“Yeah,” I said absently.
“Why do you still have your gloves on?” Judy asked, and she cocked her head at me with her eyes narrowed.
“It’s for—”
“She just forgot to take them off,” Scott interrupted me.
“—your protection,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Scott like he was a moron for answering for me.
I turned back to see Judy glaring at me, then she turned back to Scott, all hostility now. “Did you bring a soul eater into my house?”
Scott shook his head swifty. “Nooooo …” He stretched out the word to make it even more obvious he was lying.
“You’re as bad a liar now as you were as a kid,” Judy said, stating the obvious. Her face was flushed a bright red and I started to get an inkling that this was not the place to be. The image of a raven flashed in my mind and there was a stir in the back of my consciousness, a screaming from the place where I was keeping my hitchiking souls.
She is an Odin-type, Bjorn shouted once I let him out. Her ire is raised.
Tell me something I don’t know, I shot back at him.
“Maybe I did,” Scott said, trying to cover for himself now. “But she’s a good person—”
“You got a death wish?” Judy said, and came to her feet. “You are as dumb as a box of rocks, boy. You got the hots for a succubus? Let me spell how this is gonna end for you—she’ll either get you killed in a fight with Sovereign or she’ll eat your whole entire soul before she realizes how much it would burden her to be weighed down with an idiot like you for all the rest of the days of her life! Do you know how long these things live?”
Her last words came out as a scream and I stood from my place at the table, not sure whether I should be offended or not. “I am not a thing, I’ll have you know, and the only souls I’ve ever willingly absorbed are the people who have tried to kill me.”
Judy’s eyes got wide and the raven flashed in my head again. “Get out of my house,” she said as the blood drained out of her face.
“I’m not going to make a snack of your consciousness—”
“You’re not eating my damned soul,” she snapped back.
“You got that right,” I said, and started for the door, “I don’t want you shrewing in my head—”
“Get out!” she screamed. “OUT!”
I held up my hands to try and be peaceable and went for the door. She was a few steps behind me, giving me my distance. “I didn’t come here for a fight,” I tossed back over my shoulder.
Scott was trailing behind and started to say something. “She’s not—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Judy said, following us across the carpet. “Bringing a soul eater into my house. I oughta—”
“What you oughta do is watch your mouth,” I said, stopping before I turned the handle. “I’ve eaten Odin-types before.” I fixed her with a sweet smile and turned on my heel. Scott just missed getting the door slammed on him as we stepped out into the cold of winter.
Chapter 15
“I’m so sorry she treated you that way,” Scott said as we pulled out of the driveway. I was in the driver’s seat this time, and he didn’t say a word as we started back down the road.
“I’d heard metas hated succubi and incubi,” I said. “I hadn’t really ever experienced it until now.”
“Yeah,” Scott said as the car went slowly down the drive toward the edge of the trailer park, “it’s not subtle. You see it a lot in cloisters. Incubi and succubi are kind of like the bogeyman for meta kids.”
“Nice,” I said, not really feeling all that pleased about it. I reached up and put the tip of my right-hand glove’s middle finger in my mouth, and started to pull it off with my teeth, one finger at a time.
“Don’t take it too hard,” Scott said, and I could see the tentativeness in his posture toward me. “It’s a backward view, and it’s fading.”
“Not like there are a ton of my kind still out there, even,” I said, looking at the windshield wipers as they squeaked, sweeping powdered accumulation from the glass. I started on the second glove, biting on the leather as I removed it and then tossed it on the center console.
“No,” he said. “There really aren’t.” He waited just a minute. “Is there a reason you’re taking your gloves off? Are you about to off me?” There wasn’t a trace of fear in his words anywhere.
“Off you?” I asked, and sent him a sidelong glance. “According to your aunt, it’s more like I’d be getting you off—without the gloves, I guess, because you’re super dumb and want to die for a kinky thrill. No, I’m not about to ‘off’ you, I just don’t like driving with gloves on.” I looked back out the windshield and hit the brakes, hard, as a shadowy figure dashed out into the road from behind the last trailer in the line. The figure was small and wearing a black hoodie. The car went into a subtle fishtail, the back end going left about forty-five degrees before I managed to bring it to a stop. “Way to almost get yourself killed, kid,” I muttered, my hands white-knuckling the steering wheel. The headlights illuminated a boy, around twelve or thirteen, peering out at us, hands buried deep in his pockets.