It Wasn't Always Like This (27 page)

Charlie Ryan had talent when it came to taking care of wild things. He had, after all, been at it for a very long time. So the tribal council had given him a job.

It was later in the evening than he normally worked, but the bird had come recently to the refuge, and Charlie was the one who best knew what to do with it. He was, in any case, feeling sentimental. He’d been here in this place up past Oklahoma City for three years, and it was almost time to move on. The eternal problem of his existence.

A tiny town, with one stoplight and two restaurants, one a Mexican café, the other a diner that doubled as a washateria on the other side. The café had a bar—two beers on tap—and so that’s where he went.

He ordered a Budweiser. He was drinking it around 10:30
P.M
. when he turned his attention to the ancient television sagging from the ceiling. A story from down in Texas (Dallas was only four hours south) had made one of the national news channels. A murder case. And a kidnapping. There’d been a spate of those, he knew. But hadn’t there always been? Charlie never ceased to wonder at the twenty-four-hour news cycle. So much repetition and invention of crisis where only a minor bobble really existed.

He sipped the Bud and munched a chip or two from the bowl the bartender—her name was Amy, and she lived a few miles up the road with her little boy Sammy—had set in front of him.

“You want to order some food?” Amy asked him. “Before the kitchen closes?”

He didn’t answer her. In fact, the glass slipped from his hand and hit the bar with a clunk, tipping over and spilling the last of the beer onto the rough wooden surface.

Unless he was mistaken, the news piece showed Emma O’Neill, looking as she always had, walking out of some hospital, where she had been taken after helping rescue a girl who’d been kidnapped. There was more to the story, but he missed it.

Charlie was already up and running, grabbing his keys, cranking the ignition in his pickup, heading for Dallas. Hands on the wheel, eyes on the horizon, he felt the ties of all the things that had held him earthbound for so long loosening.

Driving toward Emma—it had to be Emma—felt like f lying.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Dallas, Texas

Present

Peter Mondragon was packing up his truck, a stubborn man who insisted that he was just f ine with one good arm. Fortunately, Emma O’Neill traveled light, almost as light as he did. He was glad she was coming back to Albuquerque with him. It might not be the life she wanted, but it was a good place, a solid city at the edge of the mountains—not as green or lush as some places, but f ine enough.

He was tired of police work—of the politics and the inf ighting. If he hung up his own PI shingle, she could partner with him. They made a damn good team. He just needed to remember not to act all fatherly with her. Emma O’Neill needed a business partner, not a parent.

He tossed his duffel bag into the back, wincing as the motion tugged at his dislocated shoulder even though he was using the other arm, and laughed aloud. Emma was decades older than he was. But in this business, it was good to have someone watching out for you. For both of them.

Emma hadn’t explained why she’d suddenly changed her mind about coming with him, but he suspected she’d tell him eventually. That’s how it was between them. Keeping Emma O’Neill’s secrets meant not pushing until she was ready.

If he’d been a drinking man still, he’d have cracked open a beer and toasted to new beginnings. But Pete hadn’t been a drinking man in over a decade. Not since he’d screwed up his marriage and sunk his career back in San Francisco and lit out for the desert and the mountains and the clear-headedness that came with taking things one day at a time.

He’d told Emma most of it. Hadn’t told her what he’d been contemplating right before he worked that murder case and she somehow appeared, and then there they were, elbow to elbow in clues. Things had changed after that.

He knew she thought she had never made a difference, that her long tenure—he still had trouble wrapping his brain around it sometimes, even though he knew it was God’s absolute truth—had produced nothing of lasting value. That’s why he’d told her what he had earlier today.

He didn’t know if it would stick in that thick O’Neill skull. But it might. Time would tell. She’d be okay if no more crazy cults went after her and tried to burn her to death or kidnapped her friends and injected them with poison and diseases or whatever other crap they came up with. One thing was for sure: Emma O’Neill was like a lightning rod for weirdness, for the dark things that most people never saw. But Pete imagined that came with immortal territory.

And then he laughed again that he had a life in which that sentence was even possible.

Would she ever f ind this Charlie Ryan? It seemed impossible at this point. A hundred years! Pete couldn’t imagine searching for his ex-wife for a hundred years. But his own failings aside, Shawna had not been the love of the ages. He had loved her, yes. She had, as far as he knew, loved him. But to search for her for a century? He’d have to have his own thick head examined.

But Emma, well, that was another story. There was no one else like Emma O’Neill. Maybe that was a good thing.

As for this fountain thing, he wasn’t sure what to make of that, either. If Emma said it still existed somewhere, then he believed her. Would he partake of it if she discovered its location during his lifetime? He had no damn idea. But if Pete had learned one thing since meeting Emma, it was that stranger things had happened. Would continue to happen. And somehow he was smack in the middle of them.

He had thought, once upon a time, that as a cop he’d seen everything. Well, that was a damn lie, now, wasn’t it?

This is what Pete Mondragon was contemplating as he locked up the Tundra and turned to see a mud-streaked blue Ford F-150, riding slowly down Emma’s street, like maybe the driver was looking for an address.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Dallas, Texas

Present

Emma hadn’t found the Fountain of Youth again. She hadn’t gotten rid of the pesky problem known as Kingsley Lloyd or slain the dragon known as the Church of Light, the crazy cult that was somehow also immortal in its own way. She’d saved a life and been too late to save some others
.
People she loved with all her heart were dead, and she had never stopped feeling like she should have been able to stop it. In a few minutes she would climb into Pete’s oversized truck and head back to New Mexico.

Emma O’Neill had done many things over many decades. Sometimes she felt she could barely remember it all. Much of it had been sad. An equal amount hadn’t. Her hair was still long and brown and wavy. Her eyes were still bright. Her skin f lawless. She was still impatient and ever on the move. She loved art and poetry and music. She was a dreamer and pragmatist. She liked vanilla cake with lemon f illing and roast chicken and green chile cheeseburgers and pancakes and ridiculously spicy Fritos. She had a huge heart and a quick mind.

Mostly she loved a boy named Charlie Ryan for whom she would never stop searching. And now her heart was breaking—no it
was
broken, shattered—because what had all that been for?

“It could be our f irst order of business if you want,” Pete had said. “Looking for him again.” He’d swallowed the last bite of glazed donut he’d brought back when he went out to gas up the truck, washing it down with a huge gulp of coffee. If they did become partners, Emma decided, she’d have to rethink their eating habits. But no, she told him, f inding Charlie Ryan would not be part of the deal.

She was folding clothes into a small suitcase.
I’m really doing this
, she thought. She had said her goodbyes to Coral and Hugo, telling them she was going to be working with Pete. She would call, she promised, and at least for a while, she knew she would. Coral would recover, but slowly and maybe not in all ways. Emma felt responsible for that, too.

But she told herself to press forward.

It felt strange, making a move to be
with someone rather than hiding. The picture of Charlie was tucked in this case, beneath her clothes. When she got settled in New Mexico, when she had her own place again, she’d f ind a spot for it. A frame, she decided. Like displaying the pocket watch—well, that had almost turned out disastrous—it was a big step, putting something that precious out in the open where she could look at it every day. Doing more than just committing it to memory.

But why the hell not? Whatever Lloyd’s reason in giving it to her, she would ignore that and make it her own. If Emma O’Neill couldn’t yet win the war, she would at least win a battle or two.

“Mondragon and O’Neill,” Pete had said, still pondering their new business. “Alpha order.”

“O’Neill and Mondragon,” she countered. “Age order.”

He’d laughed hard enough that she’d had to help him readjust his blue sling.

Now the sun was coming up. It was just before seven in the morning.

Emma zipped the lid on her suitcase, picked it up and carried it to the door.
One more sweep
, she thought. Make sure she didn’t miss anything. And then her gaze caught the mess on the kitchen counter, strewn with Styrofoam coffee cups and doughnut crumbs.

She set down the suitcase and went to f ind a sponge. She was wiping the counter when she heard the knock.

“It’s open,” she said, then realized it probably wasn’t. Pete had no key.

“You know you’re a pain in the—”

The door swung open.

Charlie stood on the other side, very still, waiting, as was his way. His hair was a wild thatch on his head. His skin was tawny and smooth. He was tall and slender, his arms muscled, his jaw neatly def ined. His eyes were a deeper brown than anyone else’s.

“Emma,” said Charlie Ryan.

The sponge dropped from her hand.

“Charlie,” Emma said, and his name on her tongue sounded both foreign and familiar. She swallowed, feeling those two syllables rush through her.
Charlie. Charlie.
He was in her heart and veins and blood. He always had been, she realized. She had never lost him, not really.

He was
alive.
He was
here.
He wasn’t dead.

“How?” She could barely form the question. He told her brief ly. He’d tell her more later. There was time.
So much time.

“I tried to f ind you,” Emma said.

“Me, too,” he said. “I was so stupid, Em, to leave you. I—”

“Shh,” she whispered. She had forgiven him long ago. Now she forgave herself.

He looked at her.

“I became a private investigator,” she said, as if that could explain a century of loss.

But he smiled. Not with his mouth, but with his eyes, with that sparkle nobody ever saw but her. “And I became—”

“A pilot,” Emma f inished with him.

They were f lying then, both of them, the years and the sadness and the endless places rushing below them, as they soared above it all. Alligators and swamps and Fountains of Youth and Juan Ponce de León, dead by an arrow. Long-dead parents and siblings and a man named Glen Walters who tried and failed to destroy the threads that held them together. Murdered girls and one named Coral, alive if just barely, because Emma refused to give up. A happy boy named Hugo Alvarez. A huckster named Kingsley Lloyd who had given them a gift they never wanted and still barely understood. The people who had come and gone as Emma had traveled and hoped and wondered and lived. Sylvie Parsons in Chicago. A boy named Aaron Tinsley. Poor Elodie Callahan, whom Emma couldn’t save. Pocket watches (beautiful and heavy) and hawks and constellations. Family. A baby brother Emma missed so much sometimes it was often hard to breathe. Even now. Even after so very, very long. A friend named Pete Mondragon, true as could be.

It rushed by them and through them, years and hours and minutes and seconds.

You never knew what was coming in this world, not really. That was the true mystery, the true wonder. You just hung on and hoped for the best.

This boy. This boy.

Charlie stepped over the threshold, and he was smiling with his mouth now, and every false move, every empty hope, every reckless mistake—there had been so many—faded. Not gone, because these were the things that had led them here, the things that had changed them inexorably even as they remained the same.

Oh,
thought Emma.
This is why. Because now. Because us.

It wasn’t what she expected. Not at all.

Her long-bruised heart swelled.
This boy. This man. This return.