With Chloe, everything was different.
Merek sighed and dropped his hand from the kid’s shoulder. What the hel did you say to a kid who’d been dragged away from his life, had a bul et dug out of him, didn’t trust men for shit because his dad was an asshole, and said asshole dad had disappeared without a backward glance? Merek had no fucking clue. He didn’t even think there was a right thing to say. “Look, I know your dad bailed on you in every possible way after your mom died, but—”
Alex cut him off with a snort.
“But if I was real y looking to dick someone around or to score an easy lay, this isn’t how I’d do it.”
“Yeah, I guess not.” Alex shoved a hand through his dark hair and looked away.
Merek sighed and waited for those green eyes to meet his again, too damn exhausted to care if he put his foot in this one. “I get why you don’t want to trust me, but I’m not your father. I’m in this until the end. I’m not going to bail on you when the brown stuff splatters. I haven’t yet, and I won’t.”
“It’s not just you or my dad or anyone else, it’s . . . shit.” The wolf sniffed and scrubbed at his bloodshot eyes, grief and guilt ripping through the façade of indifference. “I was completely useless back there. I couldn’t help either of you, even if I hadn’t been shot. Not against a ful -grown vampire or Fae or . . . hel , not even against another wolf.” His hands lifted, flexed until the muscles in his forearms stood out. “Some of it is instinct, you know? Just being a wolf. But I know computers, electronics. Aside from the instincts, I don’t know shit about guns or spel s or fighting.”
“I can teach you to defend yourself. Even against spel s, even though you can’t cast them like I can.” He gestured to the door. “If you don’t bail on us, that is. I can help you hone those wolf instincts even more.”
Wariness and old pain flashed in the boy’s eyes, but it wrestled with the desire to believe. “Why would you do that?”
Nothing but sheer honesty was going to keep this from turning into a total clusterfuck that Chloe would never forgive him for, so Merek laid it out there. “Because I can. Because I’l take any edge I can with protecting your godmother. Because I like you, and you need to know how to save yourself when the time comes. And, yeah, you might have been someone who was just along for the ride because I wanted to keep an eye on Chloe and she wasn’t going anywhere without you, but you’re a good person. There aren’t a lot of those in the world.”
“Don’t I know it.” Alex rubbed his side where the bul et had struck, his ancient, weary eyes meeting Merek’s. They searched his face for a long time, looking for gods knew what, but Merek met his gaze without flinching.
Final y, his face guarded by his usual inscrutable mask, Alex nodded. “I’l stay.”
10
Merek kept them hopping from one plane to another for three days straight, bouncing from one coast to the other, sleeping in airport hotels, only to drag them out of bed to do it al over again. The pace he set for them was grueling, but he had to make sure Gregor wasn’t behind them. Or any of Smith’s other operatives.
Merek wanted to be as sure as he could that they could drop off the map again, so he pushed them al to the breaking point. Neither Chloe nor Alex said a word of complaint, but their expressions took on a perpetual look of bleak exhaustion. When Merek glanced in the mirror, he saw the haggard strain on his own face.
Even Ophelia went where she was told, which was a first. They’d had to abandon the cat carrier the day they left Seattle because she just wasn’t having it. He’d even put some hexes on the thing to try to keep her temporarily contained, but Mil ie was right—the cat was a little Houdini. The spel s he’d used had worked at locking down hardened Magickal criminals, but not Chloe’s familiar.
Traveling with an animal on an airplane would have been a dead giveaway, but the cat had sniffed at him and gone transparent as soon as he’d voiced the thought. Not even a ripple in the air around her showed where she passed. The damn familiar was better at invisibility spel s than he was. He couldn’t even sense her with his magic, nor could Alex sniff her out. How she got through or around airport security and stayed clear of the thousands of feet ready to step on her, he never knew. He didn’t want to know how she managed without a litter box.
He kept a sharp eye on Alex to make sure the boy didn’t try to give them the slip during their travels, but he spent most of their flights unconscious. Part of his exhaustion might be the lingering effects of the silver penetrating his system. Merek suspected Ophelia literal y sat on the kid to make sure he stayed where she wanted him, but couldn’t be certain.
Chloe staggered a little as they left the airport in Phoenix and the wave of desert heat slapped them in the faces. Both Merek and Alex reached out hands to steady her, and she managed a ghost of a smile for them.
“Where to next?”
“Not far. An apartment building across town.” He steered her toward the shuttle to the rental car lot, Alex fal ing into step behind them.
“You mean, we’re staying here for longer than a layover? We can sleep in a bed for eight whole hours?”
The look she gave him was so hopeful he had to grin. That her hazel eyes were bloodshot and bleary made him want to pul her into his arms, but he nudged her along and kept an eye out for anything or anyone out of place.
They made it to the rental office and drove to the apartment without incident. Chloe made him stop at a pizza parlor for takeout on the way, and he could hear Alex’s stomach growling from the backseat.
Merek made them wait while he checked the place out, searched the furnished apartment for anything off, swept it with his magic to see if there were lingering vibrations from another Magickal. Nothing. When he loosed the reins on his precognition, the past of the building swept to him with stunning clarity. He saw them breaking ground on the site before it went up, and time swept forward until long after they’d left the place.
The space of days they would be there was a gaping maw in his visions, but the time directly after showed no evidence of violence. No blood spatter, no bul et holes riddling the wal s. Nothing.
He motioned Alex and Chloe forward, watched them trundle in, dump the pizza off in the kitchen, and separate into bedrooms to drop their stuff. Chloe paused to turn on every lamp and hit every light switch along the way. He’d seen them do the same thing many times before, and the normalcy of it felt good. He was swinging the door shut when Ophelia’s yowl made him pause. He didn’t bother looking around for her, just waited for her skinny body to begin stropping his ankles while she dropped her invisibility spel .
Snapping the door shut, he secured the lock and set warding spel s on the apartment. Then he stooped down to pick the familiar up and carry her into the kitchen to wait for Alex and Chloe.
They’d be under five minutes unloading everything, and he knew Chloe was currently managing to hog every inch of counter space in the bathroom. A smile twitched across his lips before it faded, and his gut twisted as something besides the need to outpace Gregor seeped into his consciousness. He was starting to like them too much, know them too wel . The problem with forced proximity was it also forced intimacy. He hadn’t let anyone this close for this long since . . . since his family. Since his wife. He sighed and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. Fuck.