“Rachel, if you have a moment?” Trent said as he halted before Wayde and me. “I can’t stay. I’ve got a meeting downtown in fifteen minutes, but I wanted to give you these since I was in the area.”
The memory of Trent, calm and collected in a black thief suit, flashed before me, and then the sight of him angry and belligerent, his shirt off as he stood at the back of my mom’s car and changed. Jenks snickered at the silence, and Wayde came forward, his hand extended to fill the obvious gap. “Mr. Kalamack. You probably don’t remember me. I’m Wayde Benson.”
Trent glanced at me warily, his hand going out to the Were. “Mr. Benson. Of course. Last year’s Halloween concert. Good to see you again. Rachel tells me you’re keeping her out of trouble lately. Sorry about that spell.”
I shook myself out of my funk as Jenks landed on my shoulder, laughing at me.
“When she lets me,” Wayde said, seeing that I still hadn’t said anything. “Thank you for getting Rachel’s ass out of a sling yesterday.”
Trent thought for a moment, gaze distant. “The observatory? It was a lucky guess.”
“Lucky guess,” Jenks scoffed from my shoulder. “Piss on my daisies, he had three spells going when I broke into his spell hut and caught him trying to—”
“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Trent interrupted, his twitching eye belying his cool exterior, the bag in his hand crackling in his grip. “I promise it won’t take long.”
Wayde dropped back a step. “If you’ll excuse me, I was going to talk to Jenks and Bis about how we’re going to arrange security now that HAPA might make a go for Rachel.”
“Say what?” Jenks blurted out. “You think those moss wipes are coming back?”
“I wish,” I muttered. “I’ve got some serious hurt with their name on it.”
Trent stifled a sigh, and Wayde shifted to his back foot. “It was nice talking with you, Mr. Kalamack.”
“Likewise.”
Catching Jenks’s eye, the Were nodded to the back living room, and the two of them headed for the porch and the dusky evening. Jenks’s complaining was cut off when the screen door slammed, and I turned my back on Trent. “Do you want some coffee?” I asked over my shoulder as I headed into the kitchen, but what I really wanted was to know what was in the bag.
“No thanks. I can’t stay.”
It was the second time he’d said it, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. His steps were soft behind me, and I turned to see him looking around the brightly lit kitchen, giving me a bland smile when he brought his attention down from the top of the fridge where Bis usually lurked when he wasn’t on the steeple.
I need to do something with my hands, I thought, forcing my arms down from around my middle. “Well, I want some coffee,” I said as I reached for the coffeepot. “I, ah, haven’t had time to wash the sweats yet. Do you need them back right away?”
Oh my God, what am I doing? He doesn’t care about a pair of sweats!
“No need.” Trent looked from the demon text on the table and set the black craft bag on the center counter between us. “I made something . . . if you want it.”
I turned from the darkening garden, the clean coffeepot in my hands. “Really?” I looked at the bag. I didn’t think it had a Statue of Liberty made out of macaroni in it.
Head down, he carefully upended the bag and a dozen or so ley-line charms slid out. “I made them for helping to confine Al, but since you wouldn’t let me use them on him, you might want them for HAPA.” The rims of his ears were red, and I squinted, trying to read his tells. He looked up, and I forced my expression to become neutral. “Spelling has become sort of a hobby of mine. Something to take my mind off business. I’ve no use for them now,” he said, folding the bag up and dropping it on the counter.
I set down the coffeepot and leaned over the charms, my head inches from his. “Curses?”
“No.”
I touched one, noticing that he hadn’t said what they were. A tiny pricking in my thumb sparked through me, and I dropped it, hearing it ping metallically on the counter. Wild magic.
“Trent,” I said, suddenly feeling uneasy. “You’re not my familiar. Did Al talk to you? Did he put you up to this?”
Grimacing, Trent rocked back a step from the counter. “No, but he’s right. You’re a demon, but you don’t have the stored spells they do. You need these more than I do.” He looked at the charms, his expression becoming almost irate. “I’ve been going through my mother’s library the last couple of years, trying things out just to see if they work. Modifying them if necessary. Things change in five hundred years. Sometimes it’s not the flour that weaves the spell properly, but the flakes of calcite in the stone used to grind it. Ceri—” He frowned, then finished. “Ceri thinks it’s a waste of time, but it’s important to me to regain what we can of our heritage. If you don’t take them, I’m just going to throw them in a drawer.”
It was an interesting story, but I wasn’t buying it. I stared at him. “Quen is outside in the car?”
“Yes . . .” he said warily.
I pushed myself into motion. “I’ll be right back.”
“Rachel, wait.”
My breath caught as Trent snatched my elbow when I passed him, his light touch stopping me dead in my tracks. I stared at his fingers wrapped around my arm, and he let go.
“Okay, the ring I made specifically for you after you left today,” he said, and my heart thumped. “But I really am working on modernizing my spell library, and you might as well get some use out of the results. Your church was on the way to my meeting tonight, and . . .” His words cut off as I eyed him. “You should see the closet I’ve got. Boxes of charms that will never be used—”
“He’s at the curb, right?” I asked, pointing into the dark hall.
Trent’s head drooped, and I hesitated as the guys up front hammered at something. He knew I wasn’t going out there, but maybe just the threat of it would get him to tell me more. Sure enough, he ran a hand over his hair, leaving it mussed, and shifting his weight to one foot, looking almost angry when he finally met my eyes. “Can I have some of that coffee?” he asked shortly, and I stifled a smile.“Sure.” Feeling confident and sassy though I had no right to, I turned my back on him and went to make a fresh pot, running the taps slowly so I could hear him better.
“My father was a businessman,” Trent said, and I turned the taps off. “A good one.”
I turned, reaching for the cloth Wayde had left out, wiping the bottom of the pot dry. “So are you.”
Trent grimaced. “So I hear. Did you hear how my mother died? Not the official story, but what really happened?”
My smile faded. “No.”
He was silent. I recognized his distant expression as he tried to figure out how much to say, and I got the coffee out of the fridge. The bag was cold in my fingers, and the grounds smelled wonderful as I opened it up: bitter as burnt amber, and rich as the sunrise.
“I have tons of memories of her pressed and beautiful, as only mothers can be to their children,” he said, inches away and miles distant. “Her hair arranged and smelling like perfume, diamonds glittering in the night-light.” He smiled, but not at me. “She was the perfect politician’s wife at official functions, but I remember her best from when she’d look in on me while I was sleeping, checking on me when she got back from wherever she’d been. I don’t think she ever knew I woke up. It’s funny how things stick with you the best when you’re half awake.”
Not meeting his eyes, I measured out the coffee. My mother had never worn diamonds when she tucked me in.
“The days I didn’t see her leave, she always came back smelling like oil, metal, and sweat. Like a sword, Rachel,” he said, and my breath caught at his earnest expression. “That’s how I remember her best. Until the day she . . . never came back at all. Quen won’t tell me, but I think she was with your father the night she died.”
My God, no wonder he had hated me. “I’m sorry. That had to be hard.”
A shoulder lifted and fell. “No harder than you holding your father’s hand while he breathed his last, I’m sure. My dad was business, my mother . . . She was a lot of things.”
I stayed where I was with the center counter between us, feeling ill. His mother and my dad? Then my dad and his father? All dead, all gone. Leaving us to . . . what?
“I was asked to become my father when he died,” he said, dividing the charms into three piles. “I was expected to be him. I’m good at it.”
“It’s not what you want to be,” I whispered with sudden insight, remembering bits of conversation here and there, his quick conversion from businessman to child thief on our three days out West.
He never looked up, arranging the spells he’d made for me, wild magic woven with the power of the moon and sun, shadow and light both. “I’m good at it,” he said again, as if convincing himself.
But I knew that wasn’t what he wanted to be, and I remembered the cap and ribbon he kept stuffed in a pocket, probably in his suit even now. I recognized in his silence the pain of wanting something and being told that it’s not for you—that you should be something else that was easier, not so hard to become. “You were pretty good when we went after that elven sample in the ever-after.”