Child, page 2
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
He leaned back on the bench, just taking in the wash of color of the impressionist art in front of them. Jason would have berated him ceaselessly if he had been there. His brother would have been bored senseless three hours ago, pleading to go. Find something to kill, and if not that, at least find something to eat. They would have gone to some bar where the special was pork or beef on bread, and Jason would have picked up either the waitress or the bartender and left Sam there alone.
Sometimes defending Jason was hard.
“I need to think about it,” Sam said.
“I know,” Samantha answered. “I didn’t mean to surprise you with it like that. I just didn’t know how else to bring it up.”
He nodded.
He understood her point. Rangers worked alone, too, for all of the same reasons Samantha had. The Seekers would only put Rangers together into pairs or more when the power or sheer numbers of their quarry required it. Sam and Jason had only been able to work together the way they had because everyone discounted Sam’s contribution to the work and because no one had ever had the heart or guts to tell them otherwise.
It shouldn’t have surprised him that Samantha would be willing to say it if she meant it, but it still shocked him that she was willing to mean it. Losing Jason had devastated Samantha almost as much as it had Sam.
“The sign said they had gardens outside,” Samantha said. “You want to go walk?”
He nodded.
“Yeah. Let’s go walk.”
<><><>
They meandered their way across the country, stopping in Denver and then a couple of cities up in the mountains where, once the snow came, very rich people would pay very brave pilots to fly them in to ski. For now, the resorts were empty, and Sam and Samantha spent days lounging in the solid-wood rentals, swimming in their heated pools, and hiking mountain trails. They didn’t talk about Jason again, but rather they swapped stories. Even after all this time, they still had stories to tell. They talked about demons and ghosts and witches and sorcerers, revisiting some of the things they’d done together and talking about what had gone right and what had gone wrong. They talked about Doris and Arthur and their three kids. They talked about math and physics and art. Samantha had an amazing mind, and Sam was ever amazed at how in love with it he was.
She was still cagey with him at night. He tried not to do anything to suggest he was impatient, but he couldn’t say anything to comfort her because even to say anything demonstrated he was thinking about sex.
And dammit, he thought about it all the time.
Samantha was hot. Even - especially - in her comfortable, woodsy clothes, the hiking boots and jeans and flannel or fleece, he wanted her against him. In her New York we-styled clothes, the stuff Carter had made her wear just to be allowed to go out with him at night, she was a smoking hot vixen in black leather and mesh, but her country-girl clothes were so much more vulnerable and like a secret that only he knew. And they were so, so much easier to get off.
It had been a long time since Caroline. And the weirdness while Jason had been gone hadn’t made anything better. He wanted a woman’s body against his, skin on skin, sweat on sweat, and Samantha could see it in his face. It shamed him, and she was suddenly at arm’s length, head turning away, anything to not make eye contact, not be touched.
Twice, up in the mountains, she had made an effort, once in a swimming pool with a stunning view of the ski slopes and one evening as they were laying on the couch watching a movie. Her mouth had found his, her body stretched along his, but as his fingers found their way into her clothing, she’d jerked, taking space, pulling her legs up against her body, and became distant for the rest of the night.
It hadn’t been like this before. She’d been comfortable around him for a long time, and there had been plenty of heat between them since they had discovered that the angeltongue magic in her hair pin had given them enough distance to be safe together.
It was that they were married now.
There were expectations, and neither of them had put them there. It wasn’t their fault. And that was what was keeping them from talking about it. He couldn’t apologize, because there was nothing to apologize for. And she couldn’t ask him to stop doing anything he was doing, because he wasn’t doing anything. Nothing new, anyway. He’d wanted her for a long time. That was hardly a secret.
Their third week up in the mountains, fully three months after the wedding, he came into the bedroom to find that she’d drawn the curtains and moved the bookcases in front of them. She’d rolled a sheet to put along the top of the curtain rod in each of the windows. He closed the door and she rearranged towel to make sure it fit completely under the door.
“Sam…?” he asked.
“Don’t talk,” she answered, turning off the light. “Don’t talk to me.”
The room was pitch black, and he wasn’t very familiar with the layout of it. He edged cautiously for the bed’s footboard, hoping he could find the knob there to keep himself from tripping over the dressers or the nightstands. Or the bookcases. He had no idea where those were, now.
Samantha hit him at speed with a sort of desperate energy. He wanted to talk her out of it, to tell her that it didn’t have to go like this, that he was fine with waiting until she was actually ready, but he knew how much it would have embarrassed her. No less, he knew she wanted him. It was just the awkwardness of the sex itself that she couldn’t cope with.
Except in the dark.
And so he lay with his wife and he knew her.
They slept curled around each other in a tangle of sheets.
In the morning he woke up in an empty bed.
<><><>
Working with Kara was a hoot.
Like everything else they’d ever done together, they just clicked. It was like when he and Sam first started as Rangers, training with Arthur. They were invincible, and nothing could stand up to them. Kerk was still on the hunt for the thirsty man, so Kara’s Seeker kept them working almost full time on stuff Jason hadn’t even thought about in months.
Goblins. Gremlins. Zombies. Fin folk.
The good stuff.
No demons who were off trying to end the world.
No grand schemes.
Just good, healthy, hack-n-slash fun.
And Kara was awesome. This hardly surprised him, but she had a certain flair and panache to her that you couldn’t rent and you certainly couldn’t buy.
Damn, it felt good to be able to shoot things again.
Without Samantha telling him about the different alloys of metal and their effectiveness against different kinds of demons.
The girl came in handy, and he missed Sam like he would have missed his left arm, but damn, damn was it nice to be working with someone who saw the beauty in just putting a hole in a target.
They’d partied in New York for a few days while they waited on a lead, drinking lots, sleeping little. They went home with strangers, they went home together, they slept on floors and, once for about two hours, in a great big canopy bed with four women who claimed to be college students.
And then they were on the job. They left Kara’s Jeep in the garage at Carter’s apartment and took the Cruiser, first to Georgia, then Utah, then Florida.
There was some seriously freaky stuff in Florida.
Best of all, he got to finish his meals. He had stopped noticing the waitstaff at restaurants and the crazy women at clubs. He was completely relaxed, because he was already there with the hottest woman in the place, and win, lose, or draw, they were leaving together.
Kara shut her laptop and folded her legs on the bed as Jason got dressed. They were at Darin and Cathy’s in Ohio after taking care of a witchlight in Dayton.
“So,” he said. “Chicago?”
“Black dog in Missouri,” she said.
“Didn’t you already kill a black dog in Missouri?” he asked.
“Mississippi, but I’m touched that you remembered.”
“I remember everything you say,” he answered with a wink in the mirror.
“You do not,” she said, standing. She was wearing tiny shorts and her thighs cut a gorgeous, smooth curve from just above her knee to somewhere up inside the shorts. It was just beckoning for his fingers to find where that curve ended. Kara was still talking. He raised his eyebrows at her, not moving his eyes.
“What was that?”
She laughed.
“Are my shorts distracting you, Elliott?”
“Definitely. You should take them off.”
She sat down in his lap, resting her forearms on his shoulders.
“You think you’re some kind of sex god.”
He nodded quickly, and she kissed the tip of his nose.
“Hate to break it to you, but I’d rather kill a black dog.”
He dropped his head back and groaned.
“And that’s why you are the sexiest thing on two legs.”
She stood.
“And they are great legs,” she told him.
“They are. They really are.”
He felt the stubble on his chin and shrugged.
“I’ll get everything down to the car and let Cathy know we’re leaving.”
She waved him off as she pulled on a pair of riding leather pants. He stopped for just a second, then shook himself and grabbed his overnight bag and hers, trotting down the stairs. Cathy was sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper and a mug of coffee. It smelled great.
“I didn’t think anyone still read those,” Jason said, dumping the bags in the doorway. She looked up.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. We have a subscription that I keep forgetting to cancel, and then I figure as long as we’re paying for them, I may as well read them. You want some coffee?”
“We’re headed to Missouri. Or Mississippi. I can’t remember.”
She laughed, turning the page in her paper.
“Make sure you get it right.”
“I’ve got a good navigator,” he said. “You have paper cups?”
“In the cabinet by the stove,” she said.
Jason found a pair of insulated paper cups - Darin had a good job and he and Cathy splurged on little things that made life just a little nicer for the Rangers who stayed with them - and filled both of them, finding creamer and sugar on the stove and adding them to Kara’s coffee until it smelled right. He heard Kara come down behind him.
“Hazelnut,” she said.
“My favorite,” Cathy responded. “How is your brother, Jason?”
“Off cavorting with his new wife,” Jason said, handing Kara her coffee and recovering the bags. He absently reached up to find Anadidd’na’s pommel behind his head, then shrugged into his backpack.
“Glad the three of you finally worked that out,” Cathy said. Jason laughed to himself. Samantha had only ever been Sam’s girl, but for a lot of their time together, Jason had been the only other one who had known that. Well, and Kara. Kara always knew everything, somehow.
“Me, too,” he answered.
Kara snorted and Cathy tipped her head to look up at her.
“Sorry,” Kara said. “The three of them are just a mess.”
Cathy nodded and Kara winked at Jason.
“You ready?”
He agreeably followed her out to the Cruiser, throwing the bags into the backseat with barely a pang at all that Samantha wasn’t back there in her nest of pillows. He was pretty sure there wasn’t any food stashed under the seat or anything, as tragic as that was.
“Mississippi,” he said.
“Missouri,” Kara answered.
“That’s what I said.”
<><><>
Merlin, Kara’s new Seeker, had found a news report about a man in Jefferson City who had been hiking with his girlfriend in a nearby state park and reported seeing a giant black wolf. His girlfriend hadn’t been able to verify it because she hadn’t seen it. Three days later, he’d fallen out of a parking garage for no apparent reason.
A week later, a criminal defense lawyer from Columbia had been on retreat with his staff to the lake and reported seeing the same animal. He’d gone off the road on the way home four days after the report and turned his truck over. He’d bled out before anyone had found him.
And then, yesterday, a man staying in a friend’s condo on the lake with his two little girls had seen it. Merlin said that the first one had made the news as an alarmist scare piece in the little local paper - wolf on the loose! - and it had taken him a while to track it down. Quotes from the little feature had shown up in a blog written by a teenage girl who lived by the lake and was convinced the beast was stalking her, but she’d been hyperventilating about it for three weeks, now, and Jason suspected that she was just enjoying the minor encounter with celebrity she was getting online.
“So we’ve got, what, one or two days to track down this dude and where he was buried?” Jason said as he drove.
“Could go decoy,” Kara said. Jason grimaced at the open interstate in front of him.
“Only if that kind of things turns you on.”
Kara laughed.
“I’ve done it a few times.”
“Of course you have,” Jason said.
“What, you haven’t?”
He grinned, not answering.
“Is it worth making sure the guy’s a prick?”
“If skipping it makes you feel better about being bait, we can,” Kara said. “But we both know he is.”
Jason nodded. The description was pretty open-and-shut.
“You ever try to kill one?” he asked.
Kara rocked her jaw to one side, grinning.
“Have you?” she countered.
He put his hand on the hilt of the sword that lay on the console next to his elbow.
“You think that would do it?” Kara asked.
“She,” Jason muttered, and Kara grinned, having scored the point. She did it to annoy him. Swords were always called ‘she’. The good ones. And he’d gone to Hell - quite literally - to get this one. He gave Kara a subtle glare and she grinned wider, putting her knee up on the dashboard. Leathers. Damn. He couldn’t even pretend to be mad at a girl in leathers. She grinned wider and turned her head to look out the window. She knew it.
“So you think she could do it?” Kara asked. He glanced over at Anadidd’na then turned to watch the road again.
“Don’t know. Maybe. You want to try it?”
He heard her laugh.
Yes.
<><><>
Black dogs were a little bit of a study in irony. Not the literary kind, Jason was pretty sure, but in the Alanis Morissette kind. Sam had tried a dozen times to explain the irony of calling something ironic that wasn’t actually ironic, but Jason was pretty sure Sam was nuts. For caring.
Black dogs were the ghosts of executed violent criminals. The really messy, nasty ones. For a long time, they were stuck in their graves, kind of nuts, presumably, but good and stuck. Bump into them, though, by putting a road too close or tearing down the wrong tree, and you let them out. And while they were nasty, even as violent ghosts went, they were targeted. They went after violent people, exclusively, and there were Rangers who refused to hunt them down, considering them to be a public service.
Sam and Samantha would have joined Merlin in going through old public records, looking for executions that were likely sources of black dogs, and for public cemeteries where the old law enforcement would have stashed the bodies. In the meantime, they would have expected Jason to keep an eye on the next target - black dogs were historically misunderstood as specters of impending death, rather than as the actual culprits who simply enjoyed playing with their prey - and try to intervene to protect the dude, should the black dog show up again.
Thing about Rangers. They were almost always more violent than any target the black dogs would stumble across on their own, and it wasn’t that hard to get them to switch, if you presented yourself instead. So you had a choice. Let the black dog do his thing, or intervene and end up with dog breath down your own neck.
Decoying.
Knowing what you were up against helped. In general, black dogs would try to cause fatalities indirectly, scaring you into doing something dumb, like backing over a wall at a parking structure, or swerving off the road when he suddenly materialized in your passenger seat. In a twisted way, the beasts had a sense of humor.
Didn’t make it any easier to survive one, knowing they were funny, but it made Jason like them better.
The real bragging-rights goal, though, was to beat one. Yeah, the Seekers and the geeks knew that the most reliable ways to kill one was at the grave. Fence one in like an ankou, summon back the sheriff who had had them executed if you knew enough to do that - Samantha would have killed him, summoning unsupervised - or just do some old-fashioned digging. Burn him to ash, scatter the bones, lock him in at a church. It was all a lot of work, and ghosts, black dogs in particular, never took kindly to being locked back in with their bones or dissipated entirely. They were strongest when you weren’t under direct sunlight, but make them good and angry and a black dog could even come after you at noon. And when you were digging up their grave, they lost their sense of humor.
So the Rangers were constantly trying different things to kill them directly. Ghost or not, they were awfully fleshy, up close. They had fur, they had drool, they had teeth, and they smelled like unbathed dogs. There were old stories - ones that the Seekers were constantly trying to kill off - about Rangers who put them down, but the details were sketchy on how. Heather had told Jason once that it was a fool’s errand, that they drew their energy from the earth and it was the same as trying to stab the dirt to death, but Jason thought that the Kiowa woman thought that most everything drew its energy from the earth. If someone was going to kill a black dog, it was going to be him, and he could hardly pass up the opportunity to try. Especially not with Kara egging him on.
Kara was texting with Merlin as they pulled off of the interstate.
“South from here,” she said.
“Was internet stalking a success?” Jason asked. Kara laughed, settling lower in her seat.
“He found them.”
Kara gave him directions through the sparse, tourist streetfront shops into the suburban-feeling neighborhoods of waterfront and houseboats.
