Dead Letter Day (5 page)

There had, however, been a period of months where she’d barely eaten at all. She’d gotten so thin she’d been practically translucent. Now she was glowing. She’d put on a few pounds and, even as another girl, I knew they’d landed in all the right places. Who knew that taking a vampire as a lover would make someone look so damn healthy? Maybe those medieval medics with their leeches and their bleeding had been onto something.

Ted, however, was frowning. “Are you okay?”

I waved away his concern. I knew I looked like hell. “I went to spin class with my mother. The instructor was brutal.”

“But was he demonic?” Norah asked.

“No. His wife’s got a little elf blood and he’s a little enthusiastic. Mom is seeing demons under every bushel these days.” And behind every desk and at the other end of every phone line. “Sometimes it’s not demons. Sometimes it’s elves.”

Norah shuddered. “I know how she feels.”

Part of Norah’s not-eating thing had been figuring out how much there was out there that she didn’t know about. It had made her damn paranoid. I’d ended up loaning her the
grimoire
that Mae had given to me years ago. I never read it. Someone might as well use it.

I’d worried that it might freak her out even more. Instead of suspecting that there were nasty things around every corner, she’d know there were. Somehow, though, knowing what might be there and what definitely wouldn’t seemed to help her. I was mainly relieved she’d stopped trying to cast protection spells. There wasn’t an ounce of magic in the girl and she’d made some awful messes, although I supposed a little salt across a windowsill never hurt anyone.

I couldn’t quite imagine my mother reading the grimoire, though. First of all, I wasn’t sure how she’d hide it from my dad. He was charmingly clueless a lot of the time, but even he might have some questions about a giant old book sitting on my mother’s bedside table. Second, she didn’t seem to want to know too many details. Mainly she wanted a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on whether something was supernatural or just weird.

I headed off to shower. I stripped down and stepped into the hot spray. Why did I feel so logy? I needed to pull it together.

Afterward, I wrapped myself in a big towel and padded down the hallway to my bedroom. Ted was stretched out on my bed, waiting. Sadly he was fully dressed. I took a second
to admire him anyway. He truly was a beautiful man, all golden blond and tawny skinned, muscled shoulders and long powerful legs. His parents might have been crazier than june bugs, but other than that, he’d totally hit the genetic jackpot.

“Where are Norah and Alex?” I started pulling clean clothes out of my drawers.

“You looked tired. I sent them out for takeout.” He didn’t move off the bed.

I sank down next to him. “Thanks. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m beat, though.”

He reached behind his head and under the pillow and tossed me a pair of yoga pants and a tank top. I clutched them to my chest. Oh, yes. Stretchy pants on my couch. Life was good.

“Have I mentioned lately that you’re the best boyfriend ever?” I leaned over and gave him a kiss.

He caught my wrist and pulled me closer. “Care to show your appreciation?”

I smiled and kissed him again. “I might. After dinner.”

He loosened his grip on my arm. “I can wait. You sure you’re feeling all right?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t feeling all right, but I couldn’t really quite put my finger on it besides feeling tired and a little dizzy here and there. “It’s been a long week. A bunch of long weeks, actually.”

“So what else is new?”

I knew that was right. I’d been burning the candle at every end imaginable for a while. Between the dojo and training my protégée, Sophie, and my job at the hospital and whatever this new relationship with my mom was, I’d been running nonstop for days on end. I might not need much rest, but I do need some.

“I’ll take a break soon. I’m going to close the dojo for Thanksgiving week.”

“Mmhmm,” he murmured.

I could hear Alex and Norah coming up the stairs. I pulled on my comfy clothes and shook out my wet hair. “We can talk about this later. Right now, we need to talk about Paul.”

Norah and Alex set the pizza out on the coffee table and I pretty much descended on it like a vulture.

I reached for Ted’s beer to take a sip to wash down my pizza, but Alex took the beer from my hand before I could even lift it to my lips. “You need to hydrate.” He handed me a bottle of water instead.

“You’re starting to sound like Paul,” I grumbled. Paul was forever micromanaging my drinking, or absence thereof. No one liked a drunk Messenger, not even me. It had been years since I’d even contemplated letting my guard down enough to actually get drunk, but that didn’t mean I didn’t appreciate something relaxing to drink in a place, and with people with whom, I felt safe.

I looked around the room. It was strange, but I did feel safe. These people knew what and who I was and they had my back. They’d proved it in a lot of ways. We’d forged a family, but now one of our members might be in trouble and we needed to do something.

“So what did you learn?” Norah asked, leaning back in the papasan chair, curled up like a knot.

What I’d learned was that I was way more trouble for my friends than I should be. “Chuck doesn’t think Paul is missing. They had…an argument. He sent Paul off to do some thinking.”

“How long ago?” Alex asked, his dark eyes narrowed.

“Two weeks.” Which was about right as far as I was concerned. It had been about three since I’d last seen Paul.

“No one’s heard anything from him?” Ted asked.

I shook my head.

“They’re not worried?” Norah chimed in.

I shook my head again. “Nope. And they don’t want any help from me either. That’s for sure.”

“So what’s our plan?” Norah asked.

I blinked. I didn’t think we really needed one. It didn’t make much sense to try to track down a non-missing werewolf. Especially if he was avoiding you.

“I’ll check police logs,” Ted said.

“I’ll see if I can find out any good gossip,” Alex said. “You, however, are going to have to talk to Meredith.”

I winced. Someone needed to tell her what was going on, though. She’d been frantic. She wouldn’t be any happier about the idea that we were the cause of Paul’s sudden departure than I was.

“But before that, you need to get some rest.” Alex grabbed my wrist, his fingers cold against my pulse point. “Do you take vitamins?”

I stared at him. “Really?”

He shrugged. “It wouldn’t hurt. I’ll drop some by tomorrow night.”

Whatever.

“COME ON, SLEEPYHEAD. TIME TO GET MOVING.” TED WAS prodding me with the toe of his running shoe. The only reason he didn’t pull back a bloody stump was that he also had a cup of coffee in his hand that he was holding just out of my reach. It wouldn’t do to spill it.

Ted loves to run. He bounces along with a high-stepping stride like a Lipizzaner stallion. I am not such a happy camper out on the road. Mae spent years turning me into a
runner. She begged, threatened, bribed and cajoled me through the years until it got to be a habit. Now the problem is that as much as I dislike doing it, I know I’ll feel like crap if I don’t. I’m totally stuck. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t, which is a pretty distinct pattern in the warp and weave of my life. Lately, though, Ted and I have been going together in the mornings before he has to go to work. As much as I hate to admit it, it does take some of the drudgery out of it. Not that I want him to know that.

I rolled myself upright and took the mug of coffee from him. “Fine, but I’m not going to be happy about it.”

“I’d probably have a heart attack from shock if you were. Now get your shoes on.”

Fifteen minutes later, I’d slammed down my coffee, wrestled myself into my running bra and double knotted my shoelaces. The sun was up, but just barely as we left my apartment. We turned left and headed up Sixteenth Street.

“Race you to the bike bridge,” Ted said, his breath even and deep.

“I am not racing anyone anywhere. You promised I didn’t have to go far and I didn’t have to go fast. I just had to go.” He’d also made some promises regarding cardiovascular fitness, but I mainly focused on the not far, not fast part.

He grinned down at me. “Fine. Just trying to make it interesting.”

I caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of my eye and felt a faint buzz in my skin. Crap. He might well be about to get his wish to make the run interesting, but not in a good way.

“Did you see anything over there?” I asked.

“Where?” he asked, not breaking stride. I could tell the nonchalance was a little studied, though. Ted was always watchful. I’m not sure if it’s being the overly wary kid of a
Class A nut job, or the cop thing, but wariness is ingrained in him. The watchfulness just stepped up a notch, though.

“Over to your right. In the bushes.” I kept my eyes on the sidewalk in front of me and focused my other senses over in the bushes on the right. “Keeping pace with us for the moment.”

“Is it…human?” he asked. Ted gets a little delicate about how to ask if what we’re encountering is of the Arcane world or the Mundane world.

“Nope.” That much I was sure of. I was also sure we were bigger than it. Unfortunately, size does not always matter.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. It’s not attacking us. It’s going to have to come out in the open sooner or later. It’s going to run out of shrubs.” We would be turning up Sixteenth Street in a block to head to the American River Parkway. It wouldn’t have a place to hide after that.

Maybe we were too focused on it. Or maybe it was too damn early in the morning and the light was no good, but as we stepped off the curb onto McCormack Avenue, a car seemed to come out of nowhere. Ted was half a step ahead of me—damn those long legs of his—and right in the path of a baby-shit brown Ford Fiesta. I grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt and hauled him back onto the sidewalk just as it whooshed past us.

Another second’s hesitation and it would have definitely clipped Ted, if not creamed him.

“Are you okay?” I gasped.

“No. Let go of my shirt.” He twisted away. “You’re burning me.”

“I’m what?” I dropped his shirt and looked down at my hands. A glow surrounded them. As I held them out in front of me, some kind of lightning-bolt thing shot out of the ends of my fingers. I turned and hurled into the bushes, and
two of the biggest crows I had ever seen in my life burst out of them and scattered into the clouds.

“I THINK YOU SHOULD GO SEE A DOCTOR,” TED SAID AS he laced up his shoes. We hadn’t finished our run. We’d come back to my apartment and I’d crawled directly back into bed. I felt like crap. Apparently I sort of looked like it, too.

Ted, on the other hand, had showered and was putting on his uniform to head to work. He looked as shiny and bright as a new penny.

“You have no idea how difficult that is for me.” Consulting with doctors was about as high on my list as hanging out with cops, although look where I was now. I was compromising my principles left, right and upside down.

“You work in a hospital. You see doctors every day,” he said as he tucked in his shirt.

“There’s seeing and then there’s seeing.” I made a point as often as possible of people seeing what they expected to see when they looked at me. At the hospital, they expected to see a slightly sullen file clerk and I did my level best to live up to that expectation. I like to set the bar high for myself.

“I know that, but you haven’t felt well for a few weeks. I totally honor the stiff-upper-lip thing, but it’s gone on long enough.” He wasn’t smiling.

“Seriously, it’s tricky when I go to the doctor’s office. Not everything about me reads right.” I explained. My resting heart rate is crazy low. So is my blood pressure. My temperature runs a bit low, too. Then there’s the matter of my reflexes. Hit my knee with one of those little rubber hammers and you’re likely to lose a tooth.

“Then ask Alex to take a look at you.” He strapped on his belt.

No, no, no. I had avoided coming into physical contact with Alex as much as possible for years. The fact that he was presently in a big R relationship with my roommate made that an even better idea. “Alex is an emergency room doctor. This isn’t an emergency. That’s like going to a butcher shop and asking for a doughnut.”