It was a bizarre way to phrase the question—like I was a retail employee trying to help a customer or something.
Gunn took a step toward me, and I felt Mason move up behind me protectively. “I just want to get to know you, Laney.”
From the porch, John snorted.
I had to agree. “Why now, all of a sudden?”
“Atlanta’s an awfully long way away,” Gunn said. “It wasn’t easy for me to get out there.”
Yeah, and the telephone and post office and email were all too hard to use, too.
I bit back the comment. “You live in Fairy now?”
“No. But not far.” Gunn gestured toward the highway. I couldn’t help but notice his lack of specificity.
“And you thought the best possible way to contact me was to hang out in the high school parking lot and waylay me on the way to my car?” So much for biting back my sarcastic comments.
“I thought it might be easier to talk to you there than here.” Gunn glanced up at John. “For obvious reasons.”
I didn’t believe him. I don’t know if it was the sneaky way he had tried to contact me, or a long-standing irritation at my absentee father, or just his generally sleazy attitude, but something about this guy all but screamed I lie. I am a lying liar who lies.
In my recent experience, that suggested that he was likely to be bad news for me and my friends.
For no other reason than that, I was going to have to find out more about him.
“Okay, then.” I shook my head at what I was about to say, but I said it anyway. “Let’s start slow. Maybe lunch next Saturday?”
Gunn jumped on the offer without even thinking about it. “Perfect. Where do you want to go?”
I glanced a question over my shoulder at Mason. He considered for a moment, then said, “The Coffee Cake Café has good burgers.”
“Work for you?” I asked Gunn.
He nodded. “I’ll see you there at noon on Saturday?”
“Sure.” Gunn stepped forward as if he might try to hug me, but when I backed up enough to bump into Mason’s solid chest, my father turned around and got back into his car. We stood and watched him drive away. I focused on ignoring the white caliche dust that swirled in the air around us.
Before the dust had settled, John stepped up to the edge of the porch. “Laney, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t see your father. It’s not my place. But I am going to tell you that you should probably give your mom a call tonight and talk to her about this.”
At my nod, he headed back into the house. At the door, though, he stopped and looked back at me, staring hard for a moment. “Whatever you do, don’t trust him.
“I won’t,” I assured him, quietly, but with more force than I had intended to put behind the words. My vehemence seemed to reassure John, and he went inside, shutting the door behind him.
“What are you going to do?” Mason asked.
“I guess I’m meeting my father for lunch.”
I wasn’t looking forward to it.
Chapter Seven
Laney
“So,” Thomas Gunn said, settling into the seat across from me two days later. “How do you like Fairy?”
Seriously? He wanted to start with small talk?
I hadn’t been able to get up the courage to talk to Mom about my planned lunch date with my father when she called to check in—and from John’s reaction, I guess I had to believe that Gunn really was my father. I didn’t know what John had said to Mom about it, but I wanted to be able to see her reaction when I talked to her about the man who, I had only just now figured out, Mom had probably never even married, given the fact that our last names were different from his.
I guess asking Gunn about that wouldn’t count as “small talk.” I needed to try something else.
I didn’t know how to have a conversation with a father I had never really met—not since I was tiny, anyway. I didn’t even know what to call him. In my head he was Gunn, but that seemed too impolite. Dad was way too daughterly, and I didn’t want to give him the impression that I wanted him to get too fatherly—or even too friendly, for that matter.
I guess I would go with Thomas, if I had to call him anything. More likely, though, I would try to work it so I didn’t have to call him by name at all.
God. What had we been talking about?
Oh. Right. How I liked Fairy, Texas. What could I say? It’s okay, except for all the actual fairies. No. That wouldn’t do.
“It’s okay, I guess,” I mumbled. Great. I was devolving into Stereotypical Teenager right before my very own eyes. Shaking my head, I worked to speak up a little. “It’s very different from Atlanta.”
“Do you miss your old school?”
The problem, of course, was that I really didn’t know how to answer that either. After everything that had happened in Fairy in the last few months, Atlanta and everything in it seemed so very far away—like a dream that I had once, about a normal life, where I didn’t worry about my sometimes-boyfriend’s missing fairy wings, or the fact that I had killed people (even if they were evil people) and become some sort of power-vampire, or the need to keep all of the weirdness under wraps, secret from all but a few people in my life.
I didn’t have an easy answer to his question, so I reverted into Mumble-Girl again. “Yeah. Sometimes.”
He made a sympathetic noise, took a sip of his coffee, and stared out the window. The silence grew long, and I had a sudden insight: maybe Thomas Gunn was as uncomfortable with this conversation as I was.
Then why did he start it?
Why insist on meeting with me if he didn’t know what he wanted to say?
Maybe there was nothing nefarious about Gunn showing up now. Maybe he just suddenly decided that he was ready to get to know the child he had abandoned all those years ago. Maybe this father-daughter reunion was weird in a perfectly normal way.
Yeah, right.
“You do know that Fairy is a … special … place, right?” Gunn leaned in toward me, watching my face intently to see how I reacted to the pauses in his statement.
Then again, maybe Gunn was every bit as creepy as I had first thought.
Now it was my turn to look out the window at the pretty little downtown street. “It’s nice enough,” I said, trying to sound more nonchalant than I felt.
Gunn leaned back in the booth, stretching one arm out along the back of the seat and watching me through narrowed eyes. “You were in the car wreck that killed the school counselor and that teacher, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” I didn’t elaborate. Mr. Bevington had instructed us to keep any answers short.
“How did it happen?” He wasn’t going to let it go, apparently.
“I don’t really remember. The doctor said it’s not unusual to forget traumatic events like that.” I shrugged. “Apparently, I might never regain all those memories.”
I started to pick up my tea glass, but realized my hands were shaking, so instead, I bent down to drink through the straw.
“What were you all doing out that night?” I took another drink and looked up at him from under the hair that fell forward around my face. Why was he digging for more information? I had already offered the standard I don’t remember answer.
It might be getting close to time to retreat into Sullen Teenager mode, I decided.
“Nothing, really. Just out.” I waved my hand toward the window and the rest of Fairy, Texas outside it. “It’s not like there’s much to do around here.”
“Hmm.” Gunn changed tacks. “Have you met anyone special here yet?”
Part of me wanted to start babbling the whole truth.
Well, I met this one guy who has silver-blue-green eyes and shining wings and I think I might be in love with him but then the scary boss-man tried to make me have a baby, so there was a big fight and I killed the boss-man, but the boy I love got his beautiful wings ripped off, and now he can barely look at me.
It was all I could do not to start laughing
hysterically right there in the diner.
“Not really,” I managed to say.
That was enough of him grilling me. I needed to see if I could turn the tables on him a little. “So where have you been for the last dozen years?”
My question sort of plopped down in the middle of the conversation and lay there writhing uncomfortably, waiting for him to pick it up and save it.
He didn’t.
“Oh, here and there.” Well. That wasn’t really an answer. I tilted my head and waited.
“I grew up here in Fairy, you know,” he finally said.
“Yeah. That’s how you and Mom met, right?”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything out loud about Mom. “I didn’t think I would ever come back here once I left, but now I think I might consider it.”
Great. Just what I needed. Creepy Dad as a permanent fixture in my life.
Our food arrived before I had to say anything in response to that. I busied myself with my oversized, greasy burger.
Gunn stopped quizzing me long enough for us to eat, slipping into mildly amusing stories about his childhood in Fairy—most of it having to do with fishing and driving back roads in pickup trucks.
I smiled politely and tried to pretend that I didn’t see him watching for my reactions to certain names or places. None of which I recognized, of course, since almost all my time here had been spent working to stay un-raped, remain un-pregnant, avoid killing any more scary school officials, learn how to control powers I couldn’t even access, and keep up with all my homework. Fishing and dirt-road travels weren’t in my daily itinerary.
I heaved a sigh of relief when the lunch date finally ended. Gunn walked outside with me. “Do you need a ride home?” he asked.
“No.” I pointed up the street. “I’m meeting a friend at the library to work on homework.”
“Oh? Anyone I’m likely to know?”
How should I know?
I managed to keep the thought to myself, though. “I doubt it. Her family didn’t move here until she was in junior high.”
We stood there awkwardly for a moment, and I wondered if he was going to try to do something really creepy, like hug me.
“Well,” I finally said brightly. “Thanks for lunch. I’ve gotta go. Bye.”
“You’ve got my number, right?” Gunn asked. “Let’s stay in touch, okay?”
“Sure.” I was already backing away, heading up the street toward the tiny downtown library. “See you later.”
Turning, I all but ran away from him. When I looked back, he was climbing into an old pickup truck. There was absolutely nothing unusual about that.
In fact, although the lunch had been awkward and uncomfortable, that wasn’t too odd for a first-time get-together between a man and the daughter he had abandoned twelve years earlier.
Even his questions had been perfectly reasonable.
So why did the whole experience leave me feeling deeply worried and utterly miserable?
And, to be honest, more than a little frightened.
* * *
At the library, I was totally useless. Ally kept trying to nudge me into working on our English project, but I couldn’t pay attention.
Finally, I called Mason to come pick me up. I saw Ally’s eyes narrow in speculation when she realized whose truck I was climbing into, but I simply waved goodbye. After today, it wouldn’t matter if Kayla heard that Mason and I were spending time together.
Because today, I planned to tell her exactly what was going on, no matter what Josh thought about it.
I still felt guilty as all get-out for the loss of his wings, but in only a few days of being snubbed at school, I had gone from hurting to furious.
That’s what I told myself, anyway. If I were going to be entirely honest, I would have to admit that the fact that he wouldn’t speak to me in public—and talked to me in private only when it was absolutely necessary, or when Mason forced him to—still made tears well up in my eyes when I thought about it.
And the fact that he could make me cry pissed me off as much as anything.
Knowing that his house was just down the dirt road on the Hamilton ranch—within easy walking distance, should he decide he wanted to talk to me—didn’t help matters at all. It just made me wonder if he would ever let himself get past his anger at me.
“Are you sure that’s really what you want to do?” Mason asked as we pulled up in the driveway of my house.
I checked to make sure my stepfather’s truck was gone, but that Kayla’s car was in the carport. “Definitely. Right now, Josh’s decisions aren’t logical—he’s being completely emotional, and he’s in no shape to decide what to do about things like that.”
It seemed odd to say that Josh was being too emotional, when the only side I had seen of him lately had seemed cold and unfeeling. But I knew that cold act was all about feeling horrible.
Mason shrugged. “Works for me. I think she ought to know.”
“Then come in the house with me.”
We found Kayla in her room, lying on her stomach on the bed with her feet kicked up in the air behind her as she channel-surfed with the remote in one hand and pecked out text messages on her phone with the other.
“What do you want?” she said in her bitchy tone when I knocked on the doorjamb and leaned around to poke my head in. All that ice melted when she saw Mason, though. “Oh. Come in.”
Sitting up, she turned off the television and rolled her eyes when I followed her boyfriend into the room.
I shut the door behind us, even though we had an open-door policy when there were boys over. I wouldn’t tell if she wouldn’t. And I was sure she wasn’t going to rat me out this time.
“We need to talk, Kayla.” Mason’s voice was serious, his lightning-quick smile completely missing from his face. “There’s something we need to tell you.”
She frowned. “What’s up?” Then she glanced between us. “‘We?’ Oh, God. You’re not going to tell me there’s something going on with you two, are you?”
I was getting awfully tired of people sounding horrified at the prospect of me being me, or someone being with me, or otherwise being connected to me. “Cool your rockets, sunshine,” I said. “I’m not after your boyfriend. He’s all yours, and you can keep him.”
She sneered at me, but I saw the relief in the set of her shoulders. I wondered if she would still feel that way after this talk.
I propped myself up against her desk, next to Mason, who took a chair and pulled it close to the bedside. “The thing is, I’m not like other guys.”
Flipping her hair behind her shoulders, Kayla regained her equilibrium. In her case, that meant switching on the sarcasm. “Are you going to tell me you’re gay?”
I snorted. “Would you hush, Kayla, and let us talk?” Turning to Mason, I said, “I think we should go straight to the show part of show and tell.”
He raised his eyebrows, then shrugged. “Fine. You’re the boss.”
I’m the boss? What did he mean by that?
I didn’t give myself too much time to ponder his phrasing, though. I felt the air in the room become denser, somehow, as if it were coalescing around Mason. His usually open, cheerful face was screwed up tight in concentration as he worked to bring his wings out of the ethereal realm and into our own world. The demons of Fairy didn’t have much practice at that, though—they spent most of their time trying to keep people in the normal, mundane, human world from seeing their wings. They didn’t try to show them off, as a general rule. Josh had made it look easy, but I had learned better in my lessons with Oma Elaine.
Mason’s wings shimmered, becoming first more and then less solid-seeming, but I was certain Kayla couldn’t see them at all.
“Maybe it would be easier to take us there instead of bringing them here?” I suggested gently, reaching down and taking his hand.
Kayla’s face took on that strange, abstracted expression that suggested she was almost remembering something—the look that she had
started getting after the mind-wipe that almost didn’t work—and she stretched her hand out for Mason to hold.
As soon as he had both of us by the hand, Mason popped us into the ethereal realm. It was the first time I had been there since the night of the attack.
I had forgotten how beautiful it was, and how strange. I still saw everything in the human world, but it was like looking at it through a hazy, shimmering layer of silvery gauze.
Everything about Mason, on the other hand, was sharper and clearer on this side, as if functioning in the everyday world did something to mute who he really was.
I guess in a sense, it did, because out in the human world, he couldn’t show his wings.
In here, those wings were glorious.
I remembered the first time I saw Josh’s blue-green-silver wings, the same color as his eyes, and I wanted to cry again.
But this wasn’t about me and Josh. It was about Kayla and Mason.
Kayla’s breath had caught in her throat as she stared up at Mason. Her gaze traced first one enormous wing, then the other.
In his own way, Mason was every bit as beautiful as Josh.
He had grown bigger since the last time I had seen his wings, too. They stretched out to give him a wingspan of almost twenty feet, the tips disappearing through the shimmery, not-quite-there walls of Kayla’s room and into other parts of the house.
“Oh,” Kayla breathed out. “That’s amazing.”
I didn’t think Mason’s wings were as beautiful as Josh’s has been, but they were pretty impressive, a dark blue that edged toward a lighter color where the light shone through the soft leather-like skin.
And of course, Kayla couldn’t help but reach out to touch the wings, stroking her fingers lightly across the bony ridge that framed them. Mason shivered a little, and I turned away from what suddenly felt like too intimate a moment.
When I did, I realized that I had released Mason’s hand—and yet, I remained in the ether. Moving into the ethereal and staying there without help were two things Oma Elaine had been trying to teach me for weeks.
I glanced down at my own hand, glimmering a silver-blue-green in the ethereal light. It was the same color as Josh’s eyes.
Flightless (Fairy, Texas Book 2) Page 5
