me hooking back up with Patience to talk
about it. Yeah, Myr would just love that. Not only was she big into the idea of
him doing his own thing, whether or not it coincided with the
Nightkeepers’ paradigms, but she and Patience didn’t get along. At
all.
Still, before he was
really aware that he’d made the decision, he had detoured off the
track leading off campus to his and Myrinne’s summer sublet, and
parked his ass on a cement ledge that was part of the so-called
landscaping at UT—which, to his largely New England-raised self was
more land-pouring than landscaping, and suffered from a definite
lack of green. But regardless, it was a place to park ass while he
dug out his cell phone. Then, not letting himself think it through
any further, because thinking hadn’t gotten him real far yet in
this particular case, he punched in the number for Patience’s
private cell.
When it started
ringing, he had a fleeting thought that she might’ve changed the
number by now, or ditched the phone entirely. He was so expecting
to hear a recorded voice tell him the line was no longer in service
that when she answered with a breathless, anticipatory whisper of,
“Yes, yes, I’m here,” he went mute for a second.
It was a second too
long.
“Hello?” she said,
her tone going from hushed excitement to dread in an instant.
“Hannah? Woody?” Her words tumbled over one another, the way they
did when her brain started bounding ahead, cascading from one
thought to the next. “Oh, gods. There’s something wrong. What is
it? What’s wrong? Where are you?
What—”
“Stop!” Rabbit interrupted. “Just stop.”
Shit. She’d kept the phone as a secret
line of communication to the winikin
guarding her sons, and must’ve forgotten he had the number. Now she
was heading toward full-on panic mode.
Before he could get
into an explanation, she snapped in a horror- laced voice, “Who are
you? How did you get this number? If you’ve done anything to my
babies, I’ll—”
“Patience!” He did
the interrupting thing again, this time rushing on to say, “It’s
Rabbit. It’s Rabbit. Do you hear me? It’s not Hannah or Wood, or
one of the rats.” He’d called the twins his rug rats, back when
they’d been his miniature tagalongs. When she didn’t say anything,
just gave a strangled sob, he moderated his tone. “It’s me. I’m
sorry I scared you. I just . . . I need someone to talk to.” Now it
was his turn to babble a little when there was silence on the other
end of the line. “I wanted to . . . Shit. I wanted to talk to you
about Myrinne and me, about how she says stuff that makes sense at
first, but . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t always mesh with what Jox
and those guys taught me. And how am I supposed to know who to
trust, who to believe?” When she still hadn’t said anything, to
interrupt or otherwise, he started thinking she’d already hung up.
“Shit,” he said again, in case she was still on the other end of
the line. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you like this. And
I’m sorry about back then, at the museum. I was a total dickwad,
and you got hurt because of it, and then I screwed up by taking
off. Now I’ve made it worse. But I’ll hang up now, and I’ll lose
this number. You don’t have to worry about me calling
again.”
He wasn’t really
breathing as he lowered the phone, trying not to think of how
crappy he’d just made her feel, how terrified she must’ve been. All
because he’d dialed before he thought it through. Another fuckup.
Seriously, how could one guy screw things up as consistently as he
did? It was a godsdamned talent—that was what it was.
Halfway wondering
what the forearm mark for “incurable fuckup” would look like, he
moved to end the call and delete the number. Before he got there,
though, he heard the thin thread of a tear- laced voice say, “Don’t
hang up.”
The phone shook
slightly as he lifted it to his ear again. “I’m—” His throat closed
on the words. He had to swallow hard before he could continue. “I’m
still here.”
“So am
I.”
The three simple
words unlocked a hard, hot torrent of grief. It slapped through
him, flailed at him, accused him of all his past sins and more.
Then it faded, leaving him clutching the phone, hunching his body
around it in full sight of numerous classmates who’d only recently
decided he was supercool. He wasn’t feeling cool now, though. He
was sweating greasily down his spine. “I’m sorry,” he said again,
and this time he wasn’t just talking about scaring her with the
call. “I’m so godsdamned sorry.”
“Me
too.”
Only two words this
time, but they spun through him like sunlight—real, warm yellow
sunlight, not the orange shit currently beating down on him. The
crushing pressure on his lungs eased, and he could breathe again.
His heart could beat again, when he hadn’t been aware of it bumping
off rhythm. “How . . . how are you?” He wasn’t sure he had the
right to ask, but couldn’t not
ask.
“I’m . . .” She blew
out a breath. “I’m doing my duty.”
“Yeah. I’m starting
to figure that one out myself.”
“I’ve heard you’re
doing a good job of it.”
“You’re shitting
me.”
“I shit you not. The
word on the street—or at least in the great room and out by the
picnic tables—is that our boy has grown up, and he’s looking more
like a mage and a man than a punk-ass juvie these
days.”
“Then why am I still
here? Why hasn’t he—” Hearing the potential for a whine, Rabbit
broke off. “Never mind.”
But Patience
answered, “Because he’s got a shit-ton on his plate, and he’s had
to out-of-sight-out-of-mind a few people and problems that he just
can’t deal with right now.” There was no need to clarify who
he was. In a way, Strike held both of
them hostage.
“Which am I—a person
or a problem?”
“A person. Definitely
a person. He loves you; don’t think any different. But you scare
him too. He isn’t sure how powerful you really are, and what you’re
going to be able to do when your magic matures fully.”
I don’t blame him, Rabbit thought, but didn’t say.
Hell, he scared himself some days, when
he could feel the magic rising up inside him, banging against the
filters and demanding to be let out. When that happened, his body
temp spiked, his muscles and joints hurt like hell, and he felt
somehow old. Sometimes it lasted a few
minutes, sometimes a few hours. Once, it’d been two days before
he’d felt like himself again; he’d stayed in bed, claimed to have
the flu, and kind of liked how Myr had fussed over him, saying his
aura was all jacked up. When he’d gotten back on his feet, he
hadn’t much liked what he’d looked like in the mirror—all hollow
eyed and drawn—but that’d gone away eventually. Since then, the
magic had been quiet. Oddly, that hadn’t made him feel any
better—which was part of why he was jonesing to get back to
Skywatch, where he could get behind the wards, drop his mental
shields, and see what was doing with his magic. Not that he’d told
Strike any of that; he hadn’t told anyone.
As though he’d
responded—or maybe she was following her own inner
dialogue?—Patience said thoughtfully, “No, you’re a person to him,
as are the twins. The problem I was talking about is Snake Mendez.
. . . He’s one of us, but he’s not, you know? And Strike’s dealing
with him by not dealing.”
“I guess.” Mendez was
a full-blood Nightkeeper, but the winikin who’d saved and raised him hadn’t been the
most mentally stable of guardians, and Mendez had gone way off the
reservation. More, he’d found the magic on his own, just like
Strike and Patience had. Except that Mendez was a hard-ass, and it
sounded like he hung way too close to the dark side of the Force.
He’d gotten hauled in by some bounty hunter, tossed in the slammer,
and had stayed there nearly two years so far: eighteen months on
the original sentence, then six more for attacking another inmate.
Rabbit was pretty sure that Strike—or, more likely, Jox—had made
sure Mendez had stayed put. Out of sight, out of mind, indeed. “He
must be thinking that jail’s one of the safest places to keep a guy
like that, at least until we get into the library and figure out
some of what’s coming next.”
“Don’t count on the
library. It looks like that’s not going to be the answer we’d
hoped.” She gave him a quick rundown of Lucius’s latest attempt to
breach the barrier, surprising Rabbit, who hadn’t realized Jade had
left the university, or that there was any sort of experiment
planned. And oh, holy shit on the sun god being trapped in Xibalba,
with a rescue needed within T minus seven days and counting. Was
that what Anna had been hiding? Maybe, maybe
not, he thought, trying to keep up as Patience bounced from
one thought to the next, more talking at him than with him, chattering fast, as though
she feared he’d cut her off if she slowed down. “But back to
Mendez. I’ve been thinking—what if Strike’s wrong about him? What
if we’re blindly accepting what the king’s telling us because,
well, he’s the king?”
Rabbit zeroed back in
on the convo, as what Patience was saying suddenly started to
parallel some of what Myrinne had been telling him for the past few
weeks. “The jaguars have a rep for being stubborn,” he said
carefully.
“Yes!” she said,
excited now. “And who’s to say there’s really only one way to
accomplish a goal, right? I’m not saying he’s wrong, and I’m not
talking treason. I’m just wondering if sometimes maybe we’re too
quick to follow the writs. This is the third millennium. Maybe it’s
time to . . . update, I guess.”
Rabbit wasn’t so sure
he was tracking her anymore, and the greasy sweat that had prickled
his back only moments earlier had gone cold, sending a chill down
his spine. “That’s kind of why I wanted to talk to you. Myrinne and
I have been . . . I don’t know . . . discussing a few things . . .
and I wanted a reality check from someone I trust, and who
won’t—”
“Shit,” Patience
hissed as an aside. “Damn it!”
He sat bolt upright.
“What’s wrong?”
“Brandt’s coming, and
he doesn’t know I still have this phone. I’ve got to go, but I’ll
call you back later, okay?”
“But—”
“Sorry, sorry. I know
you called to talk about you, and I babbled about me. But don’t you
see? You already know the answer; you’re just looking for someone
else to say it first. So, okay, I will. If you love her, then you
need to trust her, and you’ve got to put her above everyone else in
your life.”
“But the
writs—”
“Are more than three
thousand years old. And Strike’s doing the best he possibly can,
but he’s a man, not a god. With the skyroad closed, he’s feeling
his way just like we are. Who’s to say he’s right about
everything?”
“I—”
“Gotta go,” she said.
“But do yourself a favor, and don’t let other people’s agendas
screw up a good relationship.” Her voice descended to a whisper on
the last word, and then the line went dead.
Rabbit sat for a few
minutes, while the world came back into focus around him. He was
dimly surprised to see that he was still at the university, that
nothing around him had changed. Students passed him, heading from
point A to point B and vice versa with varying degrees of urgency,
yet no clue that they were practically on borrowed time unless the
Nightkeepers figured out how to get Kinich Ahau back where he
belonged, without the promise of help from the
library.
Anger stirred again,
though more sluggish this time. Why hadn’t Anna—and presumably
Strike—wanted him to know about what was going on? Why were they
distancing him from the fight just when he was starting to prove
his commitment to the cause by keeping his nose clean?
“Shit. I don’t know.”
But he couldn’t get Patience’s parting words out of his head.
Don’t let other people’s agendas screw up a
good relationship. Was that what he was doing? Maybe. If he
hadn’t yet, he was definitely in danger of it. Hell, he’d just gone
behind Myr’s back with Patience, whom he knew she couldn’t
stand.
Damn it.
“Hey,” a voice said
from a few feet away. “Everything okay?”
He looked up and for
a second wasn’t sure if she was really there or if he’d imagined
her. Surely he’d projected the perfect symmetry of her face, with
those long lashes and big, dark brown eyes, narrow-bridged nose,
and full, sassy mouth? Then she raised one dark eyebrow in
question, and became a flesh-and-blood fantasy of long legs and
toned arms and tanned skin bared beneath boy shorts and a tight
tank, even though it wasn’t that warm out yet. He was suddenly
warm, though, as a flush of mingled unease and lust rattled through
him.
“Myrinne.” Even after
almost a year, he still loved saying her name, loved knowing he had
that right. She’d been wearing his promise ring for the past five
months. It wasn’t an engagement, and it wasn’t the jun tan, damn it, but it was important to him, a
symbol that he loved her, and that she knew and accepted
it.
She raised her other
eyebrow to join the first. “Was that a ‘yes, everything’s okay,’ or
‘no, everything’s unexpectedly gone to shit’?”
He snorted. “I always
expect things to go to shit. Nothing unexpected
there.”
“And now he’s evading
the question,” she said, as though to the world at large, though
she pitched her sexy contralto voice so it was just between the two
of them, not the foot traffic. “Spill it, lover.”
“There’s no problem,”
he said, realizing it was true. “Nothing to spill.” He was the one
seeing complications where they didn’t need to exist. Stretching
out and hiding the wince when his sore muscles protested, he
snagged her hand and pulled her to him.
Laughing, she let
herself overbalance and fall against him, so they wound up sprawled
together, with her partway in his lap, partway on the cement lip
where he’d been sitting. Shifting her with an easy strength that’d
seemed to come more and more naturally as time passed, he arranged
them more comfortably, so she was sitting in his lap, curled
against his chest.
At her prickliest
last fall, she never would’ve allowed the public display. Since the
winter solstice, though, when he’d nearly killed himself trying to
lose the hellmark so they could form the jun
tan bond, she’d been more openly affectionate. Now she
curled against him and tucked her head beneath his chin so he could
lean on her, and she on him. Her hair smelled of patchouli and
vanilla, two scents she was particularly partial to. If he wanted
to, he could probably remember what they symbolized in the
pseudo-occult structure she’d been raised within. For the moment,
though, he just let himself breathe her in, feeling his muscles
uncoil one after another, until he was looser and warmer than
before, though he hadn’t really been aware of being tight or
cold.
Maybe cuddling his
girlfriend in the middle of campus shouldn’t have made him feel
like da man, but he hadn’t gotten to practice that sort of thing in
high school. He was making up for lost time.
She snaked her arms
around his waist and snuggled in closer, pressing her cheek to his
chest with her face tipped up to his. Her eyes drifted shut,
letting him know she was listening to his heartbeat, as she often
did, as though she feared that one day it would simply stop. And it
would, he supposed. But not for a very, very long time, after
they’d both lived out their full lives together. He
hoped.
“I’ve made a
decision,” he said, realizing that really, he’d made it a while
ago. It was just taking some time for the rest of him to catch
up.
“Hm?” she said, her
voice drowsy, as though she were on the verge of falling asleep,
curled up against him in the cool orange sunlight that made the
world’s palette strange and dim.
“I’m going to try to
find my mother.”
Myrinne didn’t say
anything when he dropped that, to him, bombshell. But a slow, sweet
smile curved her lips, and her arms tightened around his waist. And
as the warmth of her body, her existence, seeped into Rabbit’s
aching self and made everything seem better, he knew he’d finally
made a good decision. He just hoped to hell he could see it
through.