by Holley Trent
“Look—”
“Nope. I have no doubt you’re keeping more secrets from me. That’s the way lies work, right? Start with a little one, and they get bigger and bigger, and you don’t know what the truth is anymore.”
“I didn’t lie. I withheld information.”
“Same damn thing.”
Uncle returned with four dusty bottles and loaded them into a mesh bag. “Tell her to try this one last.” He pointed to the blue bottle in front of the three greens. “That one pairs very well with spice.”
December took the bag from him and looped the strap over her forearm. “I’ll tell her.”
Uncle nodded and clasped his hands. “Okay, good. I’ll see you to the door.”
She turned on her heel, walked straight toward Tito, and that time he got the hell out of the way.
She gotten all the way to the front door when Uncle whispered, “You really believed you had a choice?”
“I wanted her to have one. Should be her choice whether or not she wants to get tangled up with me. I’m no good at this anymore.”
“She wouldn’t be caught up in the tangle if she wasn’t equipped to be. Us, though?” He crooked a thumb toward himself and then pointed to Tito. “Just dumb luck, yes? We were born into the magic and have to cope the best we can. With them … ” He gestured in her general direction. “They don’t get paired with us unless they have the huevos. The Fates aren’t so petty that they’d stuff these humans into the grinder just to see what’ll come out of the other end. Who knows? Maybe there’s someone else she could be with.” He shrugged. “But there’s no else for you. You know that.”
Tito did.
“Tito?” December called from just outside the front door.
“One moment, Dee.”
“So, what are you going to do? Be the martyr? Punish yourself with loneliness? I can tell you solitude isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Tito?” December called over again.
“I promise, I’m coming, Dee.” To his uncle, he said, “I want her, and Cruz, too. I worry about what kind of life we could have. Forever is a long time.”
“And you think you’re not worth the duration? That’s dangerous thinking.”
“Yeah, I guess you’d know.”
Uncle grabbed his shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. “Let me be your cautionary tale. Don’t let the past stop you from trying to make a future. I’ve taken far too long to give myself permission to live. Simply existing isn’t enough. I know that now after all this time. Don’t waste good days. Thumb your nose at the people who would try to take what you deserve, and make something, eh?”
“Point taken.”
Tito followed December’s footsteps to the front doorway.
She stood on the mat, looking pointedly into the distance. “Where’d Tamatsu go?”
“He’s gotta be out there somewhere. I’ll go look.”
The sun had gone down. He didn’t know what manner of beasts skulked in Spanish vineyards beyond the occasional tabby cat, but he suspected he was the harder to frighten of the two of them.
As he started toward the first row of vines, though, he got a sinking feeling.
Tamatsu and others of his ilk gave off an incredible amount of power, even when they weren’t trying, and in spite of being a demigod with a very limited range of abilities, Tito was able to sense their proximity better than most beings. He wasn’t getting that knot in his gut or the prickles at the back of his neck.
He wasn’t getting shit.
“Uh, T? Where’d you go, man?”
No response, not that Tito really expected the angel to actually say something for a change.
There were no noises, aside from the shaking of grape leaves in the breeze and the chittering of some small creature whose sleep Tito had probably disturbed.
“Seriously, dude?”
He kept walking, aisle after aisle, knowing deep down that his ride had bounced.
“Fuckin’ dick. Wait until I see you again, man. You knew damn well we couldn’t get—”
Couldn’t get home.
“Sneaky motherfucker.” Tito scoffed and started up the aisle and toward the cottage.
Tamatsu likely thought he was doing Tito a favor. He had to know they didn’t have cash on hand to hop on an international flight back to the US, and that wouldn’t have gotten them home immediately, anyway.
Tito would have bet good money that Tamatsu would show up at the vineyard first thing in the morning, sitting where he had been before he vanished, as if nothing was amiss.
He could have a night with Dee, and she couldn’t run far. Ready or not, they had to hash things out. Tito had to start putting the past behind him.
Moving on didn’t mean he had to forget. Moving on didn’t mean he didn’t respect who he’d lost, only that he had, like Uncle said, decided to live.
“Here we go,” Tito said as he locked gazes with December in the doorway.
chapter THIRTEEN
“Where did he go?” December asked Tito as he returned to the open door.
He shrugged and took the wine bag from her. “Dunno. Can never tell what that guy’s thinking.”
“Can you call him? Send him a text message or something?”
Tito set the wine bag just inside the door, kicked a bit of mud off his boots, and then stepped over the threshold. “Tamatsu doesn’t have a phone. I doubt he even knows how to use one.”
“How the hell does anyone living in the modern era get by without having a phone?”
“He doesn’t talk, doesn’t text, and doesn’t need GPS. What good would a phone do him?”
“Ugh. I can’t just sit around waiting for him. There’s got to be some way to find him. Call Tarik. Maybe he’ll know.”
“What’s the matter?” Tito’s uncle asked. He stood near the worn plaid armchair with his hands in his pockets.
She couldn’t believe the frail man was a god. He reminded her of her old neighbor from when she was a kid—the guy who used to mow his lawn promptly at nine every Saturday morning and who would never say no to a box of Girl Scout cookies.
“Our ride left us,” she said. “I thought angels were supposed to be trustworthy.”
“No more so than anyone else. Their motives may be purer, but they’re just as … ” He narrowed his eyes and clucked his tongue. “What is that word? Flaky?”
“That’s a good word.” Tito put his phone to his ear and said into it, “Yeah, Tarik? Have you seen Tamatsu? He pulled a disappearing act on us—figuratively, this time.”
Tito looked from the ceiling he’d been staring at to December, to his uncle next, and then back to the ceiling again, cringing.
Cringes weren’t good things.
December poked him. “What’s he saying?”
“Nah, that’s fine,” Tito said into the phone. “I’m sure he’ll be back in the morning, assuming he can judge the time okay. I’ll see you then.” He disconnected and moved farther into the room without another word.
Seriously?
Growling, she stomped after him. “Tito, what’d he say?”
He crumpled onto the sofa with a grunt and draped his arms on the backs of the cushions. “Said the best he could tell, Tamatsu is between realms right now.”
“Ah,” Tito’s uncle said on retreat to the kitchen.
December made a circular motion with her hand. “Annnnd?”
Tito shrugged. “And he never goes in there for less than twelve hours. I guess he goes there looking for things whenever he has some downtime.”
“He didn’t have downtime. He was just waiting for us to finish.”
“Like Uncle said, they’re flaky. Doesn’t matter whether or not Tamatsu talks. If he’d poked his head in and said ‘be right back,’ we wouldn’t be any better off right now.”
“Crap. And you didn’t even ask Tarik about his errand.”
Tito grunted and danced his eyebrows upward.
She paced in front of a low bookshel
f, wringing the hem of her shirt and grinding her teeth. She’d finally managed to get a little bit angry at Tito and was motivated to put a hell of a lot of distance between her and him, and there went a monkey wrench.
“I swear, when that dude shows up, I’m going to kick his shin or something,” she said in an undertone.
“Might as well sit down,” Tito said. “Relax.”
“I don’t want to relax. I want to see what Cruz is doing. If I’m away too long, I worry.”
“Ma will keep her safe.”
“I understand that, but I’m still going to worry. Worrying is my job.”
She’d been speaking metaphorically, but at the rate she was going, it was likely to turn out to be literal truth, too. Her sister kept leaving her voicemails asking what was up, and December didn’t have a good answer for her.
“Sit.” He patted the cushion beside him.
“Nuh-uh.”
“You don’t want to sit next to me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be near you right now.”
“Just because I didn’t tell you about the mate thing?”
“That’s a pretty big thing. How could you take such a huge deal so lightly? I feel like you knew all this time, and you were running from it. Is that what you were doing?”
“No!” He cringed. “Well, yeah, I guess. But not because I didn’t want you. You know that. The frustration you’re enduring right now? Shit, this is the tip of the iceberg of what you’d be dealing with for the rest of your life. I didn’t want all the magic shit getting in the way of you making the right decision.”
“And you would have been okay with me being with someone else?”
“Fuck no, but okay or not, I assumed a lady like you was going to be, anyway. I wasn’t gonna go looking for verification. I figured you’d move on and find some guy, hopefully a nice one, and that you’d never know what I hadn’t told you. The match doesn’t always go a hundred percent both ways. No matter what, I would have wanted you, but it takes a little more effort for you to get attached to me.”
“We made a baby.”
He turned his hands over. “That probably helped seal the deal.”
“So, what now?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happens between you and me?”
“That’s up to you. Like I said, you’re still the one who gets to make the choice.”
“And what about you?”
“What?” He made a face as if he’d caught a foul scent on the wind.
She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped the toe of her boot with impatience. “You keep saying I get to make the choice, but what do you want? In a perfect world, how would this scenario play out for you?”
“Shit, if this were a perfect world and I were a normal guy, I’d get you in front of a justice of the peace so fast that you wouldn’t even have time to realize that you’d be marrying someone who’s not good enough for you.”
“Whatever.”
“I mean it. You should have a man with some polish—someone who hasn’t been put through the cosmic meat grinder and chewed up into some kind of cynical sausage.”
She let out a dry laugh. “My father used to say a similar thing to my mother. He was surprised she said yes, but she said yes because she knew he was what she needed. Don’t you think I would know what I need better than anyone?”
“Sometimes, the magic lies. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between need and want. Maybe you want me, but do you need me? Because I don’t think you need me the way I need you.”
“You’re full of shit,” she said in an undertone. “You wouldn’t have pushed me away if you’d needed me.”
“No, Dee, I pushed you away in spite of the fact I needed you.”
“Tito, that is deranged.”
He shrugged. “You get to be really fucking practical when you get to be my age, and sometimes practical hurts.”
“And so does love, apparently,” she whispered.
The passive expression he’d been wearing crumbled as he lowered his head. “You’re killing me.”
“You say I get to choose.”
“You do.”
“With the immortality thing, too?” The strangeness of the idea put a knot in her stomach, and she’d already had one too many left over from how violently Tamatsu had yanked them across the globe in less than five seconds. A strange idea, but an appealing one. She would never say no to having more time with the people she loved.
“Immortality is kinda par for the course if you accept me, Dee,” Tito said after a couple of minutes. “Until you just … don’t anymore.”
She perched on the arm of the plaid chair and, folding her arms over her chest, drummed the sides of her biceps. “That sounds like a hell of a breakup. You’d get to keep the kid and my record collection, and I get to die.”
She joked, but even to her, the gag fell flat.
“Now you’re understanding a little why I didn’t tell you. And besides, there was never really a good time, right?”
“I dunno, there seemed to have been a pretty sweet spot between the third and fourth times you came over in the middle of the night. Those visits were a month apart.” She closed her eyes and scoffed. “I can’t believe how stupid I was. So young and naïve, and I would have given you anything.”
“A few years makes a difference. Would you rather be immortal having that woman’s brain, or the brain you have now?”
“I don’t want to debate this with you. I don’t even want to talk to you.”
“You don’t really have the luxury of ignoring me. You agreed we could co-parent. You’re not gonna go back on your word, are you?”
“I may not have to. Someone—and by someone, I mean you—still needs to tell Cruz that you’re her father.”
“I will.”
She scoffed again. “Good luck.”
“You don’t think she’ll handle that well?”
“I’m just saying you shouldn’t assume that she will. She has every right to be upset about you not being there. She needed her daddy.”
“And I’m here now. I can accept her being upset with me, but that’s not gonna stop me from doing the right thing. I’m going to be there to teach her what she is and what that means. Give me a chance, and I’ll prove to you that I’ll never leave her for more than a day, if I can help it. I won’t make that mistake again. I’m not gonna let another child of mine slip away because I wasn’t there.”
She wanted to believe him, but she’d promised herself she wasn’t going to make his concession an easy one. She’d been a doormat for too long.
His uncle stepped into the room, carrying a sleeping bag and a blanket under one arm. “Been having a problem with pests in the vineyards. I believe I will sleep under the stars tonight to be sure my crop isn’t ruined.”
December put up her hands. “Look, I get what you’re doing, but that’s really not necessary. I’m sure Tamatsu will be back soon, and we’ll be sleeping in our own beds tonight.” She cringed. “Or at least, Tito will be.”
“All the same, I should spend the evening in the fields. The environment will be good for my concentration. Remember, I have work to do.”
“Right.” Recognition came on a delay, because just that quickly she’d forgotten why they’d zipped all the way around the globe in four seconds flat to Spain. His uncle had important work, at that, and December certainly didn’t want to delay him.
He stepped out into the night and closed the door behind him, indoor-outdoor cat be damned.
Tito patted the cushion beside him again. “Come on.”
She shook her head and settled into the armchair.
“Don’t be like that.”
“You don’t have the right to tell me how I can be or not be. I’m entitled to feel any way I’d like. I think right now, I’m justified in not wanting to sit next to you.”
“You’d feel better if you did.”
/> “No, I’d feel better if I flicked you the bird right now, and believe me when I tell you that I haven’t felt like anyone’s deserved that particular gesture in at least three years.”
“And I do? Shit. That’s cold.”
In general, Tito took what December said in stride. She’d never upset him, at least as far as she could tell, and she couldn’t remember ever having seen him without a smile. Since she’d shown up in Maria, he hadn’t had very many.
Nope. That’s not my fault.
She entwined her fingers, and then again, changing the knit each time, concentrating on perfectly locking her hands. Silly motions to fixate on so she wouldn’t have to look at him and feel guilty for a problem that wasn’t completely her making. She may have opened her legs for him, but she hadn’t asked for all the rest. No sane woman would have wanted the baggage that came with him.
“Hey, Ma. Did you talk to Tarik?”
December looked up at Tito slumped low on the sofa holding his phone to his ear.
“Nah. I don’t know for sure where Tamatsu went. I’m sure he’ll turn up by morning, though. You all right keeping Cruz?”
December could hear her snort through the speaker all the way from across the room.
“Huh?” Tito rubbed the scruff on his chin and furrowed his brow. “Yeah, okay. Go ahead.” He pinned his gaze on December and she opened her mouth to ask him “What?” but didn’t have time to get the word out.
“Hey,” he said. “No, your mommy’s right here, staring at me.” He held the phone a bit away from his face and waggled his eyebrows at December. “Cruz wants to know if she can have chocolate cake.” He put his thumb over the mic. “If it’s one of Ma’s cakes, we’re talkin’ frosting layers half an inch thick.”
“Cake?” Shuddering, December felt psychosomatic sugar pangs in her front teeth. She’d never had much of a sweet tooth, preferring salty and sour instead. With Cruz, she tried to teach the child smart decision-making with food so she didn’t grow up to be a picky eater like her mother.
But if Cruz really is immortal, a bit of cake isn’t going to kill her.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and wondered if there was a support group for parents of young demigoddesses. “Tell her she has to wait until after dinner.”
