Chapter 6 #2
“I like sandwiches.” It was true, although I did generally prefer that my sandwiches be a little more complicated than wheat bread and peanut butter.
“Secret Sandwich Society?” he asked.
I had a particularly fond memory of one evening when we’d all been in late working on sorting out a case and Hart had decided he wanted Secret Sandwich Society—which meant that we all got some.
“Yes, please,” was my response to Raj, who smiled.
I rarely ate out, so I could justify the cost of a sandwich and fries.
Maybe even the fries with pimento cheese on them as a reward to myself for having spent most of the day inside other people’s heads.
It was late enough that the restaurant wasn’t crowded, but it wasn’t abandoned, either.
The server took us back to a booth in a corner, and Raj stretched out on his side, putting his long legs up so that his feet hung off the end of the bench.
He’d left his suit jacket in the car, and proceeded to unbutton and roll up the cuffs of his sleeves a few times.
I decided that if he was that relaxed, then I didn’t have to sit facing forward, either, and tucked one foot up under myself, leaning the other elbow on the table.
“So,” he said, after taking a long drink of the ice water the server had left with us. “What do you do outside of being a psychic and the front desk guy for Beyond the Veil?”
I blinked, surprised. I’d expected him to talk about the case—ask more questions, maybe, or offer up suggestions for how I might be more helpful. I hadn’t expected him to ask me about myself as a non-psychic.
“I mean… I’m a death witch,” I said, although I’d thought he knew that.
“Besides that,” came his reply. “You know—hobbies, taste in books, movies, that kind of thing.”
I blinked again. “I—don’t really have hobbies,” I answered him. Not if hobbies meant things like knitting. “I do like books, though. Especially sci fi.” I felt my cheeks flush. I wasn’t used to talking about myself.
Raj took another sip of his water. “What kind?” he asked. “Old-school, Asimov and Dune, or like Le Guin and Okorafor?”
I grinned at him. “All of those,” I replied, realizing that he had to be familiar with the genre to have dropped that particular set of names. “N.K. Jemisin, and Ender’s Game, and Butler, and IQ84.”
“IQ84?” he asked, which led me to launch into an explanation of Murikami’s novel, its alternate timelines and realities, and how important the moon was to the whole thing.
“Sounds interesting,” came the response. “I’ll have to pick up a copy.”
“I could lend you mine,” I offered, feeling my cheeks heat. “If you want.” That particular book I actually owned in hard copy.
He smiled at me, not his professional smile, but one that made his gold-brown eyes seem to glimmer. “I’d like that,” he replied, the timbre of his voice shifting a little. “Thanks.”
It wasn’t until after I’d made the offer that I realized it would come back to me with someone else’s thoughts on it—but for some reason that bothered me a lot less than I’d have expected. Maybe because I was starting to feel comfortable with Raj. A little bit, anyway.
Feeling my cheeks flush again, I smiled back, then studied my menu. I was hungry, and the prospect of something complicated—especially fried chicken—was appealing. That meant I had two options, and had to decide whether I wanted ham and blue cheese or honey butter and pickles with it.
“Do you eat bacon?” Raj asked, and I looked up.
“Yes. Why?”
“Because I want loaded cheese fries, and that way you’ll share them with me.”
“You don’t have to share fries with me,” I said, although now my mouth was watering. “You can just get them with your sandwich.”
“Yeah, but I like their chips, too,” he replied. “And I want more fries than that.”
I frowned at him. “Then why would you want me to eat them?” I asked.
That same smile, warm and mysterious, played around his lips. I found myself staring at it, then flushed again, looking back down at the blocky text of the menu.
“I’ll just get a second order if we eat them all and I want more,” he replied. “But I feel better about getting them if you share with me.”
I looked back up at him. “Why?”
Dark eyebrows rose. “Because American society has conditioned us to feel like slovenly gluttons for eating more than what is deemed normal or appropriate.”
I felt my mouth drop open a little.
He grinned at me, showing very white teeth that looked sharper than they were supposed to be—or, at least, sharper than mine. I supposed that if you were a shifter, you were probably supposed to have sharp teeth. “Meals are for sharing,” he said, sounding amused.
I thought about this for a moment. “But we don’t do that,” I protested. “Everybody gets their own sandwich.”
He shrugged. “We shared pizza yesterday,” he pointed out. “And when you eat with your family at home, everyone shares the same dishes.”
I thought about this. We had shared pizza yesterday, but it had clearly been delineated by who could eat what. I had no idea how families ate. “I—don’t really have a family,” I admitted.
Raj tilted his head to one side. “You must have, growing up though?” It was clearly a question.
Did he not remember where I’d come from? “I ‘grew up,’ if you can call it that, at Tranquil Brook,” I reminded him.
His brow furrowed. “How old were you, when… when you were admitted?”
“Six.”
His dark skin shaded a little toward grey. “Shit,” he breathed.
I fiddled with the corner of the napkin-wrapped silverware. “Hart didn’t tell you?” I asked, not sure what else to say.
“No,” came the response. “He didn’t tell me much of anything other than the fact that you were a psychic who had been through hell.” He grimaced. “I suppose that qualifies.”
I looked up. “He didn’t tell you what happened at Tranquil Brook?” that was surprising.
“No, he told me that.” Raj cleared his throat a little, took a sip of water, then set down the glass, slowly turning it with the fingers of one big hand. “He didn’t mention that you were a patient there, though. Not until very recently.”
“Oh.” That also probably meant that Raj didn’t know about my uncle.
I was saved from having to think up something else to say by the return of the server, who took our orders—Raj asked for an Eisenhower sandwich and ordered loaded pimento cheese fries to share, and I settled on the Lafayette.
I fiddled with the napkin end, trying to figure out a way to continue the conversation without it going somewhere I didn’t want it to go.
“Your family… sent you there?” he asked, then, giving me something I could at least answer.
“Yes.” I swallowed. How much could I tell him?
“Because of your magic?”
“Yes.” It was the truth, and a safe enough answer, given his question, but I still felt guilty because there really was so much more to it than that.
Because I’m a death witch, and I killed my uncle.
Except that felt like far too much information to share with someone I barely knew, and also far, far too much to share with an FBI agent.
I knew—of course I did, working at Beyond the Veil—that there was no statute of limitations on murder.
And I was a murderer, even though the story that everyone told was that it had been an accident.
Maybe, if you wanted to stretch a point, you could claim it had been self-defense, but even I thought that was pushing the limits of what the phrase meant.
But I’d only ever told my mother what I’d done—and that was what had gotten me sent to Tranquil Brook to begin with.
Locked up, key thrown away, magic repeatedly stripped from me.
I’m not sure when exactly that began—when you’re a child locked in a place like Tranquil Brook, time becomes more than a little fuzzy.
I hadn’t even told Ward, even obliquely, through the fairy tale version I’d explained to him in his dream, that I’d killed my uncle.
Just that I’d been responsible for his fall down the stairs.
Which I had been. It’s just that I didn’t push him, exactly.
I’d just taken his life as he’d lurched forward, and gravity did the rest.
I wasn’t about to tell Rajesh Parikh, Federal Agent, that I was a murderer.
The weird part was that I felt bad about it. Not about killing my uncle—about keeping it from Raj.
I’d never particularly felt guilty about not telling Ward or Mason or Beck that I’d killed my uncle on purpose.
I knew they wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t feel bad for not telling them.
They knew that I was responsible for my uncle’s death, even though they assumed it had been at least semi-accidental, and none of them seemed to judge me for it.
Yet I was worried that Raj would judge me, and I didn’t like the idea that he might.
“I’m sorry,” he said, only making me feel worse.