Crossroads Burning

by Nash, Layla

  I lay back and stared at the dim ceiling for far too long after I put the book in the hiding place I’d made in my wall, behind one of the posts of my bed. Part of me didn’t want to dream again so I wouldn’t end up with more trouble, but part of me also couldn’t face the morning. I didn’t know what to do about Lincoln. I wanted to trust him. I did. I wanted to believe he would stay and everything would work out and that a relationship—any relationship—would be possible between us. Even if it was just friendship... I could live with that.

  Or at least I liked to hope I could.

  Not that Lincoln and his team would fit in around Rattler’s Run. They were too big and capable and fierce, too businesslike. They’d overwhelm everything, even if they didn’t mean to. And all the humans, the ones who kind of suspected magic existed but didn’t know for real, wouldn’t be able to ignore the sudden appearance of a bunch of federal agents with money and equipment and strange habits. Particularly when those federal agents went out to the Crossroads with the Lucketts and called on Luke Mankiller and his Nona.

  I covered my eyes. And I’d told Lincoln and the others that Ronan was Frank, our cousin, and a little bit crazy. If I backtracked and told him instead that Ronan was a long-ago ancestor who fucked over his neighbors in Salem, invented the werewolf curse, and then got the curse stuck to him for three hundred years... There wouldn’t be much trust after that. Especially since a Luckett was the cause of the werewolves running around North America for the last three hundred years.

  As if being a Luckett wasn’t bad enough.

  I rolled out of bed and got up to pace inside my room, avoiding the squeaky floorboards from long practice. Liv slept really lightly and would be up to tell me to stop making a racket in a few seconds if I hit any of them, even though she was on the other side of the house. I rubbed my temples as I paced, hoping that some movement would shake the thoughts loose in my brain.

  Bad news didn’t get better with age, that was for sure. If I was going to tell Lincoln anything, it had to be sooner rather than later. Otherwise it would just sound like I tried to cover my ass. It wouldn’t be an honest mistake if I waited until they came back along with Luke. I pressed my hands against my eyes. No doubt Lucia would have an opinion on how much to tell the feds, but she didn’t know them like I did. She didn’t want to hear what Ronan had to say. So maybe there wasn’t any use in trying to reason with her or Liv and coming to a family decision.

  It was my fault, all of it. I’d accepted the job from Lincoln and taken them to the Crossroads, and I’d admitted the Luckett magic before I brought them to the cave and killed werewolves and then brought them and all their trouble back to the house. My mess. Me being blinded by a handsome face and the possibility of a relationship with someone who didn’t know every rotten moment of my history could end up bringing major consequences for the family and our legacy.

  I owned it. I broke it, I bought it.

  I picked up my phone and stared at it, wondering if he would still be awake at almost midnight. I didn’t want to just call, so I sent a text. Can you talk?

  And then I waited, trying not to gnaw my fingernails down to the quick. What if he didn’t answer? What if he did?

  I didn’t have to wait long, just three circuits of my room, before the phone pinged. Always.

  It shouldn’t have made me grin like a fool, or hug myself, or start to bounce a little in anticipation. He wouldn’t have answered like that if he didn’t mean it, if there wasn’t something there. If he didn’t really believe in our mutually-assured destruction.

  And it took me another two circuits of the room to gather the courage to actually call him.

  He answered on the first ring, and my heart fluttered at the sound of his voice, a little rusty and maybe sleepy, like he was lying in bed. Maybe not wearing any clothes. “Hey there. You’re up late.”

  “So are you,” I said, and smacked my forehead. I hadn’t felt like such a childish idiot since high school and fielding a call from a boy for the very first time. “I just…there’s something we need to talk about.”

  “Oh?” He sounded suddenly a lot more awake. “Is something wrong? Did something happen?”

  “Sort of. It’s not an emergency. But I didn’t want to wait.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, wondering how the hell to start the conversation about Ronan. “But I don’t know exactly... There’s a lot to this.”

  Lincoln grumbled a bit like he was smiling or on the verge of laughing. “So am I driving to you or are you driving to me?”

  I hesitated, and when I didn’t answer, he definitely started laughing, a soft little huff that set my heart beating low and slow in anticipation. I finally managed to pull my head out of my ass and say, “My truck is broken, otherwise I would...”

  “Sure, sure.” Lincoln heaved a dramatic sigh and things rustled in the background, like he was getting dressed. “I know how it is. Anything you want me to bring, since I’ll be hiking in from town?”

  “A bottle of whiskey would be nice,” slipped out before my good sense got hold of me, and I smacked my forehead in disbelief at my own stupidity. If he hadn’t thought it was a booty call before, he sure as hell would if I wanted to get drunk. “I mean, I don’t have anything to offer you to drink except grape juice and some milk that’s probably turned so you might get butter instead.”

  “Whiskey,” he said under his breath, and I could just picture him shaking his head. “I’ll be there in about twenty minutes. Should I expect the firing squad or any other cousins hiding in sheds?”

  “Everyone else is asleep,” I said. I hoped it was true and Lucia and Ronan weren’t both still awake in their respective rooms. It would make having a heart-to-heart with Lincoln that much more difficult. “You don’t have to come out here. We can wait until tomorrow, and—”

  Lincoln chuckled. “No, Anastasia, you’ve got me intrigued. I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight wondering what it is that has you calling me so late at night.”

  My cheeks ached with heat as I turned on my heel and confronted the blank expanse of my wall. “I can’t picture you spending that much time wondering about anything, Lincoln.”

  “Wondering, hoping, it’s all about the same.” And before I could comment on that, he grumbled, “I’ve got to sneak past several agents who are having too good of a time tonight to be asleep, so I’ll talk with you more when I’m driving up to the house. Have the glasses and ice ready.”

  I would have given him shit about drinking his whiskey with ice, but the call ended and all I could do was grin at my phone. Maybe we could start with what he’d been spending his time hoping for, since that promised a far more interesting conversation than a dusty old book and a dustier old relative.

  Chapter 44

  It took him closer to thirty minutes to pull into the drive and bump along slowly toward the house, turning off his headlights about halfway past the barn. It was almost like he had experience in creeping up to a girl’s house for a late-night rendezvous. I sat on the porch with the shotgun propped nearby, in case any dire wolves ran through the night or Ronan tried to escape, and even had a tray on the rickety coffee table out there with ice and glasses and even a couple of sugar packets if he was really weird about his drinks. Gran always said to never trust a man who put water in his whiskey.

  Lincoln got out of the SUV and bumped the door closed with his hip instead of slamming it, and he sauntered up to the porch like he was a white-hat cowboy in some old B-grade Western, sidling up to Miss Kitty’s whorehouse in celebration after he shot the drifter. Except for the whorehouse part, I didn’t entirely mind the comparison. He would have looked damn good in chaps and spurs and... I shook myself before I could get too distracted by the costumes I wanted to see him wear.

  He hefted a brown paper grocery bag and held it in front of him as he approached the stairs. “Typically we do not enter someone’s house without permission and a gift. So.”

  My head tilted as I watched him, curious more than I cared
to admit. “Who is ‘we’ in that sentence?”

  “Druids.” He waited until I nodded and waved him up the stairs, then he leaned down right next to me and brushed a kiss against my cheek that practically lit fire through every inch of me.

  “Was that the gift?” I asked, feeling even more ridiculous since my voice went all high and fluttery. I needed liquid courage with an ounce of Nona’s no-nonsense attitude. She’d never let me give a man the upper hand like that.

  Come to think of it, Ronan’s attitude explained a whole hell of a lot about how Luckett women were raised, if they’d had to put up with pompous assholes mucking things up at every turn way back before they arrived in Rattler’s Run.

  Lincoln sat down right next to me instead of across the table like I’d expected, and his knee bumped mine gently as he pulled a few bottles of whiskey out of the bag. “I didn’t know what kind you liked, so I got...”

  “Every brand in the gas station?” My eyebrows climbed my forehead and made a reasonable ascent toward my hair. “This one is different, though, I haven’t seen it before. I thought you’d bring Jack or Jim or Evan or something. These are all way more expensive than anything—”

  “Not necessarily expensive,” he said, and I didn’t mind that he interrupted. He turned the bottles so I could see the labels. “It’s all in knowing how to drink it. I didn’t peg you for a whiskey girl, to be honest, so I got a variety to cover my bases.”

  I didn’t mind spending the whole night talking about whiskey and even bourbon and rye if it meant I didn’t have to admit that Ronan was a werewolf and a druid and the guy who’d fucked everything up way back in the day. I leaned my elbow on the arm of my chair and propped my chin on my fist. “Oh? And what did you peg me as?”

  “Beer,” he said, nodding to himself. He frowned at one of the bottles and set it aside, though not before I caught a glimpse of Balvenie on the label. That was definitely not cheap whiskey. I knew enough to know it was scotch, and a pretty damn good one that he couldn’t have gotten at the gas station in town. But Lincoln kept talking as I peered at the bottles. “Possibly rum. Definitely rum.”

  I snorted and sat back, folding my arms over my chest. “Come on, now. You asked for ice in your whiskey and I’m the asshole who likes mixed drinks?”

  Half his mouth turned up in a smile as he set another bottle in front of me. “Don’t start throwing stones until you’ve gotten a whiff of some of these. If you think Jack counts as real whiskey, you might as well stick with beer. Or so I’ve heard.”

  “Those are fightin’ words,” I said, trying not to laugh at his audacity. “My gran would have kicked your ass up and down the driveway for daring to say such a thing.”

  “Your gran was a whiskey connoisseur, I take it?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I didn’t know how many family secrets to spill, but Gran’s little habit seemed harmless to confess after all the other ghosts we’d knocked out of the family tree in front of Lincoln. Plus his own Uncle Digger seemed prone to less-than-legal distilling. “She spent a lot of time makin’ moonshine, most of it wheated or rye-based. So she was a connoisseur of something, though it usually exploded in the bathtub before she had a chance to age it.”

  He started laughing loud enough I worried about it waking Ronan and smacked Lincoln on the shoulder to get him to shut his damn mouth, and for a long moment he shook and convulsed like it might take a swing of one of those bottles to bring him back to normal. Lincoln wiped at the tears running from his eyes, coughing and spluttering just a little as he held his sides and leaned back in his chair, the whiskey forgotten. “I’m sorry, I think I might have misheard you. Your grandmother did what?”

  “You heard me the first time,” I said, and tried to get my expression back to stern and unyielding. “And don’t make me say anything else against my dear sainted Gran, or she will haunt the hell out of you. I’ve seen it happen. We only recently got her out of the attic.”

  He chuckled like I was joking, so I let him go on believing that. Turned out that people with strong personalities in life tended to maintain those strong personalities in death, and since Gran never met an argument she didn’t plan to win, she had several conversations to continue with us after her passing. I liked having her with me sometimes, but not when I needed to sleep or study or work magic and all I could sense was her hovering over my shoulder, waiting with the ruler to smack me upside the head if I blinked wrong.

  “I’ll apologize to your dear sainted Gran,” he said, managing to sound serious as well. “We’ll toast to her first thing.”

  He pointed at the three other bottles. One of them had too many vowels and not enough consonants, another said High West Bourye, and the third said Redbreast 12. I hadn’t heard of a damn one. I cleared my throat and tried to look like I knew what I was doing as I picked one up, frowning at the label. “Which one are you not going to ruin with ice and sugar?”

  That got another snort and an almost-dirty look. “I never asked for sugar, sugar, so don’t you start rumors like that.” He picked up the one with too many vowels and held it up. “Ardbeg Uigeadail. This is sharp, though. Might wake your grandmother right on up and bring her back to sit with us.”

  I knocked on wood, just in case, and threw some of that sugar over my left shoulder, too. But I had to man up, since I’d opened the door on drinking whiskey. He looked like he knew what he was talking about, since it was a real possibility that he was some kind of reincarnated druid who owned a distillery at one point. Or something. “Then let’s get crackin’.”

  When he opened the bottle, I felt the whiskey in my eyeballs and my nose, both of them almost immediately watering just from having the bottle four feet away. Holy shit and shinola. That would definitely wake the whole house and probably every damn Luckett in the family plot halfway to the Crossroads. Lincoln smiled and splashed a little into each of the glasses I’d brought out, although mine was cracked and his had cartoon characters on it. At least they were clean.

  From the very first sip, I thought it might kill me. I felt it like a punch in the chest and someone ripping out my nose hairs at the same time, and my eyes just kept on watering as I swallowed and the scotch burned its way down my throat and started to eat through my stomach. I didn’t cough, though, which I counted as a significant moral victory from the way Lincoln watched me, grinning. Maybe he’d taken the request for whiskey as a personal challenge to try and set my entire body on fire like I was trapped in a burning coal mine.

  I swallowed a couple of times and managed to croak, “Smooth,” before I sipped again.

  He clamped his lips together but holy smokes, how he laughed. Bent over and slapping his knee, shaking until the chair practically fell apart underneath him, and he managed to jostle my chair too.

  After far too long of him enjoying my agony over that unpronounceable drink, he reached for one of the other bottles to splash a little into my glass. He also pulled a sleeve of dry crackers out of the paper bag and handed me a couple. “Have one before you try the next bottle. It’ll help... settle things down.”

  “Right,” I said, and my voice sounded like rusty hinges. I wondered if maybe it had curled my hair, like Ma always warned us when we got too close to Gran’s still. But neither cursing nor strong drink had done much to make my hair any less straight as pins, despite me trying copious amounts of both in my teenage years. I cleared my throat a couple of times for good measure and gnawed my way through a cracker while Lincoln sipped on his unpronounceable whiskey and seemed to enjoy watching me pull myself together.

  The next one, the Rosebreast or Redbreast or whatever it was, didn’t taste like it could strip varnish from the hardwood floors inside the house, and I was able to enjoy that quite a bit more. It spread a soothing warmth through my chest and out to my fingertips, so I could smile and close my eyes and lean back in my chair to enjoy every inch of it.

  Lincoln made a pleased sound and also leaned back, scratching at his once again neatly-trimmed beard as
he poured more of the paint thinner into his cartoonish glass and watched me enjoy the drink. “That’s more like it.”

  I cracked my right eye open so I could get a sense of his expression in the half-light of the porch’s single lightbulb. “That’s an awful lot of good whiskey to bring out here in the middle of the night. Where did you get it?”

  “Heathrow always brings good liquor with him when he travels in the middle of the country. I stole it from him.”

  I choked on my next sip and inhaled it instead, coughing and wheezing as Lincoln relieved me of the glass to set on the table, then pounded on my back until I managed to suck in some air. My eyes burned and it felt like every part of me sweated or cried at the same time. “You what?”

  I hoped he said he was kidding. I really hoped it was all an elaborate prank on me, somehow.

  But Lincoln just smiled serenely and poured himself another drink. “I figured he owed us a little for how he’s behaved in town, so he can sacrifice a few bottles of the good stuff. I didn’t take any of the super expensive bottles, like the Pappy. He’ll live. He’ll probably blame his team, or he might suspect me. It’s neither here nor there.”

  I wheezed more and shook my head at another drink of whiskey, and instead sucked on an ice cube until I felt a little less like a volcano ready to spew.

  “So why did you invite me over, Anastasia?” He raised his glass in salute, anticipating the answer.

  I’d grown to love the way he said my name. The syllables sang and flowed and practically floated when he said them. His blunt fingers held his glass and tapped against the cartoon duck’s face as he watched me. Waiting. I took a deep breath and wished I dared drink more before things had to get serious. “Well, it’s hard to explain.”

  “If it’s because you want to take advantage of me, there’s something you should know.” His face went so serious that my heart plummeted to my knees and I started to object so fast he could hardly hold his hand up in time to slow me down. Lincoln shook his head, mournful as a lazy bear in fall, and sighed. “I can get on board, but you might have to make me breakfast in the morning.”