“Excellent. I’ll be whipping up some margaritas. Cinco de Mayo isn’t much of a holiday in Mexico, but any excuse to drink margaritas and blast Maná songs is just fine by me.” She gave me a look that told me she was going to say something she wasn’t sure I was going to like. Though she’d only been a constant in my life for the last three months, I knew the woman well enough to read her expressions by now.
I shoved my new cell phone into my back pocket and prepared myself.
“Kinda thought you might be spending the evening at Ronan’s Pub. Aren’t you two … together?”
That was the question, wasn’t it?
We’d slept together a month ago, albeit platonically, had a heavy petting session in the park, and generally lusted after each other like teenagers at their first prom. When I went missing for a day last month, he’d been panicked, according to Ida. He’d called to check on me for a couple of days after I moved in, and we’d made loose plans to have dinner, but those plans never materialized and, though he texted me goodnight every night, we hadn’t actually spoken in a week.
“Now why would I want to drive into La Paloma for margaritas when I can get them here?” I asked, deflecting the question.
Gladys, bless her, let me get away with it. “Well, I, for one, am glad you’re coming. Wine nights on the porch are more fun with you there.”
“Let’s be honest. They’re more fun withCecilthere.”
She grinned, deftly flipping her racket from hand to hand. “That’s the truth. You know, I can’t understand a word that gnome says, and yet I know exactly what he means. Is that his magic?”
Was it? Cecil was fae, and the fae possessed magic that didn’t abide by any natural laws I was aware of, but it wasn’t as if I knew every form of magic, either.
“Maybe. Or it could be that you’re learning to read his hand gestures—gods help you, because they only get worse.”
“Not like I don’t use the same ones myself,” she said, her laugh husky and deep. “Especially in traffic.”
We chatted about the get-together for a few minutes more, and then she took off for Ida’s and I headed for my garden room.
The garden room stood in the shade of two flourishing kurrajong bottle trees, a monument to our love and respect for the earth. Mom and I’d constructed the shed walls with old windows we’d found at flea markets, garage sales, and junk heaps. The peeling paint, rusted window locks, and cracks in the glass had only added to the charm. The floor was a lovingly disorganized array of unglazed clay tiles fitted together just right.
Yet another of Mom’s mosaics.
Our sole concession to modernity was the tinted corrugated polycarbonate roof that let the right amount of light inside. The doors were propped open with grapefruit-sized rocks. Scaled to Cecil’s height, they were boulders, and yet, like Sisyphus, he rolled them in and out as the needs of the plants dictated.
He was a phenomenal gardener, a pretty good dancer, and an absolute terror of a work partner.
I stepped inside, my foot barely touching the floor before I was forced to drop the treats and berries and duck a flying spade aimed at my head.
“Stop throwing things,” I snapped. “Use your words, Cecil.”
Animated chittering, like an Alvin and the Chipmunks song on double speed showered over me. Then water showered over me.
“Turn off the hose. I have about five outfits total right now, and four of them are in the hamper.” I put my hand up as I powered forward, doing my best to block the water from hitting my face. “I donotwant to have to redo my makeup, either. Give me that.”
We wrestled with the hose over an herb planter, both getting drenched in the process.
“What’s your deal? Why are you so enraged today?” I thought about it then added, “Extraenraged.” Cecil was usually annoyed about something. “At me.”
Fennel stretched his lithe black body, shuddering from ears to tail. He planted himself between my feet and let out a very deep, “MEOW.”
Cecil instantly backed off. He scurried down the leg of the planter and up the leg of his worktable. At the top, he swiped off his purple hat and wrung it out over the side. I was fairly sure I’d never seen his bare head before, because I was shocked at the amount of thick white hair he had beneath that little hat. For some reason, I’d expected him to be bald. But no, his hair was the same color and density as the beard that bristled from beneath his bulbous nose and brushed his chubby bare toes.
“My jeans are soaked. Damn it.” I stomped out of the garden room. “The only thing I have left in the closet is a bathing suit and the dress I wore to Sy’s funeral.”
Beta wolf Sylvester Shaw had gone missing last month, only to be found—by Cecil, Fennel, and me—buried beneath the patio of one of his many lovers, Annabelle Rossi. Annabelle hadn’t actually killed him. He’d had a post-coital myocardial infarction. Still, she’d paid a steep price for attempting to hide his body after his heart attack.
Killing her was several steps too far for me, but I didn’t have any sway with the pack. In fact, I was Alpha Floyd’s enemy number one. Or two.
At least in the top five.
Sy had been a Pallás beta, which meant he was one of Floyd Pallás’s wolves. Not that Floyd gave two shits about his betas, but this had been about saving face. He couldn’t allow such an egregious and verypublicinsult to one of his pack go unpunished. The Smokethorn County shifter community would view it as weakness and the buzzards would start circling overhead.
