Chapter 12 #2
“Dessert,” he answered, then opened the biggest container, revealing the loaded pimento-cheese fries.
Then he took one plate and pulled the contents of a box out on the thin parchment paper that lined the box, then passed me a Lafayette Sandwich with house-made chips, a half-smile on his lips.
“You’re going to get sick of this sandwich,” he teased.
I shook my head. If we went more often, I might get something else sometimes, but I both liked the Lafayette and had good memories associated with it, so it was providing me with both food and emotional comfort.
I wasn’t sure if that was normal or healthy.
At that precise moment, I didn’t care.
Raj finished pulling his own sandwich—a burger, as usual—out onto the other plate, then settled across from me at the table, eyeing me.
“What?”
“You are going to eat that, right?”
I nodded. It smelled delicious, which had activated my body’s hunger response, and the fact that it had brought back good memories was helping to reinforce that hunger. I demonstrated my willingness to eat by picking up half of my sandwich and taking a bite.
Saliva flooded my mouth at the flavors, and I ate quickly for a few minutes, as though my body were trying to make up for the fact that I’d not gotten nearly enough calories the day before.
Raj let out a pleased grunt, then picked up his own burger.
Dessert was two giant slices of peanut butter pie—graham crackers, chocolate, peanut butter creme, and peanuts. I was several spoon-fulls in when Raj spoke.
“We confirmed that the Church of Holy Judgment has a minister named Reverend Dale Durant,” he said, his voice slow and measured.
I looked up from my dessert, fork hovering. “Preacher Dale?” I asked.
“It seems awfully likely,” Raj replied. “The idea that there might be a Reverend Dale and a Preacher Dale in the same city seems too coincidental.”
I nodded, agreeing, my stomach feeling oddly unpleasant—I was both pleased that they had a lead that seemed viable and made anxious by the fact that such a person was living and fomenting hatred in the same city I—and Raj—was also living in.
“That’s a good thing, right?” I asked, mostly just wanting Raj to provide me with reassurance.
“It—is,” he answered, the hesitation between the two short words telling me that there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“What?” I asked him.
He sighed, poking his fork into his dessert. “It gives us someone to keep tabs on,” he replied. “But unless we can prove that he’s explicitly ordering his congregation, or some subset of them, to run down or otherwise cause harm to Nids, it’s not actually very helpful.”
“What about the woman named Paula?” I asked. “Or the Jerry person?”
He let out a displeased snort. “We’ll definitely be trying to get a list of congregants,” he replied. “But that’s not usually the sort of thing you can get on demand.” He grimaced. “Especially for the more radical evangelicals, who tend to not trust the government.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?” he countered, a furrow across his forehead.
“Why are evangelicals likely not to trust the government?”
“Ah,” he said, his expression smoothing.
Apparently that was a good question. “For a lot of the more radical denominations,” he explained, “there is a natural distrust of civic authority. There’s a Bible passage somewhere, I’m not actually sure where, that says something about leaving to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and God that which is God’s.
Which really religious folks take to mean that government shouldn’t dictate anything having to do with religion. ”
It was my turn to frown. “Isn’t that already in one of the Amendments?” My political science education was rather lacking, but I thought I remembered that.
Raj smiled. “Yes,” he confirmed. “That would be the First. And it specifically prohibits Congress from establishing religion or from prohibiting religious practice. We think of it as the separation of church and state, but that’s a slightly messy paraphrase.
” He took another forkful of pie, speaking around the mouthful when he continued.
“It doesn’t mean that religious organizations have the right to do anything they want without being censured by the government, but that’s what they want it to mean. ”
What he said made sense. I didn’t understand why people thought they were or should be exempt from the rules that applied to the rest of us, but I’d lived in society long enough to understand that such was the case.
I didn’t like it, but what I liked and didn’t like had almost no bearing on what was actually true or false.
I scowled down at the remaining half piece of pie on my plate. “So what do they want to do that the government is stopping them from doing?” I asked him. Then I grimaced. “Other than killing Arcanids.”
“Well, there is that,” Raj replied darkly, stabbing at his pie. “Drew is working on digging up the reasons we can get a warrant.”
“What are those?” I asked, setting down my fork. The pie was delicious, but I’d lost my appetite.
Raj spoke around a bite of pie. “Tax evasion is a pretty popular one with religious cults and fringe groups,” he replied.
“Sometimes there’s a sex scandal involving a minor or child labor law violations.
Drugs sometimes, too, depending on what the minister uses to keep up his energy levels for particularly enthusiastic sermons.
” He shrugged. “Not sure what we’ll find, but we will find something. ”
“Are you sure?” I asked. I disliked uncertainty.
Most people were more optimistic than they should have been, believing that things will eventually work out in their favor.
Raj hadn’t been wrong about anything significant—cases, especially—since I’d known him.
Details, yes, but every time he’d been certain they would close a case, they had.
He gave a shrug that I didn’t find very reassuring.
“I’m pretty sure,” he replied. “Most organizations have something we can use as an excuse to dig even deeper, although if they’re not doing anything nefarious, there generally isn’t a lot more to find.
But,” he continued, seeing me frown, “when there is something nefarious, that digging will find more. Tax evasion often leads to other things, like more widespread fraud, patterns of exploitation and abuse that usually end up with somebody wanting to sue or press charges, that sort of thing.”
“And you think this is one where you’ll find something?”
Raj’s eyebrows rose. “This man’s so-called ‘flock’ is responsible for the deaths of three Nids,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that qualifies as ‘nefarious.’”
I couldn’t really argue with that.
“That doesn’t mean they’re going to make it easy,” he warned me, gesturing with his fork, which held the last bite of his pie. “This could get ugly. Which is why I don’t want you walking home at night.”
I pressed my teeth together, holding back my objections to what I saw as his overprotectiveness.
Nothing about anything I had touched suggested that the drivers had known their victims. And since I didn’t look magical—no horns, no hooves, no fangs or fur—I wasn’t likely to be targeted by this particular anti-Arcane group.
I was much more likely to be targeted by the Magic-Free Movement, who were protesting a séance I had to work with Ward and Vi the next day.
I wasn’t going to say so out loud, though.
I was getting good enough at understanding people—and Raj, in particular—to understand that it would only upset him.
And likely result in an argument about whether or not I should be doing my job.
Smothering a sigh so that Raj wouldn’t ask me what was wrong, I stood, pushing my pie towards him. “You should eat mine,” I told him. “I’m full.”
“You sure?” he asked, looking up at me, his gaze sharp. “Don’t you like it?”
I forced myself to smile, not wanting to have to have a conversation about what—what else—was upsetting me.
“It’s good,” I assured him, although why he was concerned that I didn’t like something he hadn’t made I wasn’t sure. “I just don’t have a shifter’s stomach.”
He studied me, then decided that either I wasn’t hiding anything from him or it wasn’t worth pursuing. “Okay,” he said, sticking his fork into the rest of my pie.
I took the rest of the dishes into the kitchen, washing them to give myself time to stop stressing so much. Time to let my irritation cool so that I could actually enjoy spending time with Raj—assuming he didn’t bring up my walking to and from work again.
Raj came up behind me, setting his finished pie plate on the counter beside me. I was slightly surprised, since usually he tried to shoo me away and do the dishes himself.
But then his hands settled on my hips, and he nuzzled against the back of my head, the warmth of his breath against my scalp sending faint shivers down my spine. I paused in my dish-washing, still wrist-deep in the soapy water, as Raj’s hands slid around to the front of my khaki slacks.
I sucked in a breath.
I hadn’t been thinking about sex—which wasn’t unusual for me—but once Raj started touching me, I couldn’t focus on anything else, the warmth of his hands through my pants sending the blood rushing to where his palms were gently rubbing and chasing the irritation from my thoughts.
“Raj.” The word slipped from me in a half-gasp.
“Mmmm?” he hummed into the back of my neck, rubbing his face against my skin.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t have a question or a comment or a thought, really.
The bowl I’d been washing slipped out of my soapy fingers and clunked against the bottom of the sink.
“You should finish washing that,” he murmured into my neck. “Because it’ll bother you if they aren’t done later.”
He was right. It would bother me. It was just getting difficult to concentrate on bowls and plates and forks.