Chapter 27
When Greg walked back in through the closed door, he almost tripped over Dustin's boots.
“Graceful,” Dustin observed, masking the wave of relief that hit him at the sight of the reaper.
“Your boots are in the middle of the room,” Greg complained.
“They're by the door. Where boots go.”
Greg righted himself and pushed his glasses up his nose. He'd gotten his clipboard back, and he was fully solid.
Good. That was good.
But something was weighing on him. Dustin could tell by the way he stood in the middle of the room with an expression like he had something to say and hadn't figured out how to say it. He looked almost more anxious than usual.
“What happened?” Dustin asked.
“Um.” Greg sat on the edge of the bed, close to Dustin. “Someone else had my clipboard. A man named Noah. He was sitting on the guardrail at the accident site when I arrived. He knew my name. He knew about you. He knew everything.”
Dustin's eyebrows went up. “How?”
“I don't know. He said he wasn't from Oversight, and he wasn't a reaper. He was just... there, wearing a bow tie with rubber ducks on it.”
“Rubber ducks.”
“Yes.”
Dustin filed this under weird supernatural shit he didn't have the bandwidth to process and moved on. “And this Noah just had your clipboard.”
“He picked it up from the asphalt after we left. He gave it back. But he said something first.”
There it was. The thing that made Greg fidget. “What did he say?”
Greg's thumb ran along the edge of the clipboard. “Something about what's protecting you.”
Dustin waited.
“He said you weren't the only person who made unwise decisions after Tyler died.”
The words made Dustin tense. He got the feeling he knew where this conversation was going—and that he wasn't going to like it.
“He was talking about your mother,” Greg said.
Yeah.
Dustin did not like this.
“I think,” Greg said, “she did something after Tyler's accident. Something that changed things.” Greg was choosing his words like he was picking his way through a minefield.
“The protection you have — it has rules. It behaves like something with terms. I think…” He hesitated. “I think your mother made a deal.”
“A deal.”
“With a demon,” Greg provided helpfully.
“Do you have any idea how insane you sound right now? That's ridiculous.” Except Dustin wasn't laughing. His jaw tightened.
“It's not ridiculous.”
“It is. A stranger wearing a ducky bow tie told you some nonsense and now you think my mother—what, summoned a demon?”
“It only sounds ridiculous because you're saying it like that.”
“You don't know my mother,” Dustin said.
“No. That's why I need to talk to her.”
“No.”
Greg paused.
“You're not going to my mother,” Dustin said, firmly. He rose from the bed.
“Dustin—”
“You heard that phone call last night. You were right there.” Dustin fixed the reaper with his gaze, willing him to understand.
“You know what it's like between us. You know she can barely — that we can't even—” He stopped.
Breathed. “If you go to her and start asking about Tyler and what she did after he died, you don't know what that's going to do.”
“To her or to you?”
Dustin swallowed.
There was no malice or sharpness in Greg's voice. He genuinely wanted to know.
Dustin had nothing to say in response.
“Valerie told me Morrith is escalating,” Greg said, pressing forward. “Oversight is looking into your file. If the system finds the source of the protection before I do…”
“Then what?”
Greg licked his lips. “I don't know. But it won't be good.”
A car door slammed somewhere in the lot. Dustin stared at the beige wall and thought about his mother's voice on the phone last night. I can't fall apart on your schedule, Dustin.
Could she really have done something stupid?
The thought arrived before he could stop it, and once it was there it wouldn't leave.
Because Greg's theory made a horrible kind of sense.
The calm that Dustin had spent three years reading as distance.
The way she never panicked. Never once, in three years of watching him hurl himself off increasingly dangerous things, had Cathy said please don't do this.
He'd interpreted that as proof she didn't care.
What if he'd been wrong?
“She lives in Ridgway,” Dustin heard himself say. “About five hours south.”
Something like relief crossed Greg's face. “I can be there in seconds.”
“No.” Dustin cut him off. “Absolutely not.”
“But—”
“You're not showing up at my mother's house alone. You walk through walls, Greg. You tried to kill me. You carry a clipboard that tracks dying people. You're not materializing in my mother's living room and introducing yourself.”
“I would knock on the door.”
“Oh yeah that would make things so much better.”
“I was going to be honest—”
“Honest about what?” Dustin swung his legs off the bed and faced Greg directly. “That you were sent to collect her son's soul? That's your opener?”
Greg faltered. “I was going to say I'm trying to help.”
“You look like a lost accountant, Greg.”
“I don't know what an accountant looks like.”
“Trust me.” Dustin turned to grab his jacket, ignoring the flare in his shoulder. “If we're doing this, I'm driving you. I'll introduce you. And if she tells you to leave, you leave.”
Greg looked up at him from the bed. “You want to come?”
“I don't want to come. I need to be there because otherwise you're going to freak her out and she's going to call the sheriff and then I'll have to explain to the police why a supernatural entity is harassing my mother.”
That wasn't the reason. Not even close. The reason was that Dustin couldn't stomach the idea of Greg sitting across from Cathy and seeing the shape of what was broken between them without Dustin being in the room. To do what — control the narrative? Protect himself?
He didn't know. He just knew he had to be there.
“Okay,” Greg said. “We'll drive.”
“I'll drive. You'll sit in the passenger seat and not touch anything.”
“I'll need to hold the clipboard.”
“Fine. You can hold the clipboard.”
Highway 550 south out of Montrose was a road Dustin knew by feel.
He'd driven it hundreds of times. As a kid in the backseat of Cathy's truck. As a teenager with Tyler riding shotgun and the windows down. As an adult, less and less frequently, until the trips home became something he scheduled around obligations and cancelled when he found an excuse.
The last time he'd driven this stretch had been five months ago. Their birthday. His and Tyler's. He'd made it as far as the Ridgway exit before pulling over, sitting in the truck for twenty minutes, and driving back north.
He didn't tell Greg any of this.
Greg sat in the passenger seat with perfect posture, clipboard in his lap, watching the landscape through the window with the same wide-eyed fascination he brought to everything.
The San Juan mountains climbed in the distance, still carrying snow at the peaks.
The valley floor was brown and golden in the late morning light.
“It's beautiful here,” Greg said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you grow up near these mountains?”
“In them.”
“That explains the jumping.”
Dustin almost smiled. “How do you figure?”
“You grew up surrounded by heights. It makes sense that you'd want to interact with them rather than just look at them.” Greg adjusted his glasses. “That's what humans do, I think. They see a challenge and want to overcome it.”
Dustin said nothing. He kept his eyes on the road and his hand on the wheel and didn't think about how accurately Greg had just described the first time he and Tyler had stood on that cliff behind their school and looked down.
They drove in silence for a while. The highway curved through canyon walls, red rock rising on both sides, the Uncompahgre River running alongside in the valley below.
“What's she like?” Greg asked.
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
Dustin's grip shifted on the wheel. “I've told you about her before.”
“You told me very little.”
“You didn't need to know much,” Dustin responded. “I don't usually bring guys home.” Or girls, for that matter. Dustin had never introduced any of his dates to Cathy.
But Greg wasn't just a date, was he?
Dustin glanced at him, sitting there with his ridiculous clipboard.
No, Greg wasn't 'just' anything.
“She's practical,” Dustin said, focusing his gaze back on the road. “She doesn't do the big emotional displays. When I was a kid and I'd come home with a scraped knee, she wouldn't hug me. She'd clean it, bandage it, and ask me if I'd learned anything.” He paused. “It was different with Tyler.”
“Why?”
“Because Tyler cried and I didn't.” Dustin shrugged with his good shoulder. “I stopped crying when I was about eight. I figured out that if I didn't make a big deal about being hurt, things moved faster. You skip the worried-parent part and go straight to getting fixed and getting back outside.”
He could feel Greg processing this, probably filing it in his mental notebook of human behaviors.
“You trained her not to worry about you,” Greg said quietly.
Dustin's hand tightened on the wheel.
Was there any truth to Greg's words?
“I don't know about that,” Dustin said. He turned the radio on, not because he wanted music but because the silence was getting too full.
He got a country station. Some dude was singing about a truck.
“How much further?” Greg asked.
“About an hour.”
“Are you nervous?”
“No.”
“Your jaw is clenched.”
Dustin turned the volume up.
Miraculously, Greg took the hint.
Ridgway sat in a valley between the San Juans and the Cimarrons, a small town that hadn't changed much in the twenty-six years Dustin had been alive.
Main street had one traffic light, a general store, a coffee shop that closed at four, and a bar that everyone pretended they didn't go to as often as they did.
Cathy's house was on the east side, up a gravel road that wound between pastures. A small, tidy house with a covered porch and a yard she always kept mowed.
Dustin pulled into the driveway and killed the engine.
He sat there.
“Dustin?” Greg's voice was careful. “We're here.”
“I know we're here.”
“Do you want me to wait in the truck?”
Dustin considered letting Greg wait while he went in alone, broke the ice, prepared Cathy for what was coming.
But that would mean talking to her first. Just the two of them. Without a buffer or a reason to keep the conversation on something other than the two of them and the distance between them.
“No,” Dustin said. “You're coming in.”
He got out of the truck. The gravel crunched under his boots. The air smelled like sage and dry grass, a smell that took him back to happier days.
Almost, he smiled.
What the hell.
He climbed the porch steps. Greg followed, clipboard tucked under his arm, managing to look like a nervous census taker.
Dustin knocked.
Footsteps inside and then the door opened.
Cathy looked at him.
She was smaller than he remembered. Not physically—she'd always been average height—she seemed diminished. Tired around the eyes. Her hair was pulled back and there were more grey streaks than the last time he'd seen her in person, whenever that had been.
Her gaze moved from his face to the sling to the road rash on his cheek. “What did you do now?” she said by way of greeting.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” he said stoically.
She almost looked as if she wanted to argue, and then her eyes slid to Greg.
“This is Greg,” Dustin said. “He's…” What? My reaper? The supernatural entity assigned to collect my soul? The guy I'm sleeping with? “…a friend,” Dustin finished.
Cathy looked at Greg. Greg looked at Cathy.
He straightened his posture and clutched his clipboard and opened his mouth, and Dustin could see the speech forming — the honest, earnest, completely disastrous introduction that would include the words reaper and soul and natural order within the first sentence.
“He's helping me with something,” Dustin added quickly. “Can we come in?”
Cathy's gaze lingered on Greg for another moment. Then it came back to Dustin. To the sling.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“It's nothing.”
“That's a sling, Dustin. Did you drive all the way here with a sling on?” She sounded as if she wanted to ask if he was insane but didn't because she already knew the answer to that question.
“I dislocated my shoulder. It's already been fixed.”
“How did you manage that?”
“It was no big deal, really.”
Cathy studied him for a moment longer, then she stepped aside. “Well, come in.”