Page 49 of Tricks for Free

Was relief. I was so relieved to have him here that I could have cried.

“Yeah, see, I want to believe you care about that sort of thing, but you know what’s uncomfortable for no good reason? Lying there bleeding on everything while your asshole girlfriend walks away to ‘protect you.’” Sam gave me a sharp look, anger and recrimination in his eyes. “I would have come with you. You didn’t have to do this—any of this—alone.”

“I know you would have,” I whispered. “That’s why I couldn’t let you.”

Leonard Cunningham, presumptive heir to the modern Covenant of St. George, had been there when one of his underlings had put a bullet in Sam’s head. He’d been there when the bullet ricocheted against bone, unable to deal with fūri skeletal density. That meant that—if it happened again—he’d be packing something with more power. The Covenant watches. The Covenant listens. The Covenant, slow and hidebound as it seems, learns. Leonard would kill Sam as soon as look at him. Sooner, if he had a sniper available.

Sam shook his head. “That wasn’t just your choice.”

“Your grandmother needed you.”

“You needed someone.”

“I had Mary.”

“I’ve done some research since we split up. Having Mary isn’t much better than being on your own.”

I didn’t say anything.

Every kind of ghost has its own limitations. For Mary, those limitations take the form of her connection to the crossroads. I couldn’t ask her for much of anything, because the crossroads might interpret that as my starting to offer a bargain—and while the crossroads ghosts act on the side of the people who go down to make deals, the crossroads themselves are a lot less charitable. They would chew me up and spit me out, and laugh the whole time. As the youngest member of the current generation, I was the one she had the most leeway around, because she was still, until I passed her to someone else, my babysitter. As soon as Verity or Shelby got pregnant, I’d lose that rarified status, and I’d see Mary as often as anyone else did, which wasn’t nearly often enough.

Sam sighed. “I just wish you hadn’t gone. And I wish you were happy to see me.”

“What?” I blinked at him. “Sam . . . I’m so happy to see you I don’t know how to put it into words.”

“Really? Because you sure aren’t acting like—”

Whatever else he’d been about to say was lost as I did the only thing that made sense: I stepped closer and kissed him again. This time, I was the one pressing my hands against the sides of his face, tangling my fingers in the short hair that limned the edges of his cheekbones, making them easier to find. This time, I was the one pressing myself forward, trying to close all the distance between us, to render it irrelevant.

Something snaked around my waist: his tail, grabbing me and pulling me closer still. I didn’t resist. He was holding me, and I was holding him, and for a moment, the world almost made sense. This was something I could do. This was something I could understand.

He broke away, hands still on my shoulders and tail still around my waist, and asked, in a tone that broke my heart a little, “Does this mean I can stay?”

I forced myself to smile. “It means I may never let you go,” I said, and kissed him again, and prayed—yes, prayed—that I wasn’t about to fuck this up.

Fourteen

“Love is love. If anybody tries to tell you your love’s not worth having, shoot them in the kneecaps a couple of times. It won’t change their minds, but it’ll make you feel better.”

–Frances Brown

The smaller of two bedrooms in a shitty company apartment five miles outside of Lakeland, Florida

SAM DIDN’T UNTWINE HIS tail from around my waist until we were standing in my bedroom with the door soundly shut behind us. Only then did he let me go, take a quick, assessing look around, and sit down on the bed, folding his hands in his lap and looking at me gravely. My heart did an odd stuttering sidestep, leaving me frozen.

“Mary said I needed to come because you wouldn’t let her call for me,” he said. “She said you didn’t ask, and that meant there was no obligation, but that she was worried about you. Why was she worried about you?”

I couldn’t guess from looking at him how much Mary had—or hadn’t—elected to share. He might be testing me, making sure I’d tell him the truth. Or he might be offering me an out. I could downplay the cabal and the accidents, make it sound like Mary was just worried about how isolated I was, and . . .

And I’d be lying to him. I didn’t want to lie to him. I wanted to hold him and let him tell me it was all going to be okay, even if we both knew it wasn’t going to be. I wanted him to be the one who lied to me.

“Remember how I sometimes set things on fire by touching them, even when I don’t mean to?” I asked.

Sam nodded stiffly. The last thing he’d seen me set on fire was the big tent at his family’s carnival.

“I can’t do that anymore.”

“What?” He frowned. “Why not?”