Chapter 21 Xolotl #2
An attendant with a vest embroidered the same as the front entry sign comes by. “Hey, where are all the balls? You can’t keep them.” He glances around almost frantically. “Those are ours.”
“Dude, relax.” Gabe pats his back. “You’ll have all your balls. I promise.” He slaps the boy’s shoulder and says, “Trust.”
For some reason that works, but I’m still confused about the entire interaction. Once the employee’s gone, Gabe spins around, his eyes wide, his fingers pointing at me.
“We can get the balls back, right, my man?”
I shoot the balls back out at the machine that attacked me, until it’s utterly ruined. “I can always get things that try to harm me ‘back out.’ Never fear.”
Gabe stares at the smoking machine in horror. He swears again, loudly. “Okay, time for us to go.” He grabs my arm and practically drags me out of the batting cages. Fine by me—we didn’t even do any batting.
Our next stop is a local jewelry store.
“Welcome to Green River Gems,” a woman with a white shirt and a black skirt says.
As I look at her, I can see it—she’s sick and doesn’t know it yet.
She’ll be gone within a year. If Whitney were here, she’d be sad.
I’ve learned not to share that kind of information with her.
I understand that’s just how life works, but apparently the kind of information I immediately sense from people isn’t welcomed by others. “How can I help you?”
“My man here needs to wow his girlfriend. They’ve been dating for. . .” Gabe clears his throat. “A month.”
“Which means you want to keep things small and modest. It’s early, after all. You don’t want to scare her off.”
“Diamonds are always good, though, right?” Gabe peers through the case.
I can sense the clear stone in the case quite well—it’s one I’ve never noticed before. “This stone is rare, and humans value it?”
“Uh, yeah,” Gabe says. “Humans.” He clears his throat and widens his eyes, reminding me that I shouldn’t refer to humans as though I’m not one myself. “We sure do value diamonds.”
“What other stones do you value?” I ask.
The woman helpfully shows us the different cabinets with the different precious stones they’ve set into jewelry for female adornment, and I begin to get a feel for what the various stones humans place value on feel like. Perhaps I can find some inside the earth at a later date.
“What types of jewelry does your girlfriend like?” The woman’s staring at me intently.
“She likes guns a lot,” I say. “All sorts of guns. Handguns, rifles—pretty much all of them.”
Gabe’s expression when he looks at me is quite strange. “Jewelry,” he hisses. “Not guns.”
“Oh.” I frown. “Well, I’ve never seen her wear jewelry, honestly,” I say. “But we go shooting pretty often.”
“You might be in the wrong store, then,” the woman says with a half-smile. “The pawn shop around the corner would have quite a few guns.”
On our way out, Gabe shoves me with his shoulder. “All women like jewelry, and trust me. Whitney doesn’t need any more guns. The only person. . .” He freezes. “Wait. She could shoot at you, and you’d be fine, right?”
I shake my head. “Not so. Your sister, like you, is split evenly between light and dark energy. Any attack made by her would harm me.”
“Oh.” He nods, and we’re back in motion. A moment later, we’re in the ‘pawn’ shop the woman mentioned, and I’m not impressed. It smells strange, and all the goods appear to have been used by other humans.
“I don’t think this is a good place to purchase gifts,” I whisper. “The place feels off-putting, and the things they are selling all appear to have been used by others.”
Gabe laughs. “You’re a trip, man. Yes, that’s the whole point. People bring nice stuff here when they need money, so you can get—” He waves as a shop attendant meets us. “We need to see some guns, man.” He glances my way, and then he sighs. “The older and more unique the gun, the better.”
The attendant smiles. “I have just the thing.” He disappears again.
“I don’t have money,” I say. “I haven’t yet acquired a job, and Whitney says I can’t knock over ATMs anymore.”
Gabe throws a hand up over my mouth. “They have video cameras in here. Geez.” He tosses his head toward the door the man disappeared through.
“If you want to get a girl like Whitney a gun, you should buy a vintage one. She has all the best rifles that she wants already, so you have to go for unique.”
“Good idea.”
“And I’ll buy it for you, but then you have to pay me back.”
“I’m not sure how long it might be before I’m able to—”
Gabe turns toward me, flattening his hands on the counter. “Hey, I just had an idea. I hear you can shift into a horse still. Right?”
I nod, slowly. “Aren’t you worried about cameras?”
“They’d just think we were crazy if they hear us talking about that, but don’t talk about knocking over ATMs, alright?”
“What does me being able to shift have to do with—”
“So there’s this race down at Santa Anita, and it’s in two weeks. One of my friends is going, and I’ve always wanted to enter, but I never had a good horse for it.” His eyes light up. “But now. . .”
“I’m not sure I’d be a very good racehorse,” I say. “I can run all day, but—”
Gabe’s shaking his head. “Listen to me on this one. There are lots of horse shifters, and they’ve all won, like, every race or event under the sun.
They’ve all been at my house, and I figured Whitney would use you, for like, skijoring or something, but if you could throw me just one race, I’ll pay for—”
The attendant returns. “I knew I had this back there.” He’s grinning. “This is a Colt 1855 Revolving rifle, and—”
Before he can explain the features, I’ve grabbed it. “I remember these. They came out during the American Civil War, and at the time, this was the top tech. When everyone else was using muzzle loaders, these could fire repeatedly.”
Gabe nods at the attendant. “Yeah, we’ll take it.”
They work out the other details, but I’m positive I have a winner with this one. So when people start coming over later for Christmas, I’m not nervous. Between the clothes I think Whitney wanted, and the old gun Gabe helped me find, I’m covered.
That doesn’t help me make small talk with a lot of people I don’t know.
“How come your hair’s so long?” The kid who asked looks like he’s about ten, but I swear, there are four kids his size, and they’re all about the same age.
“Which one are you?” I ask.
“The rude one.” Helen is Whitney’s aunt, and when she drops a hand on the boy’s head, I know it must be Fisher.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Fisher can ask me anything—and the long hair is because I never cared how I looked, so I never cut it.”
The boy scrunches up his nose. “But Aunt Whitney probably cares, right? So maybe you should cut it.”
His mother rubs his head and then shoves him toward the kitchen. “Go wash some dishes or something.” Helen smiles. “Sorry about that. Kids ask everything that comes into their brain, and it’s annoying.”
“Does my hair really look bad?”
Two other ten-year-olds, a boy and a girl, both say yes at the same time. They actually look fairly similar, too.
“Are you two twins?” I arch one eyebrow.
They shake their heads at the same time. “We’re six months apart,” the boy says.
“Yeah,” the girl says, “and I’m adopted, but it doesn’t matter. Mom and Dad love us the same.”
When they walk off, I can’t help glancing around for Whitney.
“I know that look.” Helen pats my arm. “Hang in there. It gets easier.”
“What does?”
“Big, awkward family gatherings.” She hands me a drink.
I really hope it has alcohol in it. Now that I’m mortal, I can’t get enough of the stuff. “Do they really?”
“Right now it’s overwhelming, and you don’t feel like you belong, but eventually, you’ll start to like some of the people, and then you’ll hate others sometimes, but over even more time, you’ll start to love most of them. Because they matter to Whitney.”
“Is that what happened with you? Did you get dragged into this family, too?”
Helen shrugs. “Not exactly. I’m actually telling you what my husband David told me he felt.
They’re all related to me, and I still don’t like them most of the time.
That’s a Helen-specific problem, though.
” She’s smiling when she clinks her cup against mine.
“For what it’s worth, they are right about the hair.
Without all that messy mop, you’d be unstoppable.
” She winks and then wanders off, presumably for a refill.
“You survived Aunt Helen.” Whitney takes my arm. “That’s good. Most people don’t come out alive. She didn’t hassle you about not having a job?”
I shrug. “Didn’t come up.”
Whitney narrows her eyes. “Strange.”
“She did tell me to cut my hair.”
“That was rude.” Whitney frowns.
“Should I?”
She turns to look up at me. “Do you want to cut it?”
I shrug. “I want what you want.”
She laughs. “Maybe we’ll check out some hairstyles, then.” She winks. “No rush, though. I kind of like the long and unkempt look.”
“Which people here know about who I was before I retired?” I clear my throat.
“Just Amanda Saddler, Steve, Mom, and my siblings. We kept Aunt Donna, Aunt Amanda, and Aunt Helen out of anything to do with your past. It seemed wise.”
“You really don’t hate my hair?”
Whitney leans against my shoulder. “You’re the best-looking man I have ever met in my life.”
I notice she didn’t answer the question. “But do I need a haircut?”
She shrugs. “It’s your hair, not mine.”
I think that’s a yes. The problem is, I have no idea how to accomplish that.
Perhaps Gabe can cut it for me. I try to find him when Whitney gets pulled away to help with some emergency with the punch, but before I can, the family starts a reenactment of something called the ‘Nativity.’ The kids especially seem pretty excited.