Chapter 11
Garrick had come to hear Ben sing. That was the only reason he was at the Moonlight Tavern.
He told himself that one more time as he ducked under the tavern’s low doorframe.
Ben only sings occasionally so it’s worth going to listen.
The reason held up about as well as it had on the walk over, which was to say not at all.
The Moonlight Tavern was warm and loud, smelling of woodsmoke and fried fish and spilled beer, the rough plank walls papered over with decades of music posters.
Several of them were for a band called The Bite that Ben had once fronted.
The river ran along the back of the tavern and he caught the cool wet scent beneath the smell of the crowd, coming in through the wide porch doors half open to the dark.
The place was packed, and he found a corner to stand in.
He didn’t like crowds and he didn’t like the attention he drew, even in a bar filled with Others.
At least when he was standing in a corner, he was out of the way, easy to walk past and easy to leave alone.
He got a beer he didn’t especially want and set his back to the wall and told himself again he was here for the music.
Then he saw her, and the music stopped mattering entirely.
Maris was at a table near the small stage with Sylvie and Sara and Robin, and she was laughing at something, head tipped back, and she was wearing a dress.
He’d never seen her in a dress. He’d seen her in work pants with dirt on the knees and mud to the elbow, leaves in her hair, a smudge on her cheek she never noticed, and he’d found all of it, God help him, unbearably tempting.
The dress was something else. A soft green, the color of the ferns she’d been so fierce about, that left her arms bare and her collarbone bare and it moved when she moved.
Her hair was loose around her face, and she’d done something to her eyes that made them dark and smoky and mysterious.
He stood in his corner and forgot, briefly, the mechanics of drinking from a bottle.
This is a mistake.
He should have stayed home. He’d known it was a girls’ night, because Sylvie had made that theatrically clear—no boys allowed delivered with a look at him that said she knew exactly why Toby had suggested he come. He’d come anyway, because Ben was singing and he wanted to listen to Ben sing.
He was not, it turned out, the only male who’d noticed the dress.
Two tables over, a pair of human tourists in brand-new flannel shirts and boots that had never seen a speck of mud had turned in their chairs. One of them said something to the other, nodding towards Maris’s table, and grinned, and started to get up.
A wave of anger rushed through him and his grip on the bottle tightened until the glass creaked a warning. Gold flared at the edges of his vision, and he had one clear thought.
If he touches her table I will throw him across the bar.
And that was the moment he understood he needed to leave the room.
He set the bottle down before he broke it and moved.
Not towards the tourists, even though going the other way took most of his self-control, but towards the porch doors and the dark and the river.
Outside, where the air was cool and calm and there was no one in a green dress laughing at anything.
The porch ran the width of the tavern with worn wooden planks and a rail overlooking the water. The river went by below in the dark, quick and quiet, catching the tavern light in broken pieces. He set both hands on the rail and breathed and waited for the gold to drain back out of his eyes.
“You look,” said a voice from the water, “like a male who just discovered a foundation problem he can’t fix by writing a check.”
He didn’t jump. It took a great deal to make him jump.
But he did look down, and there in the dark river below the porch, half in and half out of the current with his elbows hooked over a mossy rock, was Sam—broad-shouldered, wet-haired, the faint iridescent sheen of his skin catching the light where a human’s skin wouldn’t have.
The tavern sat on the kraken’s stretch of river, and he turned up like this more often than not, especially when his mate was working the kitchen.
“There’s no problem,” Garrick said.
“Mm.” Sam floated. The water moved around him and he didn’t fight it.
“That’s why you’re out here white-knuckling a handrail instead of in there where the party is.
No problem at all.” He tipped his head, and his eyes reflected the light like a cat’s.
“I could hear your teeth grinding from the water, Garrick. Over the current. That’s a talent. ”
“There were tourists.”
“There are always tourists.”
“They were looking at—” He stopped, closed his mouth, and started again more carefully. “At the table.”
Sam’s grin spread slow and knowing across his face, all teeth, a kraken’s grin. “Ah.”
He looked back out at the dark water and refused to dignify the response with an answer.
The music inside cut off, and there was a swell of applause and whooping.
A moment later the porch door banged open and two more people came out into the cooler air.
Ben first, still holding his guitar by the neck, silvery fur damp at the temples from the stage lights, ears swiveled back in the way that meant he was glad to be off the stage for a minute.
Aidan came behind him, all red hair and easy grin, a beer in each hand, one of which he pushed at Garrick without asking.
“You looked like you needed this,” Aidan said. “You bolted out of there like the place was on fire.”
“I wanted air.”
“Sure.” Aidan leaned on the rail, spotted Sam in the water, and lifted his beer in greeting. “Sam. Heard you scared off the Pruitt boys last week.”
“They were throwing bottles in my river,” Sam said mildly. “I introduced them to it more thoroughly.”
Ben propped the guitar against the rail and stood there for a moment, working his shoulders loose. He looked at Garrick with the knowing look a mated male gives a single male who has just walked out of a room because he couldn’t stay there.
“You wanted to punch the tourists,” Ben said.
“I don’t want to punch anyone.”
“You wanted to punch the tourists,” Ben repeated, not unkindly, “because one of them stood up while she was laughing.” He pulled a rag out of his back pocket and wiped down his hands.
“I know the feeling. First month Sara worked at that school there was a substitute who kept walking her to her car. Nice male. Never did a thing wrong.”
Garrick kept his mouth shut.
“I stood outside that school for three afternoons before she noticed and told me to knock it off.”
“That’s not—”
“That’s exactly it,” Sam said cheerfully from the water.
Ben folded the rag. “When it happened to me with Sara, I told myself for about a month it was something else. Bad timing. Lack of sleep. Anything but what it was. Cost me a month I didn’t need to lose.
” He looked at Garrick calmly. “You’ve got that same look.
Like you keep adding it up and trying to make it come out with a different answer. ”
He set the beer Aidan had given him down on the rail, untouched. “She’s human.”
Nobody said anything.
“She’s human,” he repeated. “I’m a gargoyle.”
Aidan looked at Ben. “Are those incompatible?”
“No.”
Sam shook his head, and Garrick scowled at all of them. “That wasn’t a question.”
“Sounded like one,” Aidan said.
“She has a son.”
He wasn’t quite sure why he’d said it, but Toby’s earnest little face rose in his mind anyway, delighted to discover him at the nursery.
Mr. Garrick could come too. He should come too. So he’s not by himself.
The words had been bothering him all afternoon. No. Not bothering him. That would have been easier.
Ben’s expression changed slightly. “Sara says he’s a good kid.”
“Yes.”
“And you like him.”
Garrick looked at him, and Aidan, to his credit, held it a full three seconds before he ruined it.
“You know,” he said, taking a long pull of his beer, “the thing I love about all this?” He looked around at the three of them and grinned. “I love that it’s not me. No offense to any present company.”
“Aidan,” he said.
“Some poor bastard’s always got the eyes going gold over a woman in a green dress, and tonight, thank every god there is, that bastard is not me.
” He raised his bottle in a toast to himself.
“I’m going to enjoy a beer, hear Ben sing, flirt with someone who’ll flirt back and mean nothing by it, and go home to a bed I don’t have to share with anyone else’s disasters.
” He clinked his bottle against the rail. “It’s a beautiful life.”
“You’ll get yours,” Sam said darkly.
“Not tonight I won’t.”
Ben picked up his guitar and turned back to Garrick. “You want to keep doing the math, be my guest.” He paused. “Just make sure you’re solving the right problem.”
Garrick’s eyes narrowed, and Ben shrugged as someone inside shouted his name.
“That’s me.” He reached for the door.
“Well, isn’t this a cozy little tableau?”
Ben stopped and sighed, and they all turned to find Flora perched on the railing at the end of the porch.
Today’s tracksuit was hot-pink, with a fist throwing the horns across the front of it, the spiked wristband picked out in silver rhinestones, and ROCK HARD underneath in letters two inches high.
She was looking at the four of them with the satisfaction of a female who had stumbled across entertainment she had every intention of enjoying.
Garrick would have bet his entire company that she’d known they were there all along.
She probably even knew exactly what they’d said.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” she said. “I only came out for some air.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said.
“No,” Flora agreed cheerfully. “I didn’t.”
Ben made the sensible choice and escaped inside. Flora watched the door swing shut behind him, then looked up at Garrick.
“You left.”
“I’m aware.”