Destiny's Child (Kitsune series Book 3) (17 page)

Fran caught up to
Madison, and also sat on the fireplace bricks.  She said, “We’re getting extra credit for this.”

I smiled and teased them, “Glad my suffering can be of some use to you.”

Cassie flung herself down on the couch, while Mom sat on the ottoman by my feet.  She leaned in, cast a glance over to Tukka, and stage-whispered a question to me, “You said that … uh, creature was family.  He’s not your birth father is he?”

Cassie seemed to choke on her tongue, all but turning purple.  “What!  You think I’d sleep with … that?”

Tukka helped things along by huffing. 
C’mon, I have my standards
.

I said, “Uh, no, Tukka’s more like a best friend and adopted Dad, all-in-one.  He’s sort of made me an official pack member.”

Madison arched an eyebrow and didn’t quite keep a straight face as she said, “So, you’re not just an honorary bitch then?”

Fran leaned toward me.  “That’s so cool.  The best stuff happens to you.”

I just stared at her.  Fran’s a great friend, but sometimes—okay, all the time—she’s a little clueless.

Fenn said, “Can we all get over our issues and amazedness, and dish out the pizza already?”

“I just fed you,” I protested.

“I’m half kachina,” he said.  “Your Spam and beans was just a warm-up, not that it wasn’t good.”

Virgil handed him a box of pepperoni pizza.  The smell was a delightful tease.  I found myself growing hungry again.

Madison
gave Fenn a steely-eyed survey.  “Kachina, huh?  Native American star people.  We haven’t covered you in class yet.  What’s it like to be a myth?”

“Half kachina,” Fenn said.  “That makes me half a myth.  My mother was human, with bad taste in men.”

“Now that’s rude.” I knew that voice coming from the front door.  Father Vincentia, A.K.A the Trickster.  He’d tracked us down somehow.

The black suits whipped out their weapons.

Tukka growled.

So did Fenn.

I sure hope Wocky stays away.  There’s not enough pizza to go around as it is.

SIXTEEN

“Got mad running thru my dreams,

thru my veins, venom’s in my soul.

I need to break something quick,

just so you know.”

                                                       —Pissed

                    
                                      Elektra Blue

The party swept on with Tukka and his boys handling security outside, while Virgil and his black suits patrolled indoors.  Mom and Cassie took over hosting the party, making snackage, handing out drinks, hauling off empty pizza boxes.  Fenn stayed near his father,
the Father
.  Whatever the Trickster wanted, he wasn’t forth-coming to Fenn, or anyone, acting like this was all normal.  Ignoring Cassie, he took pains to ingratiate himself with my Mom, paying her a great deal of attention. 

Later, when she came by with a tray of drinks, I pulled her to a corner for a warning.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

“What do you mean?  I’m serving tea, cocoa, and coffee.”

“No, I mean hanging around with Father Vincentia.  You can’t trust that guy.”

“Now, he seems very nice, and he is a priest, from the
Vatican no less.”

Doesn’t mean they know who or what he really is.

She went on, “I understand he’s worked with your Mr. Langley before on security issues dealing with paranormal threats.  Both of them speak quite highly of you.  Why didn’t you tell me you were a consultant with the government?  I’m so very proud of you!”

This conversation is fighting me
.

I tried again.  “Mom, I know you’re hurting from things going wrong with Dad, but—”

“It’s not going to get any better.  It’s over between your dad and me, but that’s our problem, not yours.  He’s still your father.  No matter whom I rebound with, you can relax.”  She patted my arm.  “I’m not out to find you a new father.”

Good, I already have a new father.  A
shadow-man who wants to run my life
. 
And again, this isn’t where I want this conversation to go.

“Look, Mom—”

“We’ll talk later, I promise.  Let me finish handing out these drinks, okay?”

“Wait, this is important! I…”

But she was gone, and Fran and Madison were back from the hallway restroom near the kitchen.  They kept me pinned in the corner as Mom vanished.  Madison leaned in and whispered, “So, this Fenn guy, you and him doing it yet?”

I played innocent.  “Doing what?”

Fran leaned in, copying Madison as usual.  “The hot and heavy, cowgirl.  Have you ridden him into the sunset?  Done the nasty?  Gotten freaky?  Done the horizontal mambo?  Made that Coyote roll over and beg for more?”  Fran was going to blather on, but thankfully, Madison quelled her with a glare.

They weren’t going to leave it alone until they got a little dirt, so…  “We might have locked lips a couple times.”

Madison and Fran parted like the Red Sea; it was Cassie who appeared in that gap, not Moses.  And her hearing was kitsune sharp.  She draped her arms over my girlfriend’s shoulders and made a cage to contain me.  Cassie’s eyes were golden coins as she studied me.  “C’mon, Grace, spill—Fenn or Onyx?”

I felt my face flushing.  “C’mon, guys, don’t any of you have a life?  I can’t be the biggest event in town.”

Where were the bad guys, making yet another attempt on my life, when I needed them?

I was tired.  It had been a long day.  And though shape shifting had healed me up pretty good, there was a cost to my endurance.  “Look, I’m beat.  I really need to go and lay down.  Someone help me upstairs.”

Cassie’s eyes darkened.  “Oh, I’m sorry.  You’re right.  We can’t have you overdoing it.  Come on.”  She swept in and guided me across the room to the stairs that went from the front hallway up to the second floor.  I used the railing, finding out I was even more tired than I’d thought.  Instead of the bedroom I’d used last time, Cassie opened a door on the opposite side of the hall, so my windows looked out over the woods of the back property; trees, trees, and more trees.

Going in, I flipped a wall switch and discovered a rustic space with no pictures on the walls, no curtains on the two sets of windows, and an old, oval area rug done in sage and tan.  The walls were beige.  There was a brown door that I thought was probably a bathroom, and
further along the bedroom wall, a chocolate-colored dresser.  Between dresser and windows, against the far wall, were shelved headboards where two large twin beds that had been pushed together.  Old, pink floral sheets covered the bed, and a forest green blanket.  On the foot of the bed were a couple of overnight bags.  One was open.  A toothbrush kit and black jammies covered with red hearts had been unpacked, along with a crossbow and a couple of very sharp stakes.

“Wrong room,” I said.

Fran and Madison came in behind Cassie and me.  Fran called out, “Nope, it’s the right room.  Us girls are staying here.  It will be kinda like that sleepover you had at our school that time you escaped from here.”

“Cool,” I said.  “We can catch up on things.”

Cassie gave Madison—the responsible one—a firm stare.  “Have fun, but put Grace to bed and don’t keep her up too late.”

Madison
nodded gravely.  “I’ll see to it.”

Cassie started for the door.  I caught her arm, stalling her out.  She turned back to me with questions in her eyes.  I gave her a small peck on the cheek.  “G’night, Mom.”

She hugged me with murderous strength.  If I’d been human, I think she’d have broken me.  She let me go, shifting to a sunny, cavalier demeanor.  “We’ll be pulling out in the morning, before any of the ISIS hags remember we once used this place.”

“Even if they remember,” I said, “they know that we know they know, so they’ll probably figure we wouldn’t use it again.”

“Hah!” Fran said.  “Little do they know we’re exactly that stupid.”

“Speak for yourself,”
Madison said.

Cassie breezed out, pulling the door closed behind her.

Madison came over and dragged me to the side of the bed, making me sit down.  “You stay there until I get you a change of clothes, then we’ll toss you into the shower, then into bed.”

I fidgeted a little, feeling an ominous itch on my shoulder blades.  I tried to ignore the sensation, trying to will my body not to betray me by growing yet another set of baby moth wings.  Fran had thought they were cute last time, but I was getting tired of having them surgically removed by people Virgil knew.  The whole contaminated-by-moth-man-DNA thing had gotten old, weeks ago. 

I moved further down, turning so I could set my back against the headboard and watch the whole room.  I glanced at the windows with no shades or curtains.  The ceiling light made a mirror of the glass.  We couldn’t see out, but anyone—or anything—out in those trees could see in.  That bothered me.  Wocky was still flying around out there in Ryan’s hijacked corpse, and there were probably mothmen around from last time.  I’d gotten a lot of them shot up, so they no doubt held a grudge.  I mentioned this to the girls. 

Fran ran toward the hall door.  “I’ll get something to hang from the empty curtain rods.  Be back in a minute.”

Madison laid out a towel, crimson shorts and a pink tee that said BITE ME!

I stared at her choice.  “Bite me?  I thought you were against vampirism as a general rule.”

She flushed in embarrassment.  “My mom bought that for me on my last birthday.”

It spewed from my memory: what I knew about Elektra Blue, her mom, an underground legend of the indie music scene.  She wore LED bracelets, Christmas lights, black chains on occasion, and a lot of tinfoil accessories.  She sported a spiky indigo Mohawk down the middle of short-cropped, bleached-white hair.  Blue eye shadow, lipstick, and matching nail polish usually finished her look. I’d seen her on TV, and on a few magazines.  “Is she still, uh…”

“A thrall?  Yeah.  Claims the vamp snacking on her really loves her, that one of these days he’ll make it right by turning her.”

“Making her a—”

“Blood-sucking fiend, too?  Yeah.”  Madison sat on the foot of the bed, staring absently at the bathroom door.  “I wake up in the night sometimes, in a cold sweat from this dream where I’ve staked the both of them.  I can’t tell myself that it’s just a dream.  It might come down to offing them one day.  I’m a slayer.  It’s who I am, what I do.  It’s what Fran had to do to her mother.  I don’t think she ever really got over it.  It’s why she hates vamps so much.  If not for them, she’d have had a mom, a home, and a lot less guilt.”  Madison’s face turned hard as flint.  “Vamps got a lot to answer for.”  She fell back on the bed, turning her head to see me.  “I envy you.  You’ve got two moms that love you enough to stay in touch.  One is normal, and the other is cool in an I-can-totally-kick-your-ass kinda way.”

“Yeah, I get smothered a lot, but it’s nice.  It’s everyone
else
wanting to own me that gets old.”

“Hey, you ever want to throw Fenn to the side, I’ll take him out of the goodness of my heart.  I’m totally selfless that way.”

“I’ll, uh, keep it in mind.”  A funny thought occurred to me.  “Hey, I’ve got a demon-possessed mothman you can have.  I won’t even mind if you want to stake him two or three hundred times.”

“Yeah, Fenn was telling me about that.  He said you had some big plan for dealing with him if he didn’t take off that demon mark.  What was it?”

It was just like Madison to ask.  A master strategist, she was always adding to her field of expertise.

“Well, while Tukka had him pinned down and all, I was simply going to use my shadow-flame sword to cut out Ryan’s heart.  It would have bonded to Wocky’s immaterial one, two hearts for the price of one.  With Wocky’s heart held captive, I can enforce his good behavior.”    

Fran came back with a baby-blue sheet and some clothespins.  She got busy hanging the sheet over the windows, singing something under her breath. 

Madison
stiffened, snapping up into a sitting position.  She bounced off the bed and hurried to the bathroom door.  “I’ll get the shower going for you.”