Chester shrugs uncomfortably. “You wanted your friend back. I get that.”
I want my friends back, Smith. I didn’t see another way to make that happen.
Swallowing hard, Obie turns back to Ez’s scowl. “So do you thinkyou and Roma can manage that?” he asks, nodding at the incantation. “Make a counterspell for—for Kyle’s friend?”
“Probably,” Ez says, and unexpectedly, she fishes out her credit card, holding it blindly in Roma’s direction. “Hey, can you and Kyle get us some more churros con chocolate? I have a craving.”
“Oh!” Immediately, Chester pushes his last churro towards her. “You can have the rest of mine, if you want. I didn’t bite into it yet, so?—”
“That’s very sweet,” Ez says, “but I’m really just asking for a more tactful way to talk to Obie in private.”
Chester pauses. “Oh,” he repeats, sticking the churro into his cup of chocolate. “Um, okay.”
Sighing, Roma pushes herself to her feet. “Come on, Kyle,” she says, and with one last dubious glance at Obie and Ez, Chester follows her towards Churrería.
Ez waits until they’re out of earshot before speaking. “Okay, so what’sreallygoing on with that boyfriend of yours? He seems way too calm about all of this, and the fact that he already knows about your mind-hacking ability is downright concerning.”
Obie fights back a flinch. “Well, that just sort of slipped out while we were talking to his friend. Kyle wanted to know if I could look into his memories without his consent, so I… told him.”
“Yeah, but you see,” Ez argues, “you never even toldusthat, Obie. You always just said it was impossible. Plus, you just admitted that you would’ve straight-up murdered three humans if you wouldn’t have had to listen to JJ complain about it, and Kyle barely even blinked. There’s something up with him, man.”
Obie’s stomach lurches. “There… is,” he hedges, frantically weighing his options to assuage Ez’s suspicions. “Because—Ez, I’ve been on this planet for longer than I care to admit. You know that, right?”
Ez looks thrown. “Well, yeah. You’re so ridiculously old that you refuse to even tell us how old you are.”
“Right,” Obie says. “So I’ve met a lot of humans over the years. In fact, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I’ve metmillionsof humans over the course of my many millennia.”
“Okay?” Ez says, squinting at him. “What’s your point?”
“In light of that,” Obie says, “do you really think I’d be dating the rando from the bowling alley if he wasn’t at least alittleunhinged?”
Ez opens and closes her mouth a few times. “Huh,” she says at last.
“And he already knows all of the most off-putting facts about me because I’ve been actively trying to scare him away,” Obie adds. “If he can’t handle me at my ‘violence is always the answer,’ then he doesn’t deserve me at my ‘let me pay off your apartment for you,’ right? But he refuses to be intimidated. He is, as the kids say these days, matching my freak. So he’s been getting a lot of the uncensored Obadiah Smith experience.”
Actually, Obie realizes, that last part is true. Since Chester already knows that Obie is Nostringvadha—and since Obie doesn’t really care whether the hunter likes him or not—he hasn’t been filtering himself at all around Chester.
In a sense, Chester really does know Obie better than even his friends do. The realization sends a strange feeling snaking through his belly.
Ez nods slowly. “So did you two really have a boring vanilla meet cute? Or was it a bit more, ah, unhinged than you let on?”
Obie snorts out a laugh. “Well, he came out swinging by asking what I knew about binding spells in the context of the human BDSM scene before even telling me his name, so I suppose that counts for something.”
Ez grins back at him. “Oh, he’s akeeper.Take care of him, yeah?The rest of us really do like him. We’d love to see him at family get-togethers more often.”
“You will,” Obie promises.
But, Obie realizes as Ez catches Roma’s attention and impatiently waves their humans back over, that’s not quite true. Once the binding spell is gone, Boyfriend Kyle will cease to exist.
Obie doesn’t want to admit that the thought bothers him far more than it should.
16
Realizing that an ancient and powerful demon god is also just, like, a dude who pays taxes is probably the most surreal experience of Chester’s life. “You have todocumentit?”
Obie throws Chester a disgruntled look from his current vantage point underneath a tenant’s kitchen sink. “I’m a landlord, puppy. Of course I have to document repair work. I have to document pretty much everything.”
Chester rolls his eyes, not that Obie is paying attention. Apparently, after over three weeks of stalwartly keeping Chester away from most aspects of his personal life, Obie finally had to admit defeat and bring Chester along to run some errands around Redwater. Talking with realtors, depositing checks, doing maintenance and repair work?—
