“Will there be pretty girls in the next world?” Clay responded.
Good question. “Um…probably,” I hedged.
Isaac Ford shot a stream of brown tobacco juice out of one side of his mouth — luckily, the side farthest away from me. Don’t ask me how a spirit can spit tobacco. Just one of the afterlife’s little mysteries, I supposed. “But you don’t know for sure.”
“Well, no.”
“Then I’m stayin’ here,” Clay said, and Isaac nodded.
“Yup. Why mess with a sure thing? I know there are pretty girls here.”
“But — ”
My protest died on my lips, because at that point they both tipped their hats to me and faded away — off to look for half-drunk pretty girls roaming the streets of downtown Flagstaff. It was a mild Friday night in June, so that probably wouldn’t be too difficult.
I came out of that “spirit walk” frowning, and Connor peered at me, concerned. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said curtly, then relented. “I don’t know. I’m not feeling very optimistic. I mean, if I can’t get a couple of horny bootleggers to move on to the next world, how can I possibly handle this Nizhoni person?”
“Horny?” Connor repeated, looking bemused. “How can spirits be horny?”
“You don’t want to know,” I told him, and after taking a closer look at my face, he must have decided it wasn’t worth pressing the issue, because he took me home shortly afterward.
* * *
On Saturday we returned to the apartment around seven-thirty in the evening, since we’d decided to fortify ourselves with some tapas before Lawrence and my father showed up. I didn’t want to call it my last meal, because I thought that would be jinxing things before we even got started, but I couldn’t help feeling as if our little feast might be that very thing. Instead, I called it Connor’s birthday dinner, promising him that we’d do something more festive after…well, afterward. In fact, I made something of a show of getting us reservations the following evening at the Cottage, his favorite restaurant in town. All perfectly normal.
Whether he saw through my pretense, I wasn’t sure, but he didn’t comment, only said that sounded great and it was only a birthday, nothing to get that fussed about.
It had been sort of tricky, getting the chance to be here in the apartment, since both the Wilcox and the McAllister clans had solstice observances that they wanted us to attend, and Lucas had made some noises about a birthday celebration for Connor afterward. That wouldn’t work at all, of course, as we couldn’t possibly be anywhere except here. Pregnancy, however, allows you all sorts of built-in excuses for getting out of social events. Connor simply put it out there on the respective family grapevines that I was having stomach issues just short of projectile vomiting, and that closed down the matter pretty quickly. Never mind that, except for my adverse reactions to the smell of coffee, I was probably having the most nausea-free pregnancy on record. Luckily, we hadn’t really been spending that much time around most of our family members, except Lucas, and so no one found anything particularly odd about the excuse.
So we ate mostly in silence, each of us brooding about what lay ahead. I did make Connor let me have half a glass of wine. That little surely couldn’t do any irreparable harm, and if I wasn’t coming back from this journey into the otherworld, then I wanted a few last sips of malbec to accompany me to the afterlife. I know, I really shouldn’t have been thinking that way, but it was how I felt.
We’d had to eat off paper plates, since of course all of the dishes were at the new house. There wasn’t much clean-up to be done. After the last bit of trash had been shoved into the garbage can under the sink, Connor turned around and regarded me gravely.
“It’s not too late — ” he began, and I went to him and laid two fingers against his lips, hushing him.
“I’m not backing out now,” I said, raising my hand from his mouth. Oh, that mouth. As anxious as I was, the touch of his lips against my skin still sent warm little thrills all through me. How I wished it were just another night here, and that we could go upstairs and make slow, languorous love in the king-size bed. But this wasn’t our home anymore, not really, and besides, Lawrence and my father would be here soon.
“I know,” Connor said, resigned. “You get this lift to your chin when you have your mind set on something, and you definitely have it now. It’s just….” He let the words die away, and I wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face into his chest, breathing in the warm masculine smell of him, soap and the slightest tinge of clean sweat, and something beneath that, something comforting that had to be the scent of his skin.