Night Shift(85)

“I don’t like to think about a god looking at me and judging me.”

“I don’t think anyone enjoys that idea. The love part, yes, but the being-found-wanting part . . . we’re all worried about that.”

Diederik gave Quinn a startled look, as if he’d supposed his father wouldn’t venture into such deep waters. “Not you,” he said. “Not you, Dad.”

Quinn laughed and put his arm around Diederik’s shoulders. They’d been standing outside the hotel, and now they went in. Marina, behind the desk, smiled at Diederik in a very womanly way, and Quinn tried not to sigh. He’d had The Talk with Diederik when Diederik was a little tyke, because he’d known all too soon Diederik would need to know the facts. Diederik was good-natured and charming, and also outstandingly handsome, but there was a touch of feral about him that made the boy truly magnetic.

Quinn didn’t think he himself had ever been as attractive as his son, so he was really proud of Diederik’s lack of conceit. That was where the Rev had proved to be a good guardian. Vanity didn’t stand a chance with the Rev around.

Quinn ran up the stairs to his room, as Diederik and Marina exchanged a few words before Diederik went back to his job of dusting, vacuuming, and mopping the lobby and the bathroom off of it.

The apocalypse might be coming, but work had to go on. Quinn called up the diagram of the venue of the next wedding he was hired to produce, in this case a true production—almost a three-ring circus, he thought. Velda and Ramon, both true shapeshifters, would be tying the knot in two weeks.

He paused for a moment when he pictured the bride and groom. He wondered if he’d ever get to have his own conventional marriage. His mate, Tijgerin, hadn’t survived and his mother, too, was dead; they’d been the only two full-blooded female weretigers he’d ever known. But he had a son, which was all he could ask for. Quinn decided he’d be glad to find a woman of any heritage.

I’m a little old to be making such a resolution, he thought. But he was smiling. It was doable.





29





Nothing the next day went as planned. Nothing.

While the inhabitants of Midnight were preparing themselves for one crisis, which would fall in one more day, another presented itself without any of them seeing it coming—even Manfred, the psychic.

Just at eight o’clock in the morning, a big vehicle rumbled into town from the east. Joe and Chuy were running the water (the shower and the sink respectively), and they didn’t hear the sound as anything special. It roused Teacher, though, because he’d driven a vehicle that sounded like that at one point in his life. He pulled on his shoes and hurried out of his trailer.

No one in the hotel, except the man who lived in the front room overlooking the pawnshop, gave it a second’s thought. And he only thought how out of place it seemed.

The rumble gradually subsided into silence in front of Midnight Pawn. Lemuel’s shift was over and Bobo hadn’t come down yet, so no one came out of the shop to see what was happening.

“This vehicle is an abomination,” the Rev whispered, when he heard the noise of the motor. He was kneeling in prayer before the bare altar in his church.

The Rev liked to start the day with prayer. Diederik lived with the Rev, so his attendance was obligatory, and that morning Quinn had joined them, too. The Rev had spent the previous day reducing a chunk of hawthorn tree to ash, and Quinn had to put the ash in a bucket. But all that was on hold as the Rev cut short his prayer and the three men came out of the church to look at the abomination.

“That’s a stretch Hummer,” Quinn told Diederik, who had never seen one before. Since Quinn was an event planner, he was well versed in ostentatious vehicles.

Diederik was impressed, but Quinn saw that the Rev was having a bad reaction to the Hummer. The older man’s eyes went golden. He was sensing a threat, so his tiger was getting close to the surface. At his age, the Rev could change any time he wanted, as could Quinn. But Diederik still had to have the moon’s help, so if it came to fighting . . . Quinn laid his hand on his son’s shoulder. “You have a key, I think. Run. Wake Olivia. Tell Bobo to get out of the shop. Hurry.”

Diederik streaked across the road to unlock the side door of the pawnshop. He disappeared inside. Standing on that landing, he could yell upstairs for Bobo and downstairs for Olivia.

There were men getting out of the Hummer, now, men as unlike the Rev and himself as it was possible to get. They wore suits but with gun belts underneath. They had rifles in their hands. They looked in all directions. They might as well have had “HIGH-CLASS HOODS” tattooed on their foreheads. There were five of them, plus the driver, who got out but remained by the vehicle.