He opened a single white eye and stared at me.
I swallowed. Arguing with dominant wolves could have unpleasant results.
“I will watch the puppy,” declared Maia. “We can play cow-girls, and I will teach him to fetch. We shall have a tea party.” She wrinkled her nose. “And then he won’t get all dirty playing with the greasy cars. He doesn’t like being dirty.”
Sam closed his eye as she patted him on the nose.
He wasn’t going to hurt her.
I took a deep breath. “I think he likes the music,” I told Sylvia.
She huffed. “I think you want him out of your way.”
“Maia wants to babysit,” I said. “It’ll keep her occupied.”
Sylvia looked at Sam thoughtfully. She shook her head at me but didn’t fuss when I left him lying there.
Zee had shut the door between the office and the shop—he’s not fond of Latin music. So when I went in, I closed it behind me, too.
Chapter 4
THE FIRST THING I HEARD WHEN I EMERGED FROM THE bathroom with my working overalls on was Zee swearing in German. It was modern German because I could understand about one word in four. Modern German was a good sign.
The Buick was in the first bay. I couldn’t see Zee, but from the direction of his voice, he was under the car. Gabriel was standing on the far side of the vehicle; he looked up when he heard me come in, and relief flashed across his face.
He knows Zee is . . . well, not harmless, but that Zee won’t hurt him. But Gabriel is too polite—and as a result he has to put up with a lot more of Grumpy Zee than I do.
“Hey, Zee,” I said. “I take it that you can fix it, but it’ll be miserable, and you’d rather haul it to the dump and start from scratch.”
“Piece of junk,” groused Zee. “What’s not rusted to pieces is bent. If you took all the good parts and put them in a pile, you could carry them out in your pocket.” There was a little pause. “Even if you only had a small pocket.”
I patted the car. “Don’t you listen to him,” I whispered to it. “You’ll be out of here and back on the road in no time.”
Zee propelled himself all the way under the car so his head stuck out by my feet.
“Don’t you promise something you can’t deliver,” he snarled.
I raised my eyebrows, and said in dulcet tones, “Are you telling me you can’t fix it? I’m sorry. I distinctly remember you saying that there is nothing you can’t fix. I must have been mistaken, and it was someone else wearing your mouth.”
He gave a growl that would have done Sam credit, and pushed himself back under again, muttering, “Deine Mutter war ein Cola-Automat!”
“Her mama might have been a pop machine,” I said, responding to one of the remarks I understood even at full Zee-speed. “Your mama . . .” sounds the same in a number of languages.
“But she was a beauty in her day.” I grinned at Gabriel. “We women have to stick together.”
“Why is it that all cars are women?” he asked.
“Because they’re fussy and demanding,” answered Zee.
“Because if they were men, they’d sit around and complain instead of getting the job done,” I told him.
It was a relief to do something normal. In my garage, I was in control . . . Well, Zee was really in charge when he came in. Even though I’d bought the shop from him and now paid him to come in, we both knew who was the better mechanic—and he’d been my boss for a long time. Maybe, I thought, handing him sockets size ten and thirteen, that was the real relief. Here I had a job I knew how to do and someone I trusted giving me orders, and the result would be a victory for goodness and order. Fixing cars is orderly—unlike most of my life. Do the right thing, and it works. Do the wrong, and it doesn’t.
“Verdammte Karre,” Zee growled. “Gib mir mal—”
The last word was garbled as something heavy went thump, thump, bang.
“Give you what?” I asked.
There was a long silence.
“Zee? Are you all right?”
The whole car rose about ten inches off the jacks, knocking them over on their sides, and shook like an epileptic. A wave of magic rose from the Buick, and I backed away, one hand locked in Gabriel’s shirt so he came with me as the car returned all the way to the ground with a bang of tires on pavement and the squeak of protesting shocks.
“I feel better now,” said Zee in a very nasty tone. “I would be even happier if I could hang the last mechanic who worked on it.”
I knew that feeling—ah, the unparalleled frustration of mismatched bolts, miswired sending units, and cross-threaded parts left for me to discover: things that turned what should be a half-hour job into an all-day event.
Gabriel was pulling against my hold as if he wanted to get farther from the car. His eyes were wide, the whites showing all the way around his irises. I realized, belatedly, that it might be the first time he’d seen Zee really work.
“It’s okay. He’s through now, I think.” I let go of Gabriel’s shirt and patted his shoulder. “Zee, I think the last mechanic who worked on it was you. Remember? You replaced the wiring harness.”
Zee rolled out headfirst again, and there was a black grease mark running from his forehead to his chin where something had rolled across his face. A spot of blood lingered on his forehead, and there was a lump on his chin. “You may shut up anytime you choose, Kindlein,” he advised me sharply. Then he frowned. “I smell cookies, and you look tired. What is wrong?”
“I made cookies,” I told him. “I saved a bag in the car for you to take home. I brought more with me, but the horde is in possession.”
“Good,” he said. “Now, what is robbing you of sleep?”
He used to leave me alone. But ever since Tim . . . ever since I’d been hurt, he coddled me in his own way.
“Nothing you can help me with,” I said.
“Money?”
“Nope.”
He frowned, his white eyebrows lowering over his cool gray eyes.
“Vampires?” He snapped it out. Zee didn’t like vampires, much.
“No, sir.” I saluted his tone. “Nothing you can do anything about.”
“Don’t you sass me, girl.” He glowered at me. “I—”
One of Gabriel’s sisters screamed. I had a terrible vision of Sam chewing on one of the kids, and I was running.
I had my hand on the door and the door mostly open when Tia shouted, “¡Mamá, Mamá, una pistola! Tiene una pistola.”
Inside the office there were kids all over: hanging from shelving, standing on the six-inch sill at the bottom of the big window, on the floor wrapped around Sam.
A man, a huge man with a nasty-looking automatic in a steady two-handed grip, stood in the doorway between the outside and the office, holding the door open with one black leather-booted foot. The rest of him was dressed in black, too, with some sort of bright yellow design on the left shoulder of his leather pseudomilitary jacket. The only outlier in his generally soldier-of-fortune appearance was the shoulder-length silver-threaded red hair that flowed from his head in a manner that would have done credit to a romance novel cover model.
Just behind him, I caught a glimpse of another man, dressed in a button-up shirt and slacks. But the second man’s body language told me at a glance that it was only the first man, the man with the gun, who was a threat. The second man held something on his shoulder, but, beyond determining that it wasn’t a weapon, I ignored it and him to focus on the dangerous one.
Sylvia held a broom in her hand, but she was frozen because the barrel of the gun was aimed right at the littlest Sandoval. Maia was locked onto Sam with both hands and screaming Spanish in a manner that might be overly dramatic if there hadn’t been an automatic pointed at her.