I didn’t detect any trace of sarcasm and apparently neither did Eilahn, for she murmured thanks. I breathed a silent sigh of relief and dug into my comfort food.
After we finished eating I told Eilahn I’d take care of cleaning up. She didn’t put up an argument. She retreated outside, leaving Ryan and me alone in the kitchen. An awkward silence fell as I ran the water and waited for it to turn hot.
“Any new and interesting cases?” Ryan asked after a moment.
“Sort of,” I said, dabbling my fingers under the running water. “Not a murder but something kind of strange.” I quickly explained about the deaths of Barry Landrieu and Evelyn Stark and how I knew them. I wasn’t about to share the details of my connection to the two victims with the entire Beaulac police department, but I trusted Ryan.
He leaned against the counter, crossed his arms over his chest, and frowned. “Coincidences make me twitchy.”
“You and me both,” I said. The water was still cold, so I shut it off. Grabbing a towel, I dried my hands as I walked down the hall to a utility closet. “My water heater’s ancient,” I explained as he followed me. “Sometimes I have to relight the pilot manually.”
He wrinkled his nose in sympathy as I crouched and stuck the long lighter into the appropriate hole in the bottom of the tank. “It looks like you’ve done this a few times,” he said.
I listened for the sound of the gas firing up, then stood and nodded. “It’s on my list of things to replace when I can afford it,” I said with a sigh, closing the closet door. I didn’t bother returning to the kitchen, since I knew it would take a while for the water to warm up, and instead headed to the living room.
“There’s more,” I said as I plopped down into the armchair instead of my customary spot on the couch. Yes, I was a chickenshit, because what if he sat next to me? Then I might have to actually think about how I felt about him and whether his sitting next to me meant anything or nothing as far as his own feelings. And then I’d have to consider the fact that I suspected stuff about Ryan that I didn’t dare share with him, as well as consider the possibility that this whole “Ryan” that I knew was a total sham anyway.
No, much better to sit in the armchair and give myself more time to try and figure all of this crap out.
He didn’t seem to notice my hesitation over the seating arrangements and simply sat on the end of the couch closer to the chair. “More?” he frowned. “Tell me.”
I did so, giving him a rundown of the graaattack as well as the summoning attempt.
“Fucking hell,” he breathed after I finished. “So there’s another summoner involved, there are two deaths that seem to be connected, and someone in the demon realm is still trying to summon you.”
I nodded.
“Are any of these related to each other?” he asked.
I spread my hands and shrugged. “I have no fucking idea.”
He gave a dry chuckle. “Is your life ever dull?”
I could only laugh. “Not in the ways that count!”
He reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “I have your back,” he said. “In any way I can. You know that, right?”
The memory of the being who’d blasted the golem with arcane power rose up. I could barely reconcile that creature and Ryan as the same person.
“I know that,” I said. He released my hand and gave me a warm smile.
A quiet fell, undercut by the muted rush of the water heater. “Where’d you grow up?” I asked, feeling as if I was taking a hammer to the smooth glass of the silence. It sounded more abrupt than I’d intended. “I mean, you’re not from the South, are you?”
A slight smile creased his mouth. “Depends. Are you going to call me a damn Yankee if I admit I was born in upstate New York?”
“Nothing so nice,” I replied with a small laugh.
He folded one leg over the other, resting his ankle across his knee. “I guess I’ll have to brave the insults then. Saratoga, New York. Went to high school at Saratoga Springs High then left for the bustle of the big city.”
“New York City?”
He grinned. “Cleveland.”
This time my laugh was genuine. “Oh, my. Culture shock!”
“In more ways than one.”
I tucked my feet underneath me. “What about your folks. Do they still live in Saratoga?” I knew what the answer would be. Or rather, I knew what he needed to tell me.
He shook his head, a shadow flickering across his face. “My mother passed away right before I started college. My dad about five years later.”
I made the appropriate sympathetic expression. He believed it. Surely nobody was that good an actor. “Any brothers or sisters?”
“Nope. I have some cousins I never see, but that’s about it.”
Hunh. I’d expected him to say that both his parents had been only children or some such thing. But maybe whatever caused him to have these fake memories also made him have no desire to seek out the rest of his mythical family.
His memories are fake. They have to be. Is his personality fake as well? Is this the real Ryan? If he ever remembers who he is, will this person go away? Will he still regard me in the same way?
I already knew the answer to that. There was no possible way he’d see me in the same light. Except…somehow he’d acted with the instincts and abilities of his former self when I was hurt and the golems were threatening. Were those instincts always running in the background? Or was that a one-time chink in the armor that held him? I could keep on grilling him about his past, but what was the point? I had zero doubt that if—no, when—I verified this info it would all check out. Whoever had taken the effort to insert this nuanced memory and background would have surely taken steps to make sure the paper trail jived as well.
Fuzzykins chose that moment to stalk into the room. She leaped nimbly onto the end of the couch and stared balefully at Ryan.
“When did you get a cat?” he asked. He reached out a hand to give the cat a scratch, then yanked it back as Fuzzykins snarled and swiped at it with a claws extended.
“It’s Eilahn’s.” I quickly explained the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the cat. “Don’t feel bad. She hates me too. But she completely adores Eilahn.”
“That’s pretty funny,” he admitted. Then, “Are you summoning tonight?”
I blinked, surprised both at the abruptness of the question and that he would want to know at all. He didn’t like Rhyzkahl—okay, “hated” was probably a better word—and he didn’t usually want any reminder that I had any sort of contact or relationship with the demonic lord.
My surprise must have been evident because he gave a little shrug of apology. “It’s a full moon,” he said. “I figured it’d be tonight—unless you already did for this month?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. I was planning to tonight.” I eyed him, mentally bracing myself for his usual gritted-teeth tolerance that barely masked his dislike of the arrangement. I frowned when it didn’t come. “You seem oddly cool with this.”
He placed both feet on the floor and exhaled. “I did a lot of thinking while I was up at Quantico. I didn’t like some of the things I realized.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that you’re one of my best friends, the fact that I care about you considerably, and the fact that you’re in a situation that I have no right to judge, and that I need to grow the fuck up and actually be supportive.” He gave me a wry smile. “I realized that it’s not enough for me to simply not be vocal about the fact that I hated what was going on, because you’re not stupid, and you can certainly tell I disapprove whether I say it or not. But instead, I needed to change my damn outlook and accept what is and look for the positive in it. In other words, I need to stop being so much of a dick. That was kind of the reason I didn’t call. I was trying to process everything.”
I had to smile. “In other words, you were a dick because you were thinking about how to stop being a dick.”