“We’re done,” I said softly as I slipped in behind the wheel of my little red MINI Cooper. Trent was backing up, and I waited as he leaned across a stiff-looking Jonathan and shouted out the open window “Let me know what Al says!” before putting it in drive and heading for the interstate. If Quen had been here, he would’ve insisted on driving, but Jonathan could be swayed and I knew Trent liked his independence—not that he had that much.
“Al, huh?” Jenks said, suddenly interested as I sat behind the wheel and watched Trent leave. “You think that’s a good idea?” Jenks asked, now hovering inches before my nose.
I leaned forward to start my car. “He can tell me if there was a charm on it,” I said, and Jenks landed on the rearview mirror, distrust and unease falling from him in an orangey dust. I was tired, annoyed, and I didn’t like the unsettled, more-than-being-said feeling I was getting from Trent. “It shouldn’t have exploded,” I added, and Jenks’s wings slowly fanned in agreement.
If someone was targeting Trent, I wanted to know. It was worth bothering Al over, though he’d just tell me to let the man die.
That ball shouldn’t have exploded.
Two
The sun was a slow flash through Cincinnati’s buildings as I fought afternoon traffic headed for the bridge and the Hollows beyond. The interstate was clogged, and it was easier to simply settle in behind a truck in the far right lane and make slow and steady progress than to try to maintain the posted limit by weaving in and out of traffic.
My radio was on, but it was all news and none of it good. The misfired charm at Trent’s facility wasn’t the only one this morning, and so far down on the drama scale that it hadn’t even been noticed, pushed out by the cooking class in intensive care for massive burns and the sudden collapse of a girder slamming through the roof of a coffeehouse and injuring three. The entire east side of the 71 corridor was a mess, making me think my sand-trap crater had been part of something bigger. Misfires weren’t that common, usually clustered by the batch and never linked only by space and time.
Jenks was silent, a worried green dust hazing him as he rested on the rearview mirror. But when the story changed to a cleaning crew found dead, the apparent cause being brain damage from a sudden lack of fat in their bodies, I turned it off in horror.
Jenks’s heels thumped the glass. “That’s nasty.”
I nodded, anxious now to get home and turn on the news. But even as I tried not to think about how painful it would be to die from a sudden lack of brain tissue, my mind shifted. Was I really seeing what I thought I was in Trent, or was I simply projecting what I wanted? I mean, the man had everything but the freedom to be what he wanted. Why would he want . . . me? And yet there it was, refusing to go away.
Elbow on the open window as we crept forward, I twisted a curl around a finger. Even the press could tell there was something between us, but it wasn’t as if I could tell them it was the sharing of dangerous, well-kept secrets, not the familiarity of knowing if he wore boxers or briefs. I knew Trent had issues with what everyone expected him to be. I knew his days stretched long, especially now that Ceri was gone and Quen and the girls were splitting their time between Trent and Ellasbeth. But there were better ways to fill his calendar than to court political calamity by asking me to work security—me being good at it aside. We were going to have to talk about it and do the smart thing. For once, I was going to do the smart thing. So why does my gut hurt?
“Rache!” Jenks yelled from the rearview mirror, and my attention jerked from the truck in front of me.
“What!” I shouted back, startled. I wasn’t anywhere near to hitting it.
Pixy dust, green and sour, sifted from him to vanish in the breeze. “For the fairy-farting third time, will you shift the air currents in this thing? The wind is tearing my wings to shreds.”
Warming, I glanced at the dust leaking from the cut in his wing. “Sorry.” Rolling my window halfway up, I cracked the two back windows. Jenks resettled himself, his dust shifting to a more content yellow.
“Thanks. Where were you?” he asked.
“Ah,” I hedged. “My closet,” I lied. “I don’t know what to wear tonight.” Tonight. That would be a good time to bring it up. Trent would have three months to think about it.
Jenks eyed me in distrust as a kid in a black convertible wove in and out of traffic, working his way up car length by car length. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Trent’s girls are coming back tomorrow, right?”
The pixy knew when I lied. Apparently my aura shifted. “Yes,” I said, trying for flippant. “I can use the time off. Trent is more social than a fourteen-year-old living-vampire girl.” And he could text just as fast, I’d found.
Jenks’s wings blurred. “No money for three months . . .”
My grip on the wheel tightened, and I took the on-ramp for the bridge. “I’ve got your rent, pixy. Relax.”
“Tink’s little pink rosebuds!” Jenks suddenly exploded, his wings blurring to invisibility. “Why don’t you just have sex with the man?”
“Jenks!” I exclaimed, then hit the brakes and swerved when the kid in the convertible cut off the truck ahead of me. My tires popped gravel as I swung on the shoulder and back to the road again, but I was more embarrassed about what he’d said than mad at the jerk in the car. “It’s not like that.”
“Yeah?” There was a curious silver tint to his dust. “Watching you and Trent is like watching two kids who don’t know how their lips work yet. You like him.”
“What’s not to like?” I grumbled, appreciating the thinner traffic on the bridge.
“Yeah, but you thought you hated him last year. That means you really like him.”
My hands were clenched, and I forced them to relax on the wheel. “Is there a point to this other than you talking about sex?”
He swung his feet to thump on the rearview mirror. “No. That’s about it.”
“The man is engaged,” I said, frustrated that my life was so transparent.
“No, he isn’t.”
“Well, he will be,” I shot back as the bridge girders made new shadows and Jenks’s dust glowed like a sunbeam. Will be again.
Jenks snorted. “Yeah, he lives in Cincy, and she lives in Seattle. If he liked her, he’d let her move in with him.”
“They’ve got a kid,” I said firmly. “Their marriage will solidify the East and West Coast elven clans. That’s what Trent wants. What everyone wants. It’s going to happen, and I’m not going to interfere.”