by Holley Trent
“You think a lack of evidence matters? It’d be your word against the sheriff’s. Who do you think they’ll believe?”
She opened her mouth, but he said before she could get a word out, “No, it doesn’t matter who they’ll believe. They will seek to prosecute the more convenient party regardless of guilt. Tell me what you did. There are ways of mitigating situations like this.”
“I do not want it mitigated,” Lola said. “I did what I did. If there is an issue, I will handle it when the circumstance demands that I do.”
“You should be proactive, Lola.”
“I should proactively kill him? Is that what you are suggesting?”
“He’d deserve it,” Rachel murmured. She draped her arm across Elizabeth’s back and rubbed her shoulder. Elizabeth’s lip was quivering in the way that hinted at strong emotion. The tears would probably come next, and maybe she needed to let go of them. He didn’t doubt for a moment that Elizabeth had been faultless in whatever she’d seen or endured.
“You don’t have to wait for bad players to show you who they are,” he said. “Often, they will provide you with plenty of warnings before they move to hurt you. Why would you wait and see?”
“That is the order of things. I am not going to name myself his judge before he has revealed what it is he thinks he knows. It may be some trifling thing that will make this entire conversation moot.”
“Or it could be that he thinks you killed a man,” Elizabeth said, “and he’s gonna hold that over your head until he gets what he wants. You know he is. We know too many who are just like him. We’re gonna end up having to leave town for it, mark my words. It’s all my damn fault for not locking the door that night. That was the one thing you asked me to do.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Rachel said soothingly. “That’s that. Like Lola said, we’ll deal with it when we have to. Maybe it’ll all blow over and be a big fat nothing.”
Tarik didn’t think so because just like them, he’d encountered numerous men like the sheriff who dangled every possible advantage over the people they needed to exploit, and the man had no conscience. He didn’t care who was injured as long as it wasn’t him.
“I have the situation under control,” Lola said. She seemed to be addressing the room in general, but she was looking at Tarik. The warning in her voice was meant exclusively for him.
He’d heard the warning. That didn’t mean he had to heed it.
Rachel and Elizabeth headed back upstairs with worry etched in their features.
Lola turned and announced to the women, “Perhaps Tuesday off as well. We will fret about the money later.”
“Sounds like a fine idea to me. I’ll tell the others in the morning.” Rachel patted Elizabeth on the back and shut her into her room before heading to her own.
Just before the Cougar closed her door, Lola called up, “Rachel.”
“Ma’am?”
“I am not what you believe me to be. You should know.”
Before something happens, seemed to be the unspoken implication.
Rachel moved to the railing, smoothing her thin cotton shift down over her thighs. “What do you mean?”
“I am not like you. I am not Cougar in the way you are.” The words came out sounding strained and slow, as though they were unfamiliar sounds to Lola’s mouth. Or as though she’d never spoken them in that order.
Why now?
Did she fear being revealed? Did she think Tarik would cause her revealing?
“What are you, then?” Rachel’s voice was almost too quiet to hear, even for Tarik.
“I am… I am the thing who created your race.” Lola paused as if to let the words settle in, and Tarik watched as the meaning slowly played out across the pretty Cougar woman’s face.
Rachel’s mouth parted wordlessly. Her hand went to her chest. “You’re… I…”
“You are what you are because long ago,” Lola said, looking at her straight on as if to challenge and to test her mettle. “I wanted revenge on a man who had insulted me. I created a race out of caprice, not intelligent forethought. Your ancestors were Cats because I was humiliated and because I could not control my anger. I punished them for their allegiance to my lover. Fortunately, they survived the curse while he could not. Now you know who you are in league with and why I seem so grievously slow to react. The consequences of my emotions create ripples, and where and how those ripples will end, I cannot predict. Do you understand what I am telling you?”
“I… Well.” Furrowing her brow more deeply, Rachel nudged her hair behind her ears and gave a slow, small nod. “Yes. Yes, I get what you’re telling me.”
“I will understand if you decide to leave, knowing that.”
That statement seemed to jostle Rachel into an immediate state of pink-cheeked aggravation. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. And I’m not gonna say nothin’. We all got our secrets, huh?”
“Indeed,” Lola said after a minute of quiet study of the bold, proud woman.
Rachel departed and closed her door softly.
Lola pressed her fingertips to her eyes and rubbed.
Tarik knelt beside her, grinding his teeth and carefully choosing his words. No good would come of antagonizing her. She was set in her ways, as was he. He could acknowledge, though, that he would have perhaps behaved differently if he’d chosen to live amongst mortals. He could understand how easy it would be to become attached to the ones who lived in her shadow.
“Your mistakes are not so much graver than anyone else’s, goddess. In fact, given the circumstances, I believe you have been disgustedly well-behaved.”
“I cannot be the bearer of standards if I cannot keep my emotions in check. Unlike you, my errors will not have me cast from grace. My actions set precedents for the others of my kind. That is how some pandemics and wars get started. Thoughtless actions from petty gods who do not care what they will spark.” She let her hands fall to her lap and faced him. “What we did the night on the beach could have had ruinous effects.”
“It could have but didn’t.”
She let him take her hand. He studied each of the silver rings on it, all with different stones—none of which were especially precious. Significant, but not precious. He wondered why she’d chosen them. Wondered if she thought they were pretty or if she had some arcane connection to the rocks. “Fret less, Butterfly. You’re existing instead of living. Is that satisfying for you?”
“Satisfaction does not matter to me,” she whispered. She stood, pushed the chair under the table, and padded to the nearest lantern. She extinguished the light and made her way upstairs.
She was wrong. Dead wrong.
It did matter if she was satisfied. He may have been far from being a saint himself, but he was certain that if anyone deserved a reminder of pleasure, she did.
He was going to see that she got it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Don’t look now,” Rachel said with a giggle in her voice, “but there’s an angel coming this way.”
Lola let out a quiet sigh of annoyance. She looked up from her knitting project and over her shoulder. Rachel was correct. Tarik was on approach with his hands in the pockets of his duster and his wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his short-cropped hair. He was ambling slowly toward their little shady spot in the field with a smirk on his face. “Apparently we weren’t as discreet in our exit from the saloon as I thought,” she murmured.
The ladies were feeling penned in and Lola had been reading the unsettled energy roiling off them for hours since the sheriff had left. Normally, they wouldn’t have squandered a pretty afternoon outside, chasing trifling pursuits. There was always maintenance to be done in the old saloon. Linens to be washed and hung up to dry. Costumes to mend.
But sometimes people needed rest in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. Lola was coming to understand that.
“Not sure why we bothered sneaking out, anyway,” Rachel said, waving at the angel on approach. “If I had a man who looked
like that following me around, I might slow down a little.”
Tutting, Lola set her attention back on her knitting project and counted stitches. She’d evidently dropped one somewhere. She wouldn’t have chosen such an ambitious pattern if she’d known her attention was going to be so scattered. “Remember what happened the last time you got tangled up with a man whose face you didn’t mind so much, Cat.”
“How was I supposed to ignore him? He had Head Cougar energy.”
“Yep, a strong Cougar who got the job done in one shot, went out looking for tobacco, and never came back.” Elizabeth squinted at the faded threads of the sampler she’d been working on for the better part of a year. Her handiwork wasn’t much better than Lola’s but at least the effort was valiant. “He’s probably got little Cougar bastards all up and down the Rocky Mountains.”
“He does not,” Lola murmured, looking over her shoulder again. Tarik was probably just out of earshot and was standing near the one other lonely tree in the field, whispering to himself. He turned his back to them. She furrowed her brow.
“What do you mean?” Rachel asked.
Clearing her throat, Lola counted her stitches again. “Nothing you should worry about. I have ways of monitoring the population of Cougars descended from my lines, should I wish to.” Psychically monitoring the Cougars took more effort than Lola was generally willing to expend. Every so often, though, she stalked from afar the dreams of those whom had the most magic and reminded them in subtle ways of their duties. Some paid attention.
Most didn’t.
“Oh.” Rachel straightened the brim of her straw hat and whispered conspiratorially, “Not that I care at all, but…where’s he now? Dead? Somebody’s daddy finally catch up to him and put him in his place?”
“No.”
“That’s all? What do you mean, no?”
Lola set down the knitting and rolled her eyes at herself. She’d dropped three stitches. The hows and whys defied logic. She was fairly certain she’d held onto every loop. “I mean that he roams like so many do, that is all. Male Cats often roam. They go home when they feel the urge.”
“He said he didn’t have a home.”
“Perhaps he will make one here.”
His home would probably be in Maria. While it was true that Silvio no longer had a home glaring—or Cat group—he was destined to return to his mate. He simply needed to figure out on his own what Rachel was to him. Lola had chosen not to interfere. He was either ready or not. Some men needed more time to grow up.
“You know something,” Rachel accused, straightening up.
“I know many things.” Unfortunately, none of those things were how she’d managed to drop three stitches in a single row. Emitting a soft growl, she yanked out the needles from the row in progress and began ripping back the sloppy work. “I know that he is as attracted to your parcel of old Cat magic as you are to his face.”
“Gotta admit it’s a pretty face, Lola.”
“Not as pretty as that one,” Elizabeth said with a chuckle. She tilted her head toward the other tree and the angel leaning toward the trunk of it.
Tarik had turned toward them, and he’d stopped whispering. He was smirking again, though, and his gaze was fixed right on Lola.
She tutted once more and positioned herself nearer the trunk of their tree where she wouldn’t be so tempted to look at the distracting creature. His favorite pastime evidently was flustering her and making her belly twist around itself.
Odd, she thought as she wound the woolen yarn back onto its spool. She generally wasn’t so prone to distress, and that’s what it was—unspecified emotional distress. She didn’t have emotions in the way most people did, according to Yaotl. She was a wild thing who reacted with action, not emotion.
She couldn’t make sense of the reactions Tarik was triggering in her any more than she could read a pattern for seed stitch, apparently.
“I do not know if I would call him…pretty,” Lola muttered. “Hummingbirds are pretty. Palominos are pretty. Rainbows are pretty. He’s—”
“Exotic?” Elizabeth asked.
“Being called such so often myself, I would find no novelty in that. If everything is exotic, then nothing is.”
“What’s wrong with just saying handsome?” Rachel asked.
That word didn’t seem right. It seemed so wrong that mulling over it so intensely caused Lola to rip back three more knitting rows than she’d intended. As she shook her head and growled at her unwelcome plummet into self-pity, she started to carelessly rip the whole project down to the cast-on row.
“It is…difficult to explain the way I see faces,” she said. “Generally, the configuration of one’s features serves only to identify them. Faces are how I tell one person apart from the next. They do not allure or attract me.”
Rarely did they merit a long enough look for her to form any opinion about them whatsoever, much less a preference.
And she did prefer Tarik’s face the way it was. That was probably as strong a compliment as she could give.
She sighed. “Your Head Cat, Rachel. I suspect he will return before your son has need of him.”
“You could make him come back when you want, couldn’t you?” Elizabeth asked.
Lola opened the book containing her knitting project’s pattern and scanned down the chart. “I could plant that seed in a dream, however I will not. I prefer for the others to not know of my presence here. I prefer to be just…one more Cougar.”
That was the only way she’d ever have a life anything close to normal. She was coming to appreciate “normal,” and wanted to experience it a bit longer.
“I wouldn’t want you to, anyway, I guess.” Rachel tossed away the spring of dried grass she’d been fondling and waved at the winged thing casting an ominous shadow ahead of him.
“You are careless.” Establish rib. Knit one, purl one, repeat thirty-two times… She pointed to his shadow with her free needle to indicate how he could potentially be giving himself away.
“They already know. Why bother further obscuring them?”
“How do you do that?” Elizabeth pushed her glasses up her nose. “Make your wings disappear? And how come they can still have a shadow even if I can’t see them?”
He squatted near the edge of the ragged quilt the ladies sprawled on and draped his hands over his knees. “Magic, of a sort.”
“Do they work?” Rachel asked. “Or are they just there for decoration?”
“Can I fly, do you mean?”
Lola cut the Cat a look. She was getting far too familiar with the angel, and that would surely lead to disappointment. He might take the friendliness as encouragement for future discourse, and he was supposed to be going away. She was less flustered when he wasn’t there, and she missed that state.
“Well, can you?” Rachel pushed.
“Yes.” He rolled his shoulders back hesitantly. His smirk gave way to a grimace halfway around, but the ladies didn’t seem to notice. They were too busy petting the air over his shoulders where his wings must have actually been. “I don’t find the method the most efficient for transport, but it has its uses at times.”
“Like when you are making trouble near beaches,” Lola murmured.
Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one. She needed better yarn, or perhaps yarn that simply hadn’t gone ragged and frayed from her inexpert handling. More than once, she’d lurked in shadows back in México watching the native women weave beautiful, durable fabrics. They’d barely had to glance at their hands. Meanwhile Lola, a supposed higher being, was having difficulty counting to two.
“What’s she talking about?” Elizabeth asked. “Beaches?”
“Don’t mind her,” Tarik said through a laugh. “She seeks to antagonize me, but I am not so easy to incite.”
Lola rolled her eyes. Knit one, purl one.
“What were you talking to yourself about over there by the tree?” Rachel asked him.
“I actually wasn’t speaking to myse
lf, but to a peer.”
Panicked, Lola threw down her knitting and was about to stand. “You brought someone here? A stranger? You have no right.”
“Settle down, Butterfly,” he said, chuckling in that infuriating way he always did. He put her project back into her hand, kind and condescending. “He isn’t here. We don’t need to be near to communicate.”
How interesting, she thought, even as she fixed her hottest glare on him.
“Who is it? Another angel?” Rachel asked.
“Of sorts.”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you knitting or tying knots?”
It took Lola a few seconds to realize the question was meant for her. He was criticizing her handiwork.
Growling quietly, she shoved the whole shameful mess beneath the edge of her skirt. “Never mind that.”
“If you insist.” He chuckled again. “And, Rachel, I mean that my friend—Gulielmus is his name—aligns himself with factions I do not. He often sends me offers of work from them.”
“Do you take them?”
“On occasion.”
“And he was asking you about a job right then?” Elizabeth asked.
“In a way. He tends to think that for the right amount of dollars, my loyalty can be bought. He tried a new figure on me.”
“How high a figure?” Lola found herself asking. She had no idea why. His business affairs were none of her concern just as her knitting ineptitude was none of his.
“Not nearly high enough.”
“Don’t believe in being loyal?” Elizabeth asked.
“Loyalty has its advantages, however I do not believe it can truly be purchased. Not without the person selling it potentially being required to compromise whatever principles they may hold.”
“Are you saying you have principles now, bird man?” Lola asked tightly. The sharp ends of her knitting needles were stabbing her thigh.
“Perhaps they seem specious to you, but they do exist, Butterfly.”
She tutted and discreetly nudged the needles away from tender flesh. “Interesting ability,” she conceded, “speaking to others who may not be familiar with where you are. I can speak into the minds of other gods of my ilk and certain Cougars, though the act requires proximity or else effort.”
