Sunshine Walkingstick Omnibus

by Celia Roman

  I hid my face in Riley’s chest. “Oh, for crying out loud. I done no such thing.”

  “It’s ok, baby.” Riley jiggled me and waited ‘til I raised my face up to his before continuing. “Jazz just came out of the bathroom. I’m gonna say hey.”

  “More like sneak some of Fame’s liquor,” I muttered, and he grinned and passed me off like it weren’t no big deal for another man to want a dance.

  Yet ever time David got near, Riley pitched a conniption. Where was the fair in that?

  I shook my head and obediently settled into Teus’ very proper hold. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Manners, Sunshine.”

  “I got ‘em,” I replied, real cheerful like. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He glanced down at me, expression hid in the scant light thrown by jack o’ lanterns and the bonfire somebody got going during the first coupla dances. “I bought a sculpture from James a few years ago. We’ve become friends since then.”

  It took me a minute to figure out who he was talking about, and when I did, I eased back and cocked an eyebrow at him. “Jazz give you one of his folk art sculptures?”

  “I purchased it from him for a fair market price,” Teus said, enunciating each syllable.

  “But he sold it to you, Mr. High and Mighty?”

  “I have a great appreciation for the fine arts, something you would do well to cultivate.”

  I bit my lower lip, holding back laughter as best I could. Jazz painted ever thing what held still long enough to slap pigment on it, and he didn’t care what he painted neither. That’s how BobbiJean ended up with a pair of jeans decked out in roosters and Jazz wore coveralls decorated with the male member in various poses. His sculptures weren’t no different. Irreverent was maybe too mild a word for Jazz’s imagination.

  When I was dead sure I weren’t gonna laugh, I said, “I’ll get right on that.”

  “Sarcasm is unbecoming a woman of your stature, Sunshine.”

  The laughter bubbled over then, couldn’t help it. “My stature? As what, a no account half-breed?”

  Teus’ expression hardened to stone. “Never again demean yourself in that manner. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get you.” Though how telling the truth equaled running myself down, I had no idea. “Do you see the future or something, or do you just like picking on me?”

  “I have the gift of sight.”

  “So, what? You always see us dancing together?” I snorted, just to watch him curl his lip into that holier-than-thou sneer of his. Truth be told, it was kinda cute. Plus, I enjoyed the heck outta getting his goat. “Don’t seem too useful to me.”

  “I see other things, Sunshine,” Teus said, and his voice held that patient tone he used when he was trying to learn me something. “Are you still visiting the boy?”

  A chill gripped me, like somebody walked over my grave, and I stopped dead in my tracks. “Mind your own beeswax, Teus.”

  “I protect what’s mine.” He smiled down at me, gentle and not one whit sensual. “If I confess that you were right, will you promise not to tease me endlessly?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, pretending to think it over. Weren’t no thinking to do. ‘Course, I was gonna tease him, likely ever chance what presented itself. “Depends on what I got right.”

  “I am quite lonely.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Lacking in female companionship. The women around here are…”

  Boy, this was getting mighty interesting. “Go on,” I prodded.

  “Less than adequate.”

  I hooted out a laugh and tugged him back into the dance. “Is that your way of saying they don’t meet your high-falutin’ standards?”

  “Not in the least,” he said stiffly.

  “So where was I right in that?”

  “You’re not the one for me.”

  “Ah.” I relaxed in his embrace, pleased no end he’d finally realized he was sniffing at the wrong woman. “Must be tough being you.”

  “Sunshine.”

  The word was drawn out and long-suffering, like I been poking at him instead of just talking.

  “No, I mean it,” I continued. “How many female deities out there ain’t been claimed yet? Makes it kinda tough to get a date, huh?”

  “Indeed, and that is why I wish you to be my companion. You stimulate me.”

  I bit my lip again. Lordy, if this kept up, I was gonna wear a hole in it trying not to laugh. “Thank you.”

  “The offer is still open, should Ranger Rick forsake you.”

  “You been talking to David, ain’t you?”

  Teus tilted his head to the moon hanging low on the horizon. “He’ll be back soon.”

  “Is that one of them foretellings?”

  “I ran into him at the gas station. He was on his way to Atlanta to visit Gregory.” Teus dipped down and pressed a chaste kiss to my cheek, then whispered, “Not every word is a foretelling, Sunshine, but the ones that are, you should heed.”

  Large, warm hands dropped on my shoulders. I peered behind me and caught a glimpse of a familiar sport coat.

  “Hey, baby,” Riley said. “Miss me.”

  “You have no idea,” I muttered, and Teus clucked his tongue and handed me over to a completely sober Riley.

  The night wore on in high revelry, and me and Riley enjoyed ever minute of it. When we wasn’t dancing or chatting with other wedding guests, we hit the buffet of gruesome looking treats made in honor of All Hallow’s Eve. There was bloody fingers, which turned out to be sugar cookies, eyeballs on a stick (cake pops), big hairy spiders (cupcakes with licorice for the spiders’ limbs), and all sorts of other treats.

  The punch was my favorite. Somebody throwed dry ice into it at some point, turning the fruit juice and sprite combo into a spooky fog. Hey, it matched my dress. For once, I fit right in.

  Riley preferred another sort of punch. He sneaked out here and there to sip at Fame’s moonshine, and come back a little happier ever time.

  ‘Long and along, the guests started drifting home, eventually leaving a dozen or so of us to celebrate midnight with the newlyweds. We huddled around the dying bonfire sharing tall tales, me wedged between Riley on my left and BobbiJean on my right, and enjoyed the fire’s crackling serenade as wood-burned smoke drifted over us.

  When the talk wound down a mite, I nudged her arm. “You was beautiful in that dress.”

  She rested her head against Jazz’ arm and beamed a happy, sleepy smile at me. “It was pretty, wasn’t it?”

  “The bride was beautiful.”

  “Aw, thanks, Sunny.” She glanced beyond me and lowered her voice. “When is your turn coming around?”

  Sorrow pierced my heart quick as a rattlesnake strike. I sucked in a harsh breath, let it out again. She meant well, she did, but BobbiJean hit a nerve with that’un. I scrambled for polite and finally landed on the truth. “We ain’t been dating long.”

  “But you’ve known each other forever.” She leaned into me and threaded her arm through mine, squeezing it as she spoke. “And the way he looks at you? Oh, Sunny. Any woman would be lucky to have a man like that.”

  I was happy to have Riley, truly, but I weren’t fool enough to believe it’d last long enough to become permanent. “He’s a good man.”

  “In love with a good woman.”

  I cut her a side-eyed glance. “You been sipping the hooch?”

  “Just a little. Thanks for bringing it.”

  “Fame insisted.”

  “I would say I’m glad, but I think that’s the reason I have to pee so bad.”

  A guffaw slipped outta me, and I laughed so hard, I swayed on the hay bale and bumped into Riley. He slid sideways, and I panicked and grabbed at him, and hauled him back into place with a little help from the guy sitting on his other side.

  “Easy now, big feller,” I said.

  Riley grinned at me, a happy, not even close to sober smile. “I’m easy. Ain’t I easy, Jazz?”


  Jazz leaned around BobbiJean, his sloppy grin a close twin to Riley’s. “Easy as a whore in Las Vegas, man.”

  “Oh, my God,” BobbiJean muttered. “Come on, Sunny. Walk me to the bathroom. I don’t wanna go by myself in the dark and I am not leaving you here alone with these cretins.”

  I scrambled off the hay bale behind her, not an easy trick in my witchy Goth dress. I’d pulled on a jacket over it, but the night air weren’t so cold I needed pants, ‘specially around the fire. “It’s a wonder they’re still upright.”

  BobbiJean waved a hand at me. “Oh, pshaw. I’ve seen Jazz drink way more than he has tonight and be sober as a tick.”

  We walked down the hill along the graveled drive circling through the property, away from the faint light of the bonfire and the muted conversations holding court there. Halfway down, BobbiJean stumbled and grabbed my elbow. “I’ve been living here for over a decade now, and I still can’t get used to how dark the night is.”

  I hadn’t thought about it. Some things just was, like the sun rising and setting every day. “Moon’s still out. Stars, too.”

  “Oh, fat lot of help you are. I—” She jerked to a stop, her face turned toward the stand of trees rooted between the road and the water. “Did you hear that?”

  I held my breath and listened as I followed her gaze to the shadowed wood beyond the bathhouse. Crickets chirped in time to the rhythm of the river flowing gently over rock. A frog ribbeted here and there. The wind blew through the trees, stirring dry leaves and undergrowth.

  I opened my mouth to tell her weren’t nothing out of the ordinary out there when shadow moved against shadow and a pair of eyes blinked at us from the edge of the trees. BobbiJean screamed and clutched my arm, and before I could say spit, the shadow leapt forward and planted itself in front of us, and become a huge painter with coal black fur and eerie green eyes.

  BobbiJean clapped a hand over her mouth, not even close to stifling the mewl issuing from her throat.

  I froze. Hadn’t brought a gun with me and my knife was tucked into my boot. Of a certainty, that thing’d be on us long before I could draw it. I weren’t willing to risk mine nor BobbiJean’s life in the trying, wedding night or not, but what else could we do?

  A passel of booted feet stomped down the driveway behind us at a steady run. The painter swung its head toward me and dragged a paw along the ground in my direction, then twisted around and disappeared.

  Jazz and Riley and three or four other folks surrounded us before I could draw another breath. As Jazz enveloped BobbiJean in a hug, Riley cupped my shoulders and leaned down, putting his face even with mine. “You ok, baby?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked out. “BobbiJean got scared.”

  “We heard.”

  I nodded, no idea why. Riley pulled me into a hug, one hand around my shoulders, the other cupping the back of my head, and a great trembling overtook me, shaking me so hard, my fingers fumbled with the lapels of his sport coat in my futile attempt to latch on to the only solid thing I could find.

  “It’s ok, baby, it’s ok,” he murmured, but I shook my head. It weren’t ok. Johnny Walkingstick was right. Something was wrong in the deep wood, something terrible bad, and I weren’t so certain it had anything to do with the monsters I been hunting for so long.

  Chapter Seven

  We left soon as the bonfire was watered and sanded, and the food rounded up. BobbiJean helped me stuff Riley into his Range Rover. Turns out, the sober brought on by BobbiJean’s scream lasted about as long as it took to walk back up the hill, not even long enough to help clean up.

  Funny how most of the men was too tipsy to lend a hand.

  I drove real careful like to the trailer. Riley sprawled across the passenger’s seat, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and even. By the time we hit Clayton, I come to a Mount Everest sized decision. No way was I leaving him at his apartment all by his lonesome, not in the shape he was in.

  I turned right onto Hwy. 76 and headed home, and a while later, parked his SUV beside the IROC. I turned off the ignition, took a deep breath. It’d been a long time since a person of the male persuasion stayed overnight in the trailer. Family only, since Daddy died, and never a man I was dating.

  Men didn’t stick around long enough to earn their way into my roost.

  Riley’d stuck, sorta. And besides. We was friends. Couldn’t leave a friend to fend for himself, what with me being the one responsible for bringing liquor to the wedding.

  “What’re we doing here?” Riley said, his voice soft and a little slurred.

  I shifted around in the driver’s seat. His head rolled toward me and his hazel eyes opened a bare slit. I patted his thigh, gentle in deference to the ghost of hangovers yet to come. “I thought it best you sleep here tonight.”

  His mouth relaxed into a loose, happy grin. “I knew you’d come around.”

  I snorted. Yeah, right. Like he was in any shape to take advantage. “C’mon, big feller.”

  I dropped his keys on the seat, left our extra clothes and such in the back, and half pulled, half pushed ‘til he was outta the car and draped over me.

  Now, I ain’t exactly a short woman, but I weren’t no bigger’n a cricket compared to Riley, and was a mite lighter to boot. He was over six foot tall. Worked out all the time, too, so it was scrawny ol’ me versus nigh on two hundred pounds of solid man.

  I managed to balance him with an arm around his lean waist and one of his arms slung around my shoulders. We teetered and tottered across the parking area, up the steps, and into the trailer. After what felt like a coon’s age, I finally maneuvered him down the narrow hallway to the bedroom, flicked the light on with my elbow as I passed the switch, and dumped him on the bed.

  He looked up at me and grinned. “It’s about time you took me to bed.”

  I grinned back, couldn’t help it. Riley drunk was cute as a button. “Sit up and let me get you undressed.”

  “Thought you’d never ask.” He struggled onto an elbow, hindered more than helped me get his coat and shirt off, then flopped back onto the mattress, still grinning like a loon. “Touch me.”

  “I’m a-touchin’ you, sweetheart.”

  Probably not the way he wanted me to. Not quite the way I wanted to neither. Lordy, was it hard resisting temptation. His chest was muscled and tanned. A red-gold patch of hair scattered across his pectorals and arrowed down into a narrow line bisecting his flat tummy before disappearing into the waistband of his slacks.

  A fine grid of scars radiated along the top of his right hip, just visible above his pants. Them he earned serving Uncle Sam in Afghanistan. I never seen ‘em before, and now that I had, nausea tightened my innards into a knot. Dear Lord, the pain he musta been in when that shrapnel dug into him, and again when it was dug outta muscle and bone. If he hadn’ta got help right away, how much worse would it’ve been? Would he’ve lost his leg? Been permanently disabled? Would he be able to walk now a’tall, let alone move around as easy as he done?

  Riley tucked an arm behind his head and dropped his free hand onto mine. “Don’t stop.”

  I swallowed down the bile coating my throat, determined not to let my upset show. No sense hurting him again over something he couldn’t help.

  I mustered a suspicious, side-eyed look and aimed it at him. “You don’t sound near as drunk as you act.”

  “Too drunk to drive,” he said, and squeezed my hand. “Unbutton my pants.”

  “Don’t get no ideas.”

  “Baby, I’ve had ideas about you since you got boobs.”

  I snickered. As if. “Settle down there, Romeo.”

  But it weren’t so easy to undress the rest of him as it shoulda been. I pulled off his socks and shoes, tucked the latter outta the way, and sat down beside him on the bed, staring at the fly of his slacks like it was the devil come to get me.

  In a way, I reckoned it was. Or not it exactly, but what was hiding behind it, already stirring if looks could be believed, and how’d t
hat happened with Riley at least two and a half sheets to the wind?

  Time to get it over with. I blew out a long breath and set my fingers to work on getting his pants off. They trembled and shook like saplings under the breeze, and my skin brushed his ‘long and along. He was smooth, soft, and too warm in the room’s slight chill. I tried to ignore it, tried to concentrate on the task at hand. I brung him here to keep an eye on his inebriated self, not to fondle him.

  I finally managed to get the button undone, fumbled with the zipper, and pulled it down over his manhood, partway thankful he weren’t full on aroused and a smidgeon disappointed, too.

  Which was plumb ridiculous.

  He helped me wiggle his pants off. Soon as they landed in a heap with the rest of his clothes, he snagged my arm and pulled me down on top of him. “Sleep with me.”

  I oomphed and spit hair outta my mouth, then raised up on my elbows and stared down at him, face to face. He smelled like that cologne of his, woodsy and masculine, tinged with the barest hint of corn liquor. I narrowed my eyes at him. “You ain’t drunk.”

  “Can’t drive home.” He rolled onto his side, taking me with him, and tucked me into the curve of his body, one muscled thigh wedged between both of mine. His eyelids slid closed and his breath heaved out on a long sigh, and his voice went low and soft again. “I love you so much, baby.”

  My heart jumped into my throat and froze there, stiff as an frost covered grass. “What?”

  His body went limp against mine, and I lay there beside him consumed by the words spoken when he was too open to keep ‘em hid.

  Danged if I didn’t fall asleep contemplating the finer points of mine and Riley’s relationship.

  I woke in the middle of the night still dressed in my witchy Goth dress, denim jacket, and boots, snuggled up to a furnace. It took my sleep befuddled noggin a minute to put two and two together and come up with Riley, and when it did, the confusion what worried me into Morpheus’ embrace popped up again, clear as a bell.