Forged Under Blue Fire: Indigo Knights Book VIII

by A. J. Downey

  “This is going to take some doing,” he declared.

  “Yeah, I don’t do anything half-assed,” I shot back.

  “No! No, you do not,” Skids agreed.

  Golden chuckled and we stood around for the most part while Backdraft, the expert in these types of situations, did his thing. Assessing the damage, prying the boards making up the door jamb loose, that kind of thing. When he wanted or needed one of us, he would say so.

  Elka came out of the kitchen doorway a short time later with a metal travel mug in her hands. She paused to look at each of us in turn and declared quietly, “Coffee is in the pot on the counter. If you need more, I left everything out next to it. Mugs are above the sink, milk and creamer are in the fridge. I left a bowl of sugar out if that’s your thing. I’m really sorry, but I have to get to work. First day and all.”

  “Naw, it’s fine, we get it. Thanks for the coffee.” Skids smiled at her kindly.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said.

  “No, please. It’s fine. Just… just if you need to use the bathroom please be careful of the paintings. I’d die if anything happened to them. They’re oils so the paint’s still wet.”

  “We’ll be careful, I promise,” I told her.

  “Thanks again,” she muttered and taking up her purse and shouldering her briefcase she squared her shoulders and squeezed past Backdraft and Golden, her posture rigid.

  “She’s not okay,” Golden mused out loud when she was well out of earshot.

  “No shit, genius. What was your first clue?”

  “Knock it off and come help me,” Backdraft grunted.

  “What do you need?” Golden asked.

  “Pull!”

  Golden hooked his fingers in the doorjamb and helped pull it away from the wall, the already splintered wood cracking loudly.

  Fixing her door was a pain in the ass. Regardless of its status as ‘finished’ or not, I had promised to bring her the new keys around by lunchtime and so with the guys still working on it, that’s what I did. I swung by one of the local hardware places where they still had a guy behind the counter to cut new keys and had some duplicates made for her. I figured three sets would do. One for her, one for her management company and a set maybe for her pops or whoever she wanted to give them to. There was another set, left with the guys to lock up if they finished up before I got back, but that didn’t seem like it was going to happen.

  It was always something, man. Always something. With any kind of home improvement project or repair there had to be a hiccup or a pain in the ass hardware issue just something. This project was no fucking exception and at times I found myself seething unfairly at Elka like it was somehow her fault for not answering the fucking door.

  Which, it kind of was, even though it wasn’t exactly fair to level blame. You know what I mean?

  Anyway, I was shit at these kinds of things. Repairs and the like. Put a gun in my hand that was having issues and I could fix that, but cages, bikes, and houses? Never been my thing. I just was all thumbs. I could tell you how to fix bad sports plays or how to handle any sport-related injury, but fixing people was way different than fixing a splintered doorframe.

  I especially had this thought hit home when I saw Elka, bent over some painting painstakingly doing what, I didn’t know to it. It was the look of grim concentration on her face, something about her stooped posture, her bent shoulders; the way she clutched her necklace to her chest as if she were trying to keep her damn heart from falling out.

  Naw, with as many fits and problems fixing her front door had been giving us all morning long, fixing her was gonna be way more painstaking a process.

  Not your problem, asshole. Just stay in your lane, I thought savagely to myself but as I followed the reception lady to Elka’s fancy white plexiglass table glowing softly under whatever piece she had on it, I knew I was fooling myself.

  Females ain’t nothing but trouble, I reminded myself, but my internal voice was echoed by the lighter side of my soul reminding me that not all females were. She honestly didn’t look like no trouble at all. Just… tired. Lonesome maybe. Hurt definitely.

  “Ms. Köhler, this man is here to see you – he says he’s the police.”

  She looked up from her work, setting her cotton swab full of goop aside and said, “Thank you, Katie. I’ve been expecting him.”

  Katie smiled and I swear to God, dipped some fancy ass curtsey before turning and striding back the way she came. I cocked my head and stared after her, looking from Elka before back in the receptionist’s direction before looking back to Elka shaking my head.

  Elka, to her credit, actually cracked a smile and tittered a soft laugh.

  “Some of us art nerds are from a bygone era,” she stated, and I blinked in amazement and said, “For real.”

  “How’s my front door?” she asked, slipping off her stool and hugging herself, her white-gloved hands capturing her elbows.

  “A pain in our ass but it’ll be done before you get home. I wanted to bring you by your new keys.” I pulled the ring with two keys on it out of my pocket and held them out to her.

  “Oh,” she murmured and pulled off her white cotton gloves and the latex ones beneath them.

  “You have lunch yet?” I asked.

  “No, um, not yet,” she murmured, taking the keys and slipping them into her navy-blue lab coat’s pocket.

  “Come on, my treat. There’s this bomb ass taco truck right down the street in the food truck grotto.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, rocking back in her low kitten heels a bit. “I’m honestly not even hungry.”

  “Come on, you gotta eat and it’s my treat,” I said.

  Again with that look on her face like she was torn in two.

  Finally, she nodded and said, “Let me just clean up my station.”

  I wandered closer to it and gave a low whistle at what she had laid out.

  “Looks old,” I said dryly.

  “Not terribly,” she responded. “It was painted in 1874.”

  “Dayum!” I stretched my bottom lip and took a step back from where I’d leaned a hip against the table.

  She smiled and tried to keep a lid on her laugh as she said, “By far it’s not the oldest restoration project I’ve done. Get into the mid-sixteenth century and there’s where I find my nerves.”

  I couldn’t even fathom to do the math, so I asked, “How old is that?”

  “Five hundred years or so,” she answered as she pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves. I felt my eyes go wide as I shook my head gently back and forth.

  “Mm-mm, you got nerves of steel working on something like that,” I said.

  She smiled genuinely, pride shining softly from her face as she did everything she needed to in order to be able to go to lunch. It was a lot, and I kind of felt bad all the steps she had to go through in order to start back up once she was back.

  “Ready?” I asked her as she tossed her stripped off latex gloves into a nearby trashcan and slipped out of her lab coat, extracting her freshly cut keys from the pocket.

  “Yeah, let me just grab my purse.” She went to a line of hooks on the wall, her name above one etched into a brass plate that was shinier than the rest. I smiled and said, “They sure know how to roll out the welcome wagon around here.”

  Elka smiled. “They have all the equipment to make them in another part of the building for exhibits. I asked about it. They thought it was a nice touch in here.”

  “Yeah, it is,” I agreed. She pulled her purse down and hung her lab coat in its place. Slipping the strap over her head and settling the little bag on her opposite hip, she dropped her new keys in the top of her purse and zipped it closed.

  “Need anything else?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she replied and fell into step beside me. We stopped at the front desk to hand in my visitor’s badge and away we went.

  6

  Elka…

  We walked slowly along the block toward the fenced-in vac
ant lot full of food trucks that were ringing in a makeshift cafeteria area of picnic tables. The food truck grotto was almost a modern art installation in and of itself, a mere block and a half from the historical art museum. One of Indigo City’s crown jewels, if I do say so myself – er, the museum not the food truck grotto – although it had held a special place in my heart too.

  “So,” Oz, said with a gusty sigh trying to start a conversation after around half a block of silence. “Wanna tell me why your old man called me up in the middle of the night to come kick in your door?”

  “Wow, you don’t beat around the bush, do you?” I asked, hedging for time but also knowing that it was likely a lost cause. I mean, he’d already done so much already. The least I could do was be candid now.

  “Not especially, no,” he said dryly, and I nodded.

  “When I was in college, I was engaged,” I answered slowly. Finding the words was surprisingly difficult, even now.

  “And?” he asked after I was quiet for too long.

  “It… it didn’t work out,” I finished lamely. What I wasn’t able to say was just how straight out of a Jane Austen novel Robert Critchley had been. How I hadn’t been rich enough for his rich family. How I’d been pregnant when he’d dumped me at his mother’s behest and how they’d graciously offered to pay for the abortion – which I’d gone through with – which had crushed me and sent me spiraling into a deep depression.

  “Bad enough you tried to hurt yourself?” he asked.

  I pressed my lips together and nodded a little too rapidly.

  “It was stupid. Really stupid, and I regret it… mostly because of what it did to my dad and to Mia. I don’t think he’ll ever believe that I’m okay again, you know?”

  “And are you?” he asked, stopping in line at the taco truck that was apparently his favorite. I gripped the strap on my bag with both fists, twisting the faux leather against the palms of my hands uneasily.

  “No, I guess not. I mean, I thought I was but now with Mia… I mean, he probably wasn’t wrong to worry but…” I swallowed hard and met Officer Jones’ warm brown eyes. “I won’t do it again. I learned my lesson,” I said faintly, and his eyebrows went up.

  “Interesting way of putting it,” he said, slipping a pair of wraparound glasses off of one of the breast pockets of his leather vest. He slid them over his eyes, and I felt like it was a way to cut me off, a way to take a step back and put some distance between us.

  I honestly couldn’t say I blamed him. I was a hot mess. I owned that. I mean, I had to own that. Had to live with it. Alone now.

  Tears welled up and I looked away, dashing at them with my fingertips. While I wasn’t all-out constantly crying over Mia anymore or how horribly distressed I was about moving through the rest of my life without her just being there somewhere in the background, just a phone call away… These sudden bouts were still overtaking me at the worst and oddest little moments.

  I had been proud of myself that I hadn’t broken down while working, that I had been able to lose myself in the monotonous task at hand of cleaning the surface grime off of the Inness painting in front of me, but it seems my grief would not be denied for more than a few hours, and it was roaring to life even now.

  “Hey, don’t do that,” Oz said with a warm and tender smile. “Don’t cry,” he said gently and then added sort of off the cuff, “Pretty girls don’t cry.”

  I laughed, the notion patently ridiculous, one, that pretty girls didn’t cry – I happened to know from experience they did – and two, that I could even be considered one of their ranks. I was a fine-art nerd and ‘pretty’ had never really been a descriptor used in my direction. I’d always been passably ‘cute’ but nothing more.

  Mia. Mia had been the pretty sister of the two of us. Still, his way with dry sarcastic humor had its desired effect for now. The small bit of incredulous laughter he’d drawn from me had allowed me to get just enough of a grip to get my shit together to keep people from looking or getting worried. The last thing I wanted to do was cause a scene.

  “You know what you want?” he asked to distract my mind further and I contemplated the menu board above the truck’s open food service window. A sandwich board was off to the side with the day’s specials and I let my eyes rove the colorful chalk letters and drawings at the edges. Whoever had done the sign had an incredible eye for detail and a fantastic capability with blending the chalks. It was almost too bad that the sign would be wiped clean to start again for the next day.

  “I’m really not that hungry,” I reiterated, but Oz would have none of it. He was seemingly determined that I eat something.

  “You a taco girl or more into burritos?” he asked.

  “A couple of tacos,” I finally relented, the smells from the truck catching on the summer breeze and carried to my nose sort of waking my stomach.

  “Pollo, carnitas, or carne asada?” he asked, his accent flawless. I blinked, not sure why I was surprised a black man would know Spanish and feeling like a racist white-privileged little shit right on the heels of the thought.

  “Um, I don’t know,” I said. I mean, I didn’t eat a lot of Mexican food and I wasn’t entirely sure what any of those meant. I spoke fluent German thanks to my upbringing and high school classes. Even some college classes. It wasn’t very useful here, though.

  “Right.” It was our turn at the window, and he turned and reached up to the guy manning the window and clasped his hand in greeting. That strange sort of male hand-hug that dripped with machismo and made it look like they were about to arm wrestle. Offsetting the gesture were the genuine smiles on their faces, the younger man’s expression lighting up with utter delight at Oz’s presence.

  They spoke back and forth in rapid-fire Spanish and I couldn’t understand a word of it. It was more than slightly uncomfortable when the young man eyed me up from his heightened perch from within the food truck as Officer Jones spoke, clearly about me. The young man crossed himself and my tense posture eased.

  “Man, I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said. “My condolences for your sister.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured, and he called back into the truck.

  The cook yelled something back and the young man frowned and snapped at the older man who could have been his father or uncle.

  “I’ll have that right up,” he told Oz and then waved his hands at him rejecting the money Oz tried to hand him.

  “No, no, no, man! Your money’s no good here!”

  “Ahhhh, thanks, Enrique.”

  “No problem, go grab a seat, I’ll bring it out.”

  “You’re awesome, man.”

  I followed Oz over to a vacant pair of seats across from each other at one end of a brightly blue painted picnic table. We sat and he grabbed a spray bottle of cleaner from the middle of the table and sprayed our section of it down, swiping some paper towels off the roll and sweeping them over the space between us before tossing them into one of the open trashcans made from some equally vividly painted, repurposed metal fifty-five-gallon drums.

  “There,” he said, dropping into his seat and I smiled at him a little gratefully.

  “Seems like you and Enrique go way back,” I mentioned as just a way to get the conversation started.

  “Ah, yeah, he’s a good kid. Got swept up in a gang bust a few years back when he was fifteen, was facing some pretty hefty adult charges. Wound up in my jail for processing. I got him into an after-school program I was working at the time, volunteer shit. Got him back on track and out of trouble. That’s his uncle’s food truck he’s working. Few more years and he’s set to take over the family business when the old man retires.”

  “Wow,” I said impressed. “You do a lot of community outreach then?”

  He shook his head. “Not so much anymore. If I do, it’s usually with the club.”

  “How come? Seems like you’re good at it, or am I a special case?”

  He laughed slightly, eyes unreadable behind his sunglasses as he bowed his he
ad. He shook it. “You aren’t a ‘case’ at all,” he said.

  Then what am I? I wondered silently, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask. Instead, I studied what I could see of his face. He was strikingly handsome, unique in a way that I had almost never seen before. I mean, he was definitely mixed race and one of those races was black, but I couldn’t for the life of me identify what the other half was.

  Whatever it was, it gave a wonderful, warm golden cast to his skin that was offset by all the black he was wearing. The tee shirt he had on was wonderfully fitted and molded to his chest and shoulders like a second skin. It strained at the sleeves to contain his biceps and I let my practiced eye rove the tattoos that sleeved one arm from shoulder to wrist. I let my eyes follow each loop and curve of thorny vine, the roses big and crimson at their edges. The entire piece of art wrapping his forearm and clambering up over his elbow bespoke a vehement desire for the onlooker to back off, while simultaneously touched on a deeper sadness. One I couldn’t yet identify. A loneliness, perhaps… or, perhaps, I was just projecting.

  “A’riiiight, here you guys go.” Enrique arrived just before the bubble of question that’d risen to my lips had a chance to burst. I swallowed it back down, deciding it had been too personal to ask. What do they mean to you…?

  It was none of my business. I don’t know why, but it just didn’t seem like a good idea to get too close.

  You know exactly why it’s a bad idea. You don’t want another relationship. Not if it’s going to end like your last… and you especially don’t want a relationship based on… what? Pity?

  It wasn’t time to try again. Not by a long shot. Especially not now.

  I stared down at the too-bright cardboard-like eco-friendlier clamshell Enrique had set in front of me. Eying the glass Coke bottle he’d set beside it.

  “I’m just going to grab some napkins,” I murmured, half rising from my seat while he and Oz chatted amicably.