Diverted from his stealth mission, Rabbit swallowed. “Shit. I’m sorry. I should’ve helped with this.”
“You were too busy planting your head up your own ass at the time.”
“No kidding.”
The mild response earned him a longer look from the winikin, and a faint, approving nod. “So the rumors are true. You’re growing up.”
“Doing my best.”
“Glad to have you.” The winikin turned away before shit could get mushy, consulting his phone once again. “Back corner, six boxes here, another ten a couple of rooms down. We won’t need everything, but we’ll pull them all out and pick and choose.” He paused with a sidelong grin. “You get to carry the ones with all the five-pound hand stones.”
“Screw you,” Rabbit agreed good-naturedly.
They found the boxes. Jox tensed up when Rabbit popped the first one, then relaxed when it proved to be full of the promised shin guards and a couple of crazy-looking headpieces adorned with brittle parrot feathers. At Rabbit’s look, the winikin lifted a shoulder. “Let’s just say I was working fast back then, and was more than a little stressed. When I came looking for Gray-Smoke’s battle gear, to give to Alexis, I opened up what I thought was the right box and saw—” He broke off, jerked his shoulders irritably. “Ghosts. Not important now; let’s get these boxes back out into the light of day.”
After that, Rabbit almost didn’t ask him about Red-Boar. The winikin was already dealing with massacre flashbacks. Didn’t seem fair to pile on another set of memories. But as they schlepped the boxes out of the first room and moved on to the next, and the boxes didn’t yield any surprises, the winikin unwound by degrees. What was more, Rabbit started hearing Myrinne’s voice in his head, telling him he had to look out for himself and not worry so much about other people’s opinions.
Eventually, he said, “I’ve been thinking about my old man lately.”
The winikin didn’t look up from his iPhone. “What sort of thinking?” He seemed okay with the question.
Rabbit shrugged. “Trying to figure him out, I guess. The more distance I get, the more I realize that not everything he did or said was bullshit. It’s just tough deciding which is which.” And that was the gods’ honest truth. The more he and Myrinne had tried to figure out where Red-Boar had been during the years after the massacre, when he’d disappeared into the jungle and eventually came back out with a tagalong half-blood toddler he’d refused to give a proper name, the more Rabbit had started remembering his old man without the anger those memories usually brought. Granted, the useful shit Red-Boar had taught him had been pretty sparse when weighed against the me-me-me shit, but still.
“Good luck,” Jox said dryly. “I couldn’t always tell the difference, and I knew him his entire life.”
But after a minute of silent schlepping, he said, “Anything you want to know in particular?”
“Well . . . Anna’s told me a bit about what he was like, you know, before.” He almost hadn’t bothered asking her, but had figured, What the hell? To his surprise, she’d talked for nearly an hour, making Red- Boar sound like the local big man on campus, his first wife the homecoming queen.
Rabbit hadn’t known what to make of the picture she painted, couldn’t reconcile it with the stubborn, zonked- out asshole he’d grown up with. When Jade turned up with the skull effigy a few days later, though, he’d thought he understood. Anna had been saying good- bye to the memories. No wonder she’d made them sound better than they probably were. He continued. “And Strike’s filled in most of what I was too young to remember about growing up. So I was hoping maybe you could tell me about when the old man went missing . . . and what happened when he came back.” Even as he said it he felt like a total shit. Nothing like putting the guy right back where he didn’t want to go.
At first he thought Jox was going to give him a well-deserved, Ask me that some other time . . . like never. But after a moment, the winikin said, “It happened a few years after the massacre. Every cardinal day, your father and I would hop a plane down to the Yucatán and sneak into Chichén Itzá, and he would try to jack in, to see if the barrier was still blocked. This one time, as we came out of the tunnel, he just . . . I don’t know. Snapped. I knew he was having trouble dealing—we all were. But this
. . . It came out of nowhere. One minute he was treating me like furniture, like usual, and the next he was coming after me.” The winikin’s voice dropped. “Three times in my life now, I’ve thought I was going to die. Once was during the massacre. Once was when the makol took over Lucius and got loose inside the compound. And once was when Red-Boar came after me that day.”
A shiver crawled down the back of Rabbit’s neck. “I thought he just up and disappeared.”
“He did. But he beat the shit out of me first.” Jox clenched and unclenched one fist, staring at it as if remembering pain, or perhaps broken bones. “I don’t know what was going on inside his head, or what specifically triggered it. All I know is that I was surprised as hell when I woke up and found myself alive—more or less—and him long gone. I dragged myself to our bolt-hole in the village—remember that place?—doctored myself up, and managed to make my flight home, barely. I remember sitting there with his spot empty beside me, hoping to hell he wouldn’t show up.”
“He . . . Fuck.” Rabbit gave up any pretense of hauling the next-to-last box and just stared at the winikin. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Don’t be. Those were his fists, not yours. I consider it damned lucky he didn’t use his knife on me.
If he had, we’d all be living very different lives right now.”
“Whoa.” Rabbit’s brain tripped over the sequence of what-ifs. If Jox had died back then, Strike and Anna would’ve gone into the foster system. Anna had blocked out most of her memories from before the massacre, and Strike’s had been those of an average, if doted-on, nine-year-old boy. What would they have done when the barrier reactivated? Where would they have gone? They wouldn’t have known about Skywatch, wouldn’t have known there were other survivors. More, Rabbit didn’t even want to think what his own childhood would have been like without Jox in it, and Strike and Anna as his unofficial siblings. Granted, Jox had been able to buffer his old man only to a point, but without that leveling influence . . . Hell, he probably would’ve ended up in the system too. If he’d been lucky.
“Your father came back three years later. I had taken Strike and Anna down to Chichén Itzá for the cardinal day—with Red-Boar gone, it was up to them to try the magic. We were just coming out of the tunnel when he stepped out of the rain forest. I pulled a gun on him,” Jox said matter-of-factly. “I’d been carrying a piece the whole time he was gone, afraid that he’d show up and go after one of the kids instead of just me. But he didn’t try to hurt us. He put his hands in the air. A few seconds later, you came out of the underbrush and stood beside him. I looked at you for a moment and you looked back, and I put the gun away.” The winikin paused. “He never apologized, and I never asked him to, just like I never asked him where he’d been or what he’d been doing.”
Rabbit’s throat had gone dry. “You let him come back because of me?”