River Road (25 page)

Juli and I emerged from the kitchen and joined the rest of the adults in the big family room. Things were winding down, and the TV had been turned to the local news—or at least news from Hattiesburg, the nearest station that didn’t have the taint of New Orleans on it.

A little girl with wispy-fine blond hair and honey-colored eyes, no more than six or seven, tugged on Juli’s arm. It was Corey, her oldest. She looked like a short, female version of Jake, and I wanted to hug her.

I needed to get away from all this domesticity before it rubbed off on me in some permanent way.

“Mama.” She got louder the more Juli tried to shush her. “Look.”

Our eyes followed her finger toward the front window, from which we could see across the porch and into the yard. Backlit by the low-hanging sun of early dusk, Jake and Alex stood nose to nose, arguing intensely. I didn’t think they were discussing Liz’s coconut cake.

“I bet they’re fighting over you,” Juli said, loud enough for the mamas, Norma and Liz, to hear. I’d have given her a good, hard magical zap if I could’ve gotten away with it and wasn’t still suffering from merman-lag. “You need to break it up before they start throwing punches.”

I considered slipping a silencing potion in her glass of iced tea. I had all the basic ingredients in my purse and it didn’t take any curing time. A quick trip to the bathroom and I could have it ready.

Tom Warin, every bit as tall and but not quite as brow-beaten as I’d imagined, spoke up for the first time. “Those boys been fighting their whole lives. It ain’t like this is the first time and it won’t be the last. Just let ’em go at it. They never hurt each other too bad.”

His pronouncement made, he turned the TV to the Weather Channel and ignored the storm brewing in his front yard.

His brother Ed, shorter and the source of his son’s dimples, chuckled and leaned his own chair back to assess the situation. “Nothin’ serious.” He returned his attention to the TV. “They ain’t even bleeding yet. Looks like a cold front’s headin’ in next week. Better check on that shipment of space heaters.”

I sighed and walked onto the porch to get a better look. Jake’s dad was wrong; it was serious, whether anyone was bleeding or not.

“Hey guys,” I said softly, moving off the porch and stepping between them. Probably not the smartest move, but I didn’t know what else to do. I turned my back to Alex and faced Jake. Alex had better control, and Jake was about to lose it.

I put my hands on his chest. “Look at me, Jake.” I repeated it three times before he finally dropped his gaze from Alex and turned cold, calculating eyes to me. Fear shot through me, and I saw his nostrils flare. Jake was barely home, and the wolf smelled my adrenaline rush. Again.

He blinked hard a couple of times and backed up, shaking his head. “I. God. Shit.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. “I should never have come back. I don’t think I can do this.”

“What happened?” I turned to Alex with raised eyebrows.

“We were just having a discussion.” Alex looked mad enough to chew glass. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the house. “Get your stuff. We need to head back.”

We packed up the wrapped plates of food and the container of banana pudding, and got back on the road with a minimum of drama.

I waited till we hit the I-10 before I started. “Tell me.”

Alex feigned ignorance. “About what?”

“You and Jake. What was that about? He was about a second away from going all loup-garou on you, and you weren’t backing him down.”

He chuffed, sounding more like Gandalf than Alex. “He told his enforcer sponsor he wants to take field assignments, not do investigative work. It’s a bad idea.”

I thought about Jake’s admission that he wanted to kill things. Field assignments would let him do that and maybe burn off some of that feral energy. But what if the more he killed, the less picky he was about
what
he killed?

“What does his sponsor say?” I shifted in my seat. “I can see both sides of it. I mean, admit it, you miss the field work too, don’t you?”

Alex clammed up. I had a quick ethical argument with myself over whether or not it was fair to try to read his emotions, then said to hell with it and did it anyway. I pretended to watch the shadows of the new Twin Span bridges rising along the edge of Lake Pontchartrain while I opened my mind to his.

Alex had always been hard to read, but he was upset enough that he was broadcasting more than usual. Frustration and anger didn’t surprise me. Jealousy did. He was jealous of Jake?

Maybe it wasn’t so surprising. Jake was treading on Alex’s turf while Alex was stuck doing sentinel work. It put them in prime position to restart the macho rivalry that had died down the last few years as Alex maintained his FBI cover and Jake ran the Gator.

Lightbulb. “You don’t want the competition.” I turned as far sideways in my seat as the seat belt would allow. “You don’t want Jake competing with you as an enforcer.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Alex snapped.

Yep, that was it. I’d nailed it. “Is not.”

No answer. Clenched jaw. Big frown. I could see them in the soft lights from the dash as darkness fell.

I turned back around in my seat and watched the ocean of dead trees that, this long after Katrina, still marked the entry to New Orleans East as they streamed through the car’s high beams. Alex pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine. Backwash from passing eighteen-wheelers jostled the car.

“What are you doing?” I had a fleeting fear he was so mad he’d put me out on the shoulder of the highway and make me walk home.

“I’m going to talk and you’re going to shut up and listen.” His voice rasped with tension. “I don’t give a shit about competition from Jake, at least not as an enforcer. We need the help. With investigations like we have going on now, I can’t take off for a day to take an enforcer run. But he’s not ready.”

Alex was so damned rigid. “Let him take a run. See how he does.” Why make everything so complicated, I wanted to add.

I flinched as Alex slammed his hand on the roof of the car, jarring the overhead light cover. “I’m worried about him, damn it. He’s loup-garou. He’s going to have to develop iron control over his wolf or the enforcers will kill him. Do you understand that? He’s not a normal were. If he screws up, they won’t move him somewhere else and give him a new assignment. They’ll kill him. Put him down like a goddamn lame horse. He slips up one time and that’s it.”

I shivered, noticeably enough that Alex reached over and cranked the car so the heat would cut back on. My shivers had nothing to do with the temperature. “What if you could take some runs with him, till he’s ready to do it by himself?” My voice shook. For the first time, I saw a hint of what Jake was up against and I was afraid for both of them. They might fight and argue with each other, but if Alex had to hurt Jake, he couldn’t live with it.

Alex leaned his head against the headrest. “I’d like to do that. But we’ve got so much work of our own. I can’t take the time off right now.”

I wanted to tell him to take the time off, that I could handle things, but as much as I wanted to prove myself to the Elders, the thought of losing Alex made me want to cry.

“DJ, I need an honest answer about something.”

I looked out the side window and wiped away a tear, hoping Alex didn’t see me. “Okay.”

“Did Jake lose control with you?”

The mental image of flat yellow eyes looking down at me flashed through my mind, the feel of his teeth on my neck, his arm pinning me so hard I couldn’t move.

“You’re not answering, so I take that as a yes. Shit.” Alex rubbed the back of his neck. “What happened?”

I didn’t know the right thing to do, except to be honest without being graphic. “He didn’t lose it, not completely. The wolf started slipping in and I had to zap him to get his attention—Jake’s attention.” I had the wolf’s full attention, which was the problem. “We were both a little shaken by it.”

Alex took a deep breath. “What were you doing when this happened?”

Good question. And
making out on the sofa in his apartment
would not be my answer. “Nothing really, just fooling around.”

Alex narrowed his eyes, and I could feel him studying my face in the semi-darkness. “Okay, I’ll take
fooling around
to mean something a little more private than listening to Zachary Richard in a crowded room.”

I blessed the dark as I felt my face heating up. It was probably the same shade of scarlet as my sweater. “Well, yeah, but it wasn’t like we were—”

“Don’t tell me.” He held up his hand to cut me off. “I get the general idea. What was Jake’s reaction?”

Haunted eyes, a fist jammed through a plaster wall, bloody knuckles. “It scared the crap out of him. He shut down and took me home.”

Alex exhaled and leaned against the headrest again. “Good. That’s what he’s supposed to do, and he needs to be scared. Did you ever feel like you were in danger? And I want an honest answer. You won’t help him by lying to protect him.”

“It scared me when it happened.” I’d had time to think about it, and realized that when Jake grew so still, he’d been warring with the wolf and, to some extent, holding it off. “But I don’t think he would have hurt me.” I hope to God I was right about that.

“Good.”

I still didn’t think we’d gotten to the heart of the problem. “You said you weren’t jealous of Jake because he was an enforcer. Is there something else going on?”

“None of your business.” He started to pull the car back on the interstate, then stopped again, shifting it back into park. “But we are going to talk about your merman stunt.”

Good Lord. The man was a grunting caveman half the time. Now he was channeling Oprah on the side of the I-10. “Fine. Let me have it.”

“We’re partners. I have to know you’re not keeping shit from me. What if I hadn’t found out about the power-share with Rene, hadn’t gone out with you yesterday? Robert could have killed you, or worse—and you didn’t even have the staff. Or Rene could have gotten so out of control he drained everything you had.”

Damn it. I knew he was right, but I had my reasons. “I just—”

“Don’t protect me.” Alex’s voice was gruff. “Don’t make decisions for me. Don’t be afraid I’ll take off if you do something I don’t like. I’m not going anywhere. Even if I end up back on field duty at some point, I’m not leaving
you
.”

My own tears caught me by surprise, and I turned away before he could see them. Everybody leaves. If I’d learned one thing in life it was that. They might die. They might betray your trust. They might stay until life got too hard or inconvenient. But in the end, the people you cared about always left.

His hand brushed my wet cheek. I’d planned to get in his head and somehow, instead, he’d gotten in mine. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You just don’t seem to understand that this isn’t a one-sided thing with us. I don’t want to lose you either. Not because you’ve put yourself in danger protecting me or because of the shitty baggage you drag around from your screwed-up family.” He paused a heartbeat. “And not because of Jake.”

He said that last part so softly I barely heard him. What did that mean exactly—he was afraid Jake would hurt me, or he didn’t want to lose me to Jake? It was such a startling thought that I decided to keep it to myself to gnaw on a while.

We pulled back onto the road and drove into the city in silence. At the red light nearest my house, he finally said, “I’m the one who bought the house.”

“What?” I’d stared out the passenger window so long I was almost in a trance. “What house?”

“Next door to you. The shotgun. I close on it next week.”

I didn’t know what to say. Was that good or bad? Did I want Alex for a neighbor? Was he buying that house out of feelings for me, or was I giving myself way too much credit?

But houses were major commitments. If he was buying a house, he wasn’t going anywhere, at least not for a while. I smiled, not wanting to examine that warm, safe feeling too closely. “I’m glad.”

CHAPTER
25

Twenty-four hours later, I stood in the middle of my bedroom again, wrapped in a towel, surrounded by heaps of clothing and looking for something to wear on a date. Life had been much simpler when I had no social life, plus my dates weren’t exactly dinner-and-a-movie guys. One had serious control issues, one seemed to be changing the rules of our relationship and was almost scaring the crap out of me more than his werewolf cousin, and the third wasn’t even alive in any normal sense of the word.

I couldn’t call Eugenie this time, not and lie my way through an explanation of a dinner date with an undead pirate who couldn’t even come and pick me up because cars hadn’t been invented during his lifetime. Of course, that hadn’t stopped him from stealing one.

Whatever I wore, I had to make it snappy. I’d spent the whole day combing through everything I could find on the River Styx, looking for the elusive connection between the mers, the dead wizards, and the water breaches. The situation seemed to deteriorate hourly.

Denis Villere had called late last night with news that a member of his family found a new breach in Plaquemines, between Buras and Port Sulphur. A lot of people lived between Buras and Port Sulphur. The media was full of what some clever reporter had deemed the “Plaquemines Plague,” the state water officials were squabbling with the Army Corps of Engineers over jurisdiction, and the Elders wanted it all to just go away before some smart water engineer figured out there were substances in the water that didn’t conform to any known contaminant or life-form.

The fact that Denis had found the new rifts raised him on my suspect list, except for that little issue of motive. If the seafood in the area was impacted, it would hurt not only the Delachaise clan but the Villeres as well. So against my better judgment, I agreed to pay Denis to place the temporary charms over the new rifts until Rene and I could do a repeat of our ritual. I knew he’d be willing but I needed another day or two to recuperate. Plus, we needed to find out how the breaches were occurring and put a stop to it.