Chapter Twelve
Hell House Client Brief: The local plumber will NOT come back after last time. Try next town over.
Harlow Construction had a website.
They had their boss on the front page. Easy—or Ezekiel, if Shepherd had that right—Harlow was a tall man with shaggy red-black hair and a bony, expressive face. He looked…maybe mid-forties. More likely late-forties, but with good skin care.
“I don’t know what in the teen pregnancy you think was going on around here,” Kel said. “But that is not my grandad.”
Shepherd handed him a photo. It was folded in half, ink peeling along the crease.
Kel flattened it out and frowned at the image.
He’d seen it before. Ruby, back when she didn’t think she was going to be a Laker for life, posed like a pin-up on the hood of the Mustang.
She had her hands braced behind her and her smile almost reaching her eyes.
“How’d you get this?” Kel asked.
“Doncaster dropped it.”
“OK. So Ruby had game back then,” Kel said. He handed the photo back to Shepherd. “It doesn’t mean her dating pool was the Middle School.”
Shepherd leaned over and took the photo back. He folded it again and then held it up next to the screen.
“Who’s that with her?” Shepherd asked. He tapped the photo with his forefinger without needing to look. “Who’s driving the car?”
“Dio,” Kel said. He hadn’t really looked, but… “It’s Dio Madden’s—or whatever name he was using back then—car. Who else would be driving it?”
“The car goes with the house,” Shepherd said. “It was Dio’s car. It’s your car now. Whose car was it back then?”
Kel slouched back in the kitchen chair and crossed his arms.
“Nice try,” he said. “You already told me that Dio was his own grandfather. He just reinvented himself so people would stop asking him to do Just for Men ads.”
Shepherd ignored that and waited expectantly.
It turned out he had more patience than Kel. That wasn’t really a surprise. After a good…five seconds of stand-off, Kel gave in and leaned in to take a pointedly closer look at the photo.
It was Dio.
At least, it could have been Dio.
Maybe.
…it was an old photo taken through a car windscreen. It could have been anyone.
The hair did have a ruddy hint instead of Dio’s sandy curls and, Kel supposed, the face looked a bit long and sharp. He had to admit the smile, even caught in profile, didn’t look like it would fit on Dio’s face.
After a second, Kel reluctantly glanced from the photo to the image on his laptop. He supposed if you squinted…
“All right,” he allowed. “There’s a family resemblance and the family name. So what? Ruby said my grandad wasn’t a welcher; she never claimed he was a saint.”
Shepherd set the photo down on the table.
“He was driving the car.”
Kel rolled his eyes. “OK, you win,” he said. “I’ll admit it. My grandad was an asshole. He probably jacked the car so he could show off for Ruby. Hell, maybe that’s why Dio ran him out of town. Maybe power makes you petty. Check in with me in a few years, and I’ll let you know.”
It was the first time in their relationship—because fuck him—that Kel had seen Shepherd look actually annoyed. Good. Why should Kel be the only one to suffer?
“Why would I bring this up if I didn’t think it was important?”
“Because you like to be the centre of attention.”
Shepherd waved his arms in an expansive, exasperated gesture.
“I hate being the centre of attention.”
It was thin. More like fog than smoke, but Kel saw the barely-there sketch of Shepherd’s mouth. I’m just special; it’s not my fault if people can tell.
“If you can’t lie to yourself,” Kel said. “Don’t try lying to me.”
Shepherd’s eyes narrowed. He slapped his hand over his mouth and backed away from the table. It didn’t help. Kel wasn’t going to share that, though. The taste of Shepherd’s lies on the back of his tongue was sour, like dish soap and grease.
“You can’t do that,” Shepherd said. “How did you…”
Kel stood up. He put his hand on top of the laptop and closed the case with a brisk click. Then he pressed his hand flat against it as he leaned forward.
“Maybe when it comes to curses,” he said. “The Shepherd doesn’t know as much as the wolf? Did you think about that?”
There was a pause. Shepherd’s hand lowered slightly, enough that Kel could see that his mouth and the smoke moved in unison.
“What?”
what?
“...you know what I mean,” Kel grumbled.
He pushed himself up and stalk-limped toward the kitchen door.
As he went, he tossed over his shoulder.
“I don’t need you as much as you thought I would, so you’re trying to make something out of fucking nothing.
I’ll find my own bed for the night. I’m sure the house has enough rooms that I don’t need to share with the help. ”
He could taste the meanness of that in his throat. It was savory, like breathing in the steam from a fresh-out-of-the-oven roast. When Shepherd followed him, he’d have to make it up to him.
Apologise. Somehow make it genuine, since Shepherd was better than most at seeing through his shit.
Right now, though, it felt better than good.
There were scratches gouged into the baseboard of Dio’s bed. Deep, raw, fresh marks splintered out of the ornately carved mahogany. Kel, sprawled out on the silk sheets, could have stretched his feet down and touched them with his toes.
He was pretty sure they hadn’t been there last night.
Not positive—he’d not really been in the mood to check the decor—but pretty sure.
That made his ankles itch. That had always been his big night terror as a kid: that something would grab his feet—that had stuck out over the end of every bunk bed, sofa, or cot since he was eight—in the night.
It had been a stupid fear then. It was even more stupid now—wasn’t the house meant to be on his side—but it still took him a while to work himself up to swinging his legs out of the bed.
He planted them flat on the rug, toes curled down into the pile, and it was only when nothing grabbed them that his shoulders relaxed.
The warm breeze on his ankles—warm, damp, rhythmic—was just a draft.
Kel got up and took two long steps away from the bed. When he looked back, his heart in his mouth, there was nothing there.
Somehow that didn’t help.
He shuddered and grabbed his jeans to scramble into them.
Shepherd hadn’t come after him.
Kel hitched his jeans up over lean hips and buttoned them.
He wasn’t sure what to make of that. It had never happened before. Usually people wanted to have the last word or get their property back or make him confess to something on the record. Nobody had ever just let go of the fight halfway through.
Although Kel had never used supernatural powers on someone mid-fight either. That probably would change how they reacted.
“Shit,” Kel muttered as he dragged his fingers through his tangled hair to get it out of his face. “I might have fucked up.”
The house didn’t care.
He could tell that somehow. It wasn’t like a telepathic connection or anything; he couldn’t feel it the same way he could the smoke in his chest. The house just felt…like when you had a cat. The sense that there was another living being nearby, but that it was pretty indifferent to you.
Kel supposed he couldn’t blame it. He wasn’t sure why he cared. It wasn’t like ‘fucked up’ was unfamiliar territory for him.
He’d pushed it a bit this time, but—Kel limped out of the bedroom and headed toward the stairs—it was nothing new.
The door to Shepherd’s room was open. Kel glanced in and winced at the stripped bed. That felt pointed. He gripped the handrail and went downstairs, the steps creaking under his weight.
It was quiet.
“Shepherd?” Kel said. It came out quieter than he’d planned. He cleared his throat and tried again. “SHEPHERD?”
His voice bounced back off the plaster walls. No other answer. That was mature.
Kel leaned in around the kitchen door, wasting a good, sheepish smile on the empty space. There wasn’t even a cup of coffee on the kitchen table.
Great. Uncaffeinated Shepherd to start the day.
Kel straightened up, arm braced against the doorframe, as he looked around.
It was, he realized, very quiet. Shepherd filled a space. He talked. A lot. He didn’t really need anyone to answer back. Silent, uncaffeinated Shepherd.
How badly had he fucked up?
Shit, Kel realized as he headed toward the conservatory, he really was going to have to apologise, and without it being dragged out of him.
It took him three more rooms and an empty garage to realize the truth.
He’d sped straight through ‘fucked up’ to ‘fucked off’.
Ruby dipped her thumb in the egg residue on the plate and smudged it onto the collar of Kel’s overalls. They were standing in the middle of the empty greasy spoon, the ‘CLOSED’ sign on the door turned to put off anyone wanting a late breakfast.
Kel pulled his collar out to look at the stain. “Really?”
She licked her thumb clean and dried it on her apron. “You need to look simple,” she said, as she popped out her hip and let a drawl thicken her words. “People love to talk down to common working folk, darlin’. How do you think I make most of my tips?”
“By pretending to be from Texas?”
“That was Louisiana,” Ruby said.
“Are you sure?”
She reached up and patted his cheek. “Don’t sass your grandma just because it took you most of the morning to be sure your boyfriend had left you.”
Kel snorted. “He’d be the first to tell you, he wasn’t my boyfriend,” he said. Even he could hear the self-pity in his voice.
There was a pause. Ruby rolled her eyes and heaved a sigh before she allowed herself a grudging sympathy. Or what passed for it among the Lakers.
“I know your pride hurts,” she said. “But it was for the best. You’re like your dad. Like me. We’re not cut out to be loved. It brings out the worst in us. If he’d not hurt you, you’d have hurt him.”
Kel reached up and scratched the back of his head, fingers dug down through his hair. He grimaced as he remembered Shepherd’s face the night before.
You can’t do that.
“I think I already hurt him,” he said.