Every Which Way But Dead

Four

Squinting over my sunglasses, I leaned against my car and scanned the parking lot. My cherry red convertible looked out of place among the scattering of minivans and salt-rusted, late model cars. At the back, away from potential scratches and dings, was a low-to-the-ground, gray sports car. Probably the zoo’s p.r. person, as everyone else was either a part-time worker or a dedicated biologist who didn’t care what they drove.

The early hour made it cold despite the sun, and my breath steamed. I tried to relax, but I could feel my gut tightening as my annoyance grew. Nick was supposed to meet me here this morning for a quick run in the zoo. It looked like he was going to be a no-show. Again.

I uncrossed my arms from in front of me and shook my hands to loosen them before I bent at the waist and put my palms against the ice-cold, snow-dusted parking lot. Exhaling into the stretch, I felt my muscles pull. Around me were the soft, familiar sounds of the zoo preparing to open, mixing with the scent of exotic manure. If Nick didn’t show in the next five minutes, there wouldn’t be enough time for a decent run.

I had bought us both runner passes months ago so we could run anytime from midnight to noon when the park was closed. I had woken up two hours earlier than usual for this. I was trying to make this work; I was trying to find a way to mesh my witch’s noon-to-sunup schedule with Nick’s human sunrise-to-midnight clock. It had never seemed to be a problem before. Nick used to try. Lately, it had been all up to me.

A harsh scraping pulled me upright. The trash cans were being rolled out, and my pique grew. Where was he? He couldn’t have forgotten. Nick never forgot anything.

“Unless he wants to forget,” I whispered. Giving myself a mental shake, I swung my right leg up to put my lightweight running shoe atop the hood. “Ow,” I breathed as my muscles protested, but I leaned into it. I’d been slacking off on my workouts lately, as Ivy and I didn’t spar anymore since she had resumed succumbing to her blood lust. My eye started to twitch, and I closed both of them as I deepened the stretch, grabbing my ankle and pulling.

Nick hadn’t forgotten—he was too smart for that—he was avoiding me. I knew why, but it was still depressing. It had been three months, and he was still distant and hesitant. The worst thing was I didn’t think he was dumping me. The man called demons into his linen closet, and he was afraid to touch me.

Last fall, I had been trying to bind a fish to me to satisfy some inane ley line class requirement and accidentally made Nick my familiar instead. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I was an earth witch, my magic coming from growing things and quickened by heat and my blood. I didn’t know much about ley line magic—except I didn’t like it. I generally only used it to close protective circles when I was stirring a particularly sensitive spell. And to make the Howlers pay what they owed me. And occasionally to fend off my roommate when she lost control of her blood lust. And I had used it to knock Piscary flat on his can so I could beat him into submission with the leg of a chair. It had been this last one that tipped Nick from hot-and-heavy, maybe-this-is-the-one boyfriend, to phone conversations and cold kisses on my cheek.

Starting to feel sorry for myself, I pulled my right leg down and swung the left one up.

Ley line magic was heady in its rush of strength and could drive a witch insane, making it no accident that there were more black ley line witches than black earth witches. Using a familiar made it safer since the power of a ley line was filtered through the simpler minds of animals instead of through plants as earth magic did. For obvious reasons, only animals were used as familiars—at least on this side of the ley lines—and in truth, there were no witch-born spells to bind a human as a familiar. But being both fairly ignorant of ley line magic and rushed, I had used the first spell I found to bind a familiar.

So I had unknowingly made Nick my familiar—which we were trying to undo—but then I made things immeasurably worse by pulling a huge amount of ley line energy through him to subdue Piscary. He had hardly touched me since. But that had been months ago. I hadn’t done it again. He had to get over it. It wasn’t as if I was practicing ley line magic. Much.

Uneasy, I straightened, blowing out my angst and doing a few side twists to send my ponytail bouncing. After having learned it was possible to set a circle without drawing it first, I had spent three months learning how, knowing it might be my only chance to escape Algaliarept. I had kept my practice to three in the morning, when I knew Nick was asleep—and I always drew directly off the line so it wouldn’t go through Nick first—but maybe it was waking him up anyway. He hadn’t said anything, but knowing Nick, he wouldn’t.

The rattle of the gate opening brought me to a standstill and my shoulders slumped. The zoo was open, a few runners straggling out with red cheeks and exhausted, content expressions, still floating on a runner’s high. Damn it. He could have called.

Bothered, I unzipped my belt pack and pulled out my cell phone. Leaning against the car and looking down to avoid the eyes of the passing people, I scrolled through my short list. Nick’s was second, right after Ivy’s number and right before my mom’s. My fingers were cold, and I blew on them as the phone rang.

I took a breath when the connection clicked open, holding it when a recorded woman’s voice told me the line was no longer in service. Money? I thought. Maybe that was why we hadn’t been out for three weeks. Concerned, I tried his cell phone.

It was still ringing when the familiar choking rumble of Nick’s truck grew loud. Exhaling, I snapped the cover closed. Nick’s blue, beat-up Ford truck jostled off the main street and into the parking lot, maneuvering slowly, as the cars leaving were ignoring the lines and cutting across the expanse. I slipped the phone away and stood with my arms over my chest, legs crossed at my ankles.

At least he showed, I thought as I adjusted my sunglasses and tried not to frown. Maybe we could go out for coffee or something. I hadn’t seen him in days, and I didn’t want to ruin it with a bad temper. Besides, I had been worried sick the last three months about slipping my bargain with Al, and now that I had, I wanted to feel good for a while.

I hadn’t told Nick, and the chance to come clean would be another weight off me. I lied to myself that I had kept quiet because I was afraid he would try to take my burden—seeing as he had a chivalrous streak longer and wider than a six-lane highway—but in reality I was afraid he would call me a hypocrite since I was forever on him about the dangers of dealing with demons, and here I was, becoming one’s familiar. Nick had an unhealthy lack of fear when it came to demons, thinking that as long as you handled them properly, they were no more dangerous than say … a pit viper.

So I stood and fidgeted in the cold as he parked his salt-stained, ugly truck a few slots down from mine. His indistinct shadow moved inside as he shuffled about, finally getting out and slamming the door with an intensity that I knew wasn’t directed at me but necessary to get the worn latch to catch.

“Ray-ray,” he said as he held his phone up and strode around the front. His lean height looked good and his pace was quick. A smile was on his face, its once-gauntness muted into a pleasant, rugged severity. “Did you just call?”

I nodded, letting my arms fall to my sides. Obviously he wasn’t prepared to run, as he was dressed in faded jeans and boots. A thick fabric coat was unzipped to show a bland, flannel button-down shirt. It was neatly tucked in and his long face was clean-shaven, but he still managed to look mildly unkempt, with his short black hair a shade too long. He had a bookish mien instead of the hint of danger that I usually liked in my men. But maybe I found Nick’s danger to be his intelligence.

Nick was the smartest man I knew, his brilliant jumps of logic hidden behind an understated appearance and a deceptively mild temperament. In hindsight, it was probably this rare mix of wicked intellect and harmless human that attracted me to him. Or possibly that he had saved my life by binding Big Al when he tried to rip out my throat.

And despite Nick’s preoccupation with old books and new electronics, he wasn’t a geek: his shoulders were too broad and his butt was too tight. His long, lean legs could keep up with me when we ran, and there was a surprising amount of strength in his arms, as evidenced by our once frequent, now distressingly absent, mock wrestling, which more often than not had turned into a more, er, intimate activity. It was the memory of our once-closeness that kept the frown off my face when he came around the front of his truck, his brown eyes pinched in apology.

“I didn’t forget,” he said, his long face looking longer as he tossed his straight bangs out of his way. There was a flash of a demon mark high on his brow, gained the same night I had gotten my first and remaining one. “I got caught up in what I was doing and lost track of time. I’m sorry, Rachel. I know you were looking forward to it, but I haven’t even been to bed and I’m dead tired. Do you want to reschedule for tomorrow?”

I kept my reaction to a sigh, trying to stifle my disappointment.

“No,” I said around a long exhalation. He reached out, his arms going around me in a light hug. I leaned into the expected hesitancy of it, wanting more. The distance had been there so long that it almost felt normal. Pulling back, he shuffled his feet.

“Working hard?” I offered. This was the first time I had seen him in a week, not including the odd phone call, and I didn’t just want to walk away.

Nick, too, didn’t seem eager to leave. “Yes and no.” He squinted into the sun. “I was up sifting through old messages on a chat-room list after finding a mention of that book Al took.”

Immediately my attention sharpened. “Did you …” I stammered, pulse quickening.

My quick hope squished to nothing as he dropped his gaze and shook his head. “It was some freak wannabe. He doesn’t have a copy. It was all made-up nonsense.”

I reached out and briefly touched his arm, forgiving him for missing our morning run. “It’s okay. We’ll find something sooner or later.”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “But I’d rather it be sooner.”

Misery hit me, and I froze. We had been so good together, and now all that was left was this awful distance. Seeing my depression, Nick took my hands, stepping forward to give me a loose embrace. His lips brushed my cheek as he whispered, “I’m sorry, Ray-ray. We’ll manage something. I’m trying. I want this to work.”

I didn’t move, breathing in the smell of musty books and clean aftershave, my hands hesitantly going about him as I looked for comfort—and finally found it.

My breath caught and I held it, refusing to cry. We had been months searching for the counter curse, but Al wrote the book on how to make humans into familiars, and he had a very short print run of one. And it wasn’t as if we could advertise in the papers for a ley line professor to help us, as he or she would likely turn me in for dealing in the black arts. And then I’d really be stuck. Or dead. Or worse.

Slowly Nick let go, and I stepped back. At least I knew it wasn’t another woman.

“Hey, uh, the zoo is open,” I said, my voice giving away my relief that the awkward distance he had been holding himself at finally seemed to be easing. “You want to go in and get a coffee instead? I hear their Monkey Mocha is to come back from the dead for.”

“No,” he said, but there was true regret in his voice, making me wonder if he had been picking up on my worry about Al all this time, thinking I was upset with him and drawing away. Maybe more of this was my fault than I had guessed. Maybe I could have forged a stronger union between us if I had told him instead of hiding it from him and driving him away.

The magnitude of what I might have done with my silence fell on me, and I felt my face go cold. “Nick, I’m sorry,” I breathed.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, his brown eyes full of forgiveness, unaware of my thoughts. “I was the one that told him he could have the book.”

“No, you see—”

He took me in a hug, silencing me. A lump formed in my throat, and I couldn’t say anything as my forehead dropped to his shoulder. I should have told him. I should have told him right from the first night.

Nick felt the shift in me, and slowly, after a moment’s thought, he gave me a tentative kiss on the cheek, but it was a tentativeness born from his long absence, not his usual hesitancy.

“Nick?” I said, hearing the coming tears in my voice.

Immediately he pulled back. “Hey,” he said, smiling as his long hand rested on my shoulder. “I’ve got to go. I’ve been up since yesterday and I have to get some sleep.”

I took a reluctant step back, hoping he couldn’t tell how close to tears I was. It had been a long, lonely three months. At last something seemed to be mending. “Okay. You want to come over for dinner tonight?”

And finally, after weeks of quick refusals, he paused. “How about a movie and dinner instead? My treat. A real date … thing.”

I straightened, feeling myself grow taller. “A date thing,” I said, moving awkwardly foot-to-foot like a fool teenager asked to her first dance. “What do you have in mind?”

He smiled softly. “Something with lots of explosions, lots of guns …” He didn’t touch me, but I saw in his eyes his desire to do so. “… tight costumes …”