Speed of Light (15 page)

“We need to get you crutches, don’t we?” I suggested, already knowing she’d shoot me down. Juliet didn’t like relying on anyone, let alone anything.

“It’s not that bad. Nothing a little chocolate frozen custard with red grapes can’t fix.” She offered a gentle smile that apologized for not trusting me more.

“I’ll run down and get a pint from Auntie Em’s.” Taking a custard order seemed the least I could do.

After taking my hand, Juliet followed me down the hall toward the living room. It felt as though she were preparing
herself for another blow, sinking deeper into her center away from the rough edges life kept brushing against her.

Fara stopped midsentence as we entered the room. I was struck by the sight of Mini sitting in Fara’s lap and Custos licking her face.
Okay, I get it. She’s good
.

I waited to move nearer to Tens until Juliet dropped my hand and stepped toward Fara.

Closing the distance, Fara reached into a pocket in her skirt and held out a cellophane baggy. “I brought you dark-chocolate-covered raisins. Sorry, they’re a little melty.”

Juliet relaxed. “These are my favorite.”

Fara nodded and I think blushed. All the adults stared with smiles that spoke of relief, of resolution.

“Who else wants frozen custard?” I asked loudly, making a big display of taking orders, trying to give Juliet and Fara a moment to adjust to each other without an audience.

Tens followed my lead, tucking hair behind my ears as we walked down Main. “What do you think?”

“She’s not what I wanted for Juliet,” I answered honestly.

He guffawed. “Like I was what you wanted?”

“Good point.” We’d danced and crackled around each other like a match put to kindling.

Tens and I returned with cold bags and individually dished custard from down the street.

Fara was finishing a story about her upbringing. “I’ve been trained my whole life for this job. I expected it to happen later, though, when I was older and my father
finished teaching—” She broke off, glancing down at her hands.

I handed her a dish of chocolate.

She placed a dainty spoonful in her mouth and her eyes widened. “What is this? It’s better than iced cream.”

“Frozen custard—the secret is in the recipe,” Rumi answered her. “Not the same thing as ice cream; it’s our mana from heaven in the summers.”

She nodded, digging deeper into the cup.

Juliet didn’t touch hers but watched it melt.

“So it’s your family’s business? Being Protectors?” I asked.

“Yeah, a calling I think, in blood?”

“It’s in your blood?” I clarified.

She nodded, smothering a yawn with a quick apology.
It is late
.

“How long have you been training? How will you protect Juliet?” Tony asked.

“Can you read her thoughts like Tens is supposed to do with Meridian?” Rumi asked.

“What about Nocti? Have you met any of them? Killed them?” Nelli added.

“How do we know we can trust you?” Tony added.

They all talked over each other.

Fara put her custard down and inhaled. “I cannot prove I am who I say I am. But I am here, and if you ask me to leave, I will sleep on that bench out there. I will be here every day. I will be respectful but I will know where Juliet is at all times. My father swore on Zoroaster,
as did his father, and his father back forever. We give our lives to Dey, the Creator. Everything I am is here, in this life, to help Juliet be her full self. My life is Light’s. I am Haji Firuz on Earth. I answer to no one but Light, and I will fight the Dark, with or without your blessings. But I would rather we be friends.” She looked each one of us in the eyes as she spoke. Sincerity vibrated off each word. “I am sorry my father’s Amordad is not here to introduce me to you and make right.”

“Amordad?” I asked.

She glanced at me, her brow furrowed. “You say Fenestra.”

I nodded. “Yes.”

As if the discussion was over, Juliet stood. “I trust you. I put your things in the guest room. You must be tired.”

With that, the conversation was truly over. Juliet took control and even when Tony opened his mouth, she limped past him, dismissing us.

Fara hesitated.

“If you are not who you say you are, my vows to God will not protect you from harm. I will not lose her again.” Tony waved a hand in Juliet’s direction.

“We understand each other,” Fara said, and disappeared down the hallway.

We left the van in Tony’s parking lot, preferring to walk home and make sure there was no one watching for us at Helios. No vandals, no news crews spilling over from the story at Rumi’s studio following leads to us. No Nocti that we saw.

“You think they’ll be okay?” I asked Tens, swinging our hands.

We passed a statue of a mother with a stroller and I swore her eyes followed us. As callous as it might sound, I preferred homeless people to the statues. At least the homeless smiled back occasionally when I handed them coffee and a hot dog. The statues seemed to watch everything and judge.

“Given enough time and space, she’ll be fine. Juliet’s wounded, Merry. It’s going to take her a long time to heal.”

“I know. I don’t know how to help her.”
I refuse to believe it’s too late
.

“You can’t. You have to let her ask. Maybe Fara will get through to her.”

“Custos stayed at Tony’s. Aren’t you a little jealous?”

“Jealous?” He stopped and tipped his head in question.

“She’s yours,” I insisted.

“Oh no, I learned a long time ago that I was
hers
, and only when she wanted me. She’s of the Creators, Supergirl. She comes and goes as she pleases. Makes sense she’d stay with Fara. Juliet knows her, trusts her. She’s going to buffer as long as she needs to.”

“That’s very wise of you.” I smiled up at him.

“Oh, I’m very wise. You should listen to me more often.” He grinned, leaning down to kiss me.

“I should, should I?” I said against his lips before melting into his embrace.

“Mmm-hmm.”

No one had staked out the cottage. The door was secure and Tens’s special-ops double check of a single dog hair across the threshold was intact as well.

He flopped onto the bed and held up his feet. “Remove my boots?”

I snorted back a laugh. “Let me consider it … yeah, no.”

“You wear me out,” he sighed.

“That’s cuz you’re so old.” I flopped down next to him.

“Ouch.”

“You’ll be how old on your birthday?”

“Twenty, and you know it.” Tens leaned over and unlaced his boots, toeing them off.

“Your feet stink.” I wrinkled my nose playfully.

“Really?” His eyes twinkled.

I didn’t like his expression. “No. No. No.” I backpedaled. Hard. “Roses? I smell roses.”

Tens grabbed me and tossed me down on the bed. “My feet stink, huh?”

“Kisses? I’ll give you kisses?” I tried to pucker my lips and meet his.

Instead, he belched in my face.

I gagged. “Lordy, hell.”

He rolled over onto his side, laughing so hard I thought he might hurt himself. “My feet don’t smell so bad now, do they?”

Boys
.

N
elli’s apartment was really the old carriage house to an estate in a very high-end part of town. The type of neighborhood that housed professional athletes, television personalities, and heiresses. The private drive was on the back side of the property, and I couldn’t even see the main house from her living room.

Tens dropped me off on his way to speak with Gus and track down the student photographer.

I hadn’t been to Nelli’s in weeks and gawked at what used to be a neat and tidy living area. If the tornado that went through picked up all of the households in February, it deposited all their papers here. The smell of
mildew and dust was overpowering.
What fresh disaster is this?

“What happened in here?”

Nelli’s eyes were red and swollen. “Here, take one of these allergy pills. They help.” She held out a glass of water and a bottle of over-the-counter medication as I walked in. “I know it’s not a very elegant offering, but trust me, you’d rather have that than crackers and cheese.”

I swallowed a pill because my throat scratched immediately. Perfect.

Nelli opened windows. “Can you turn those air cleaners on? Bales dropped them by last night when he unloaded the rest of the boxes from the storage unit.”

“Sure.” I found the right switches and the cool rush of air ruffled file folders, notepaper, and sticky notes.

“It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it,” Nelli said. “When I got home last night, it clicked for me. I’ve been looking for a piece of paper I’m sure had Howie’s name on it and several others, including Argy. There was a photograph attached. It’s got to be here. Somewhere.” Hysteria and exhaustion lifted her voice. “It’s got to. I think it’s a piece of Juliet’s past.”

She’s one minute from a breakdown
.

“We’ll find it. Where should I start?”

She pointed to different sections of the room. “Decades are split up, then years between them. Anything that is patient files and not kid related goes to the dining room. Yes, it looks as bad as this. Why don’t you start over by the fireplace?”

“Sure.” I wasn’t convinced the organizational system worked.

Nelli switched on the television. “Will it bother you if we watch race practice? Uncle Gus got me hooked when I was a kid.”

“No, it’s fine.” I didn’t realize that the world revolved around a left-turn axis until the calendar hit May and the semis hauled in cars. Snazzy buses brought in teams and drivers. Everything in town became about the Indianapolis 500 race.
Black and white
. With a teasing smile, I asked, “So, how is Bales?”

Nelli’s blush started in blotchy red at her collarbones and moved north up to her plump cheeks. “He’s amazing.”

“I think he likes you. A lot.” I picked up another pile.
Patient. Patient. Kid
.

“I like him. I think I love him.” Nelli ducked her head and focused intently. “But I need to see this through. Make it right before I can move on.” She waved her hand.

“Nelli, you know you can’t make it right, don’t you?” I looked around the room. “There’s no logic to Nocti evil. They have no boundaries. You didn’t do this.”

“I know, but my office should have caught on sooner. Forty years, Meridian. Forty!”

“And you’ve worked there how long?”

“Four.”

“Uh-huh. And you’ve known about us for three months? You didn’t let kids go there, right? Didn’t send the elderly there?”

She put down a stack and looked at me squarely, seriously. “I don’t want to alarm you. But there is no other explanation for all of this.” She spread her hands to encompass the room.

“For goodness’ sake, what are you talking about?” I half expected the CIA to come storming in.

“There had to be someone in the children’s services office who knew. Someone on the inside who helped. Maybe more than one person. This is a long line of cases.”

I nodded. “It makes sense. Maybe several? This is a lot of years of no one noticing, which means they were really good at hiding.”

“Or there were lots of people in on it and they didn’t have to hide.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe that most people would let this go on. Do you?” Watching how torn up Nelli was about this abuse of power, I couldn’t imagine the majority of people feeling differently.

“You can’t imagine the things I’ve seen. People in my job have to let a lot of things that bother us go. If we don’t add up the little bits and take stock occasionally? Refocus our energies? I can see blind eyes being turned.”

“That’s sad.”

“Sad is my job on a daily basis. It’s not the cartoon channel.”

I nodded. “But you make a difference, right?”

“Not to any of these kids.” Nelli spread her arms wide and brushed the tops of the piles with her fingertips.

“You can’t think of it that way.” I shook my head.

“Hard not to.”

“So who helped the Nocti? Do you have any theories?”

“I don’t know. I need to dig, but I wanted to make sure you were okay with me pursuing it.”

It could be dangerous
. Tens’s voice echoed in my head. He’d tell her no.

“That’s standard too. Hard to take children away from a drug dealer and not see a gun or two.”

I shuddered. “Delightful.”

“Nah, mostly it’s boring paperwork.” She smiled.

I’m not sure I believed her, but maybe she needed me to. “Bales has your back, right?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know everything. Not the supernatural stuff, not about you or the Nocti.”

“Does he love you?”
I see it in his eyes when he thinks you’re not watching, but do you know?

“Maybe.”

“Then we’ll need to tell him. So he knows what he’s up against. It’s not fair to keep him in the dark.”

“You’d let me share?” Nelli’s eyes watered.

“Of course.” At this point, we needed all hands on deck. Especially if Ms. Asura had an alliance of her own and was moving toward us again. “You don’t have to do this—to try to unravel who the Nocti are or figure out which children were Fenestra. You can give us the papers and we can take over.”

“This is my job.” She shook her head. “Besides, it’s the
moral right. My department is there to rescue kids; someone failed them, so now it’s my turn to see it through. But I don’t know who to trust.”

“Let’s start with a list. Who’s been in the office longest?”

For the next several hours, we made a list of everyone who was in Nelli’s department that she knew and what she knew about them. We agreed she’d tell Bales, and if we needed to have more of a discussion, we would.

When her cell rang, it was her boss. “Okay, yes. A funeral? That’s a good idea. Yes, okay, I’ll let you know. I’ll be down shortly.”

While Nelli talked, I watched cars on the TV turn around the track at furious speeds. One at a time, the cars spun; then the screen filled with men and women wearing headsets and jumpsuits directing the action. There were bright colors, lots of sponsor names, and logos. But other than recognizing a few of those, I really had no idea what I was watching.
This is a sport?