Divine Misdemeanors (15 page)

The Hummer drove to him, and the bullets seemed to not quite hit it, and when the next rocket came, it was just to one side of it. I felt the impact in my gut, as if the vibration ran through my body and hit me in the stomach. Sand and dirt fell like dry rain on the shiny black metal of the Hummer.

I opened the door, but it was as if only Brennan could see me. None of the others were mine. He said my name, and even over the ringing in my ears I heard the whisper of it, “Meredith.” He reached up with the hand that had been clutching the nail around his throat. The others asked, “What are you doing?”

It was only as his hand wrapped around mine that the others saw me, saw the car. There were gasps of amazement and guns pointed at me, but Brennan said, “She’s a friend. Now get in the Humvee!”

One of the other soldiers said, “Where did she come from? How did it…”

Brennan pushed him toward the front door. “Questions later.”

Another rocket hit just on the other side of their Hummer, and suddenly there were no more questions. There was an exclamation of, “No one’s driving!” But everyone piled in, Brennan squeezing beside me in the back, and the moment we were all inside the Hummer drove away. We drove farther down the road, which was intact enough to drive on, and the next moment the Humvee behind us exploded.

One of the new men said, “They got into our range.”

The man from the front seat turned around and asked, “What the fuck is going on, Brennan?”

He looked at me as he said, “I prayed for help.”

“Well, God hears you good,” the other man said.

“It wasn’t God I was praying to,” Brennan said, and he looked into my eyes and reached out one hand as if afraid to touch me.

I put his hand against my face. There was grit and dirt and blood. He had a wound in his hand that he’d touched to the nail.

“I was praying to Goddess,” Brennan said.

“You called me with blood, metal, and magic,” I whispered.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Los Angeles,” I said.

I felt the dream, or vision, or whatever it was begin to soften and waver, and I spoke into the air, “Black Coach of mine, take them to safety. See that no harm comes to my people.”

The radio in the front of the Humvee crackled to life, which made us all startle, and then give nervous laughs. The song was “Take it Easy” by The Eagles.

One of the soldiers said, “What is this, a Transformer movie?”

Their laughter was the last thing I heard as the dream faded, and I woke sitting bolt upright in the bed between the men. The bed was covered in pink rose petals.

RHYS WAS THE ONLY ONE AWAKE FOR SOME REASON. GALEN AND WYN
slept as if nothing was happening. The petals decorated their hair and faces, but they slept on.

Rhys said, “There’s something on your face.” He reached out and came away with dirt and fresh blood. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“It’s not my blood.”

“Whose is it, then?” he asked.

“Brennan’s.”

“Corporal Brennan—the soldier you healed, who helped us fight?”

“Yes,” I said. I wanted to know if Rhys had watched me dream. I wanted to know if my body had stayed here in the bed, or if I’d vanished, but I was half afraid to find out. But I had to know.

“How long have you been watching me?”

“I felt the touch of the Goddess. She woke me, and I kept guard over your sleep, though if you could come away with Brennan’s blood on you, maybe I wasn’t guarding the right part of you.”

“Why are Galen and Wyn not awake?” I asked, my voice soft the way you do when people nearby are sleeping.

“I’m not sure. Let’s leave them sleep and talk in the living room.”

I didn’t argue. I simply slipped out from the petal-covered sheet
and the warmth of their bodies. Wyn snuggled into the hole I’d made. When he touched Galen, he stopped moving and settled back into deeper sleep. Galen never moved. That wasn’t entirely unusual; he was a heavy sleeper, but not this heavy.

I stared down at him as Rhys gathered his holster, gun, and a short sword that he usually wore at his back. He was licensed to carry the gun here, but the sword was only allowed because technically he was still the bodyguard of Princess Meredith, and some things that might attack me respected a blade more than a bullet.

He gathered his weapons, but he didn’t bother with clothes. He held out a hand to me, completely nude, with his weapons in his other hand.

I scooped up a short silk robe that had been lost to the floor. Sometimes I got cold; Rhys seldom did. He, like Frost, had once been a deity of colder things than a Southern California night.

He laid his weapons on the kitchen counter and turned on the light over the oven, making a small glow in the dark, quiet house. He turned on the coffeemaker, which was ready to go for the morning.

I chided him. “You just wanted coffee.”

He smiled at me. “I always want coffee, but I think this may be a long talk, and I worked today, too.”

“It’s industrial espionage using magic, right?” I asked.

“Yes, but the Goddess didn’t wake us up to talk about a case.”

I slipped the robe on and tied it. It was black with red and green flowers on it here and there. I seldom wore all black if I could help it. It was too much my aunt Andais’s signature color. My hair had gotten long enough that I had to sweep it out of the robe to settle the collar.

I enjoyed watching Rhys move around the kitchen nude. I admired the tight line of his ass as he stood on tiptoe to reach mugs from the cabinet.

“The problem with a seven-foot-tall man being the main one who lives here is that he puts things you use every day too damn high.”

“He doesn’t think about it,” I said, and slid onto the bar stool near the front of the outside counter.

He got the mugs down, and turned with a grin. “Were you watching my ass?”

“Yes, and the rest of you. I’m enjoying watching you move around the kitchen in nothing but your smile.”

That made him grin again as he put the mugs by the coffeemaker, which was now making the happy noises that said coffee was on its way.

He came to me, face going solemn. He gave me the full attention of that one blue-ringed eye. He raised his hand again, and touched the blood and grit on my face.

“I take it Brennan was injured.”

“A small cut on his palm, and it was that hand that he gripped the nail with.”

“He’s still wearing it around his neck,” Rhys said.

I nodded.

“You know the rumors about the soldiers who fought beside us?”

“No,” I said.

“They’re healing people, Merry. They’re laying on hands.”

I stared at him. “I thought that was just for that night, just with faerie’s magic bleeding all over everything.”

“Apparently not,” he said. He studied my face, as if looking for something specific.

“What?” I asked, nervous under his so-serious scrutiny.

“You never left the bed, Merry. I swear to that, but Brennan touched you physically. Enough to leave dirt from his location and his blood, and that scares me.”

He turned and started searching the drawers of the cabinets for something. He came up with ziplock bags and a spoon.

I must have given him a suspicious look, because he chuckled and explained. “I’m going to take a sample of the dirt and blood. I want to know what a modern lab will make of it.”

“To get the Grey Detective Agency to pay for it you’ll have to explain.”

“Jeremy is a good boss, a good fey, and a good man. He’ll let me put it through as part of a case.”

I couldn’t argue with anything he said about Jeremy. He’d been one of my few friends when I first came to Los Angeles.

Rhys opened one of the bags and leaned toward my cheek with the spoon. “This isn’t exactly chain of evidence. If it was a real case the zip lock bag might let the other side argue that it was contaminated by anything and everything.”

“I wasn’t thinking when I touched it, so my skin is in there, and you’re right about the method of collection, but this isn’t a real case, Merry.” He very carefully scraped some dirt into one of the open bags. He was so gentle I felt only a slight pressure.

When he had enough dirt he closed the bag. He got a new spoon and a new bag, and scraped some of the dirt, but I was betting that he had more blood in this one. He took more time with this one, and it actually scraped my skin a little. It didn’t hurt, but it might have if he’d kept doing it long enough.

“What do you hope to gain by testing these?”

“I don’t know, but we’ll know more than we do right this minute.” He started opening drawers until he found a Sharpie in the drawer closest to the phone. He wrote on the bags, dated them, signed his name, and had me sign them, too.

The rich smell of coffee filled the kitchen. It always smelled good. He poured coffee into one of the mugs, but I stopped him from doing it twice.

“No caffeine, remember?”

He hung his head enough for the white curls to fall forward. “I’m an idiot. I’m sorry, Merry. I’ll put on water for tea.”

“I should have said something earlier, but honestly, the dream spooked me.”

He filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove, then came back to stand beside me. “Tell me about it while we wait for the water to boil.”

“You can drink your coffee,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’ll get fresh when you can have tea.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I know.” He put his hand over mine. “Your hands are cold.” He took my hands in his and raised them to his mouth to lay a gentle kiss on them. “Tell me about the dream.”

I took a deep breath and told him. He listened, made encouraging noises here and there, and held my hands, when he wasn’t making tea. When I finished telling the story, my hands were a little warmer, and there was a pot of tea steeping on the counter.

“Traveling through a dream or vision isn’t unheard-of for us in the far past, but to manifest physically so that a follower could touch us and be touched or rescued from danger, that is really rare, even when we were in our prime as a people.”

“How rare?” I asked.

The timer went off for the tea, and he went to hit the button. “I was willing to believe that we’d been quiet enough not to wake anyone, but I purposefully put on that annoying buzzer for the tea.” He used small tongs to fish out the tea toddy with the loose-leaf jasmine in it. “No one woke up, Merry.”

I thought about that. “Doyle and Frost should have been up when we walked past the door to the bedroom they’re in, but they didn’t.”

“This buzzer would wake the dead.” He seemed to find that funny, laughed at his own joke, shook his head, and put a small strainer over my mug before he poured the tea.

“I’m not sure I get the joke,” I said.

“Death deity,” he said, half pointing at himself as he put the teapot down.

I nodded, as if that made perfect sense, which it didn’t, but … “I still don’t get the joke.”

“Sorry, it’s an insider sort of thing. You aren’t a death deity, so you wouldn’t get it.”

“Okay.”

He brought my mug of tea to me, then went back to pour out his cold coffee, and pour fresh for himself. He took a sip, closed his eye, and just looked happy. I raised my tea so I could smell the jasmine before I tasted it. With some of the gentler teas, scent was as important as taste.

“Why do you think that no one else has woken up? I mean, Galen and Wyn were right there through all of it.”

“I think Goddess isn’t done with you tonight, and it’s something she wants us to do together.”

“Do you think it’s because you’re the only death deity we have out here?”

He shrugged. “I’m not the only death deity in Los Angeles, I’m just the only Celtic one in Los Angeles.”

I frowned at him. “Who do you mean?”

“Other religions have deities, Merry, and some of them like to walk around pretending to be people.”

“You make it sound like they’re not the same kind of deity that you and the others are.”

He shrugged again. “I know that this particular deity is choosing to walk around in human shape, but he can be simply spirit. If you see me walking around without being in human form, I’m dead.”

“So you mean not just something else with magic over the dead, but something that is truly a deity, a god with a capital ‘G’ like the Goddess and the Consort.”

He nodded, sipping his coffee.

“Who is it? I mean, what is it? I mean, …”

“Nope, not going to tell you. I know you too well. You’ll tell Doyle and he won’t be able to resist a closer look. I’ve already spoken to the deity in question and he and I have a deal. I’ll leave him alone and he’ll leave us alone.”

“Is he that scary?”

“Yes and no. Let’s just say that I’d rather not test his limits when all we have to do is leave him alone.”

“He’s not harming anyone in the city, is he?”

“Leave it alone.” He frowned. “I should have kept my big mouth shut.”

I sipped my tea, enjoying the jasmine flavor, but honestly, the scent of Rhys’s coffee overpowered the delicate perfume of flowers. Coffee would have been nice. I could try caffeine free.

“What are you thinking about so hard?” he asked suspiciously.

“I’m wondering if I could get caffeine-free coffee and how it would taste.”

He laughed then, and leaned up to kiss my cheek. “We should clean you up.”

He went to the sink again, and got a paper towel off the roll by the sink. He set his coffee down so he could get it wet. But the moment he came toward me with the towel, I smelled roses, not jasmine.

“No,” I said, “we don’t clean it off like this.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

I just knew the answer. “The ocean, Rhys, we clean it off in the ocean at the place where the water meets the shore.”

“That’s an in-between place,” he said. “A place where faerie and a lot of other places meet the mundane world.”

“It can be,” I said.

“What do you have in mind?”

I took a deep breath and could smell jasmine again more than roses. “I’m not sure it’s what
I
have in mind.”

“All right, then what does the Goddess have in mind?”