The Outlaw Demon Wails (35 page)

“I don't want to go to bed,” she said petulantly, sounding nothing like my mom. “You have to leave. Monty will be home soon, and it hurts him when you come over. He won't admit it, but it does. Robbie is too old for you to see him anymore. He's going to remember you.”

“Alice,” he whispered, his eyes closed. “Monty is dead. Robbie is in Portland.”

“I know.” It was a faint, resigned whisper, and I felt ill.

“Come on,” he coaxed. “Let me get you in bed. Do it for me. I'll sing you to sleep.”

She protested, and he swung her up and into his arms as easily as if she were one of his bass guitars. My mom let her head fall against him, and he turned to me, still plastered into the corner. “Please don't leave,” he said softly, then turned and carried her out.

My heart pounded as I stood where I was and listened to their progress through the house, my mom's soft inquiries and his rumbling responses. It grew quiet, and when I heard him singing softly, I staggered to the table, reaching blindly. Numb, I sank into the chair my mother had been sitting in, my head dropping into my hand as my elbow found the table.

I felt sick.

The acidic scent of tomato soup was comforting, helping to mask the fading smell of hot metal and burnt amber. My stomach rumbled, and I thought it pathetic that I could be hungry when I was so strung out. Course, I hadn't eaten anything last night other than a handful of tiny wieners on sticks and six little squares of cream-topped pumpkin cheesecake.

The soft sound of a wooden spoon thumping the top of a saucepan brought my gaze up from the faded linoleum table, and I watched Takata awkwardly pour the steaming soup into a pair of thin-walled white bowls. He looked funny making dinner—or maybe it was an early breakfast, now—the rock star puttering around in my mother's kitchen, hunting for things in a start-stop motion that told me he had been here before but had never cooked.

My face twisted, and I forced the bitter emotion away. I was sure he had an explanation. The only reason I was sitting here was because I wanted to hear it. That, and because the I.S. was probably looking for Trent's car. And I was exhausted. And he was making food.

Takata's expression was weary as he set a bowl of soup before me, then
slid a plate with two pieces of toast beside it. He looked at the amulet I wore to warn me about surprise demon attacks. I thought he was going to say something, but he didn't. Angry, I took a napkin from the holder on the table. “You know how I like my soup,” I said. “With toast.” My chin quivered. “You come over here a lot?”

He turned from the stove with his own bowl. “Once a year, maybe. More than that, and she starts leaning on the past too much. She likes to talk about you. She's very proud.”

I watched him set his bowl down across from me and sink into the chair, shifting to find a comfortable position on the thin padding. I spared a thought that I could probably chart his visits by his tour dates and her doctor visits.

“Sorry,” he said, hesitantly taking a napkin for himself. “I know this isn't much of a dinner, but I don't cook much, and even an idiot can warm up soup.”

Ignoring the toast, I tried the soup, and my tension eased as the rich warmth slipped down. He'd mixed it with milk. Just the way I liked it. I glanced up when his pocket started to hum. The tall witch looked discomforted as he pulled a cell phone out and checked the number.

“You have to go?” I said bitingly. I should have just pinned him to the wall and made him talk.

“No. It's Ripley. My drummer.” A wan smile curved up his thin lips, making his long face look longer. “She's calling to give me an excuse to leave if I need it.”

I took another sip of soup, angry at myself that I was hungry when my life was falling apart. “Must be nice,” I muttered.

Giving up on ignoring the toast as a matter of principle, I picked it up and dunked it. So he knew I liked toast with my tomato soup. That didn't mean I shouldn't eat it. Elbows on the table, I looked at him as I chewed. I felt drained, and this was just too weird.

Takata's gaze fell away. “I wanted to tell you,” he said, and my heart gave a hard thump. “For a long time. But Robbie left when he found out, and it just about killed your mother. I couldn't dare risk it.”

But you could risk having coffee with me ages ago? And you could risk
hiring me to work your security last year?
Burying my unreasonable feelings of jealousy, I said, “Robbie knows?”

He looked old all of a sudden, his blue eyes pinched. I wondered whether, if I had kids, they would have green eyes or blue.

“He recognized me at your dad's funeral.” Takata grimaced with his attention on his soup. “Our hands are exactly the same. He noticed.” Spoon shaking, he took another sip of soup. I silently dunked a corner of my toast.

I felt like such an idiot. God, Takata had asked my opinion of the lyrics of “Red Ribbons” last year, and I hadn't gotten it. He had been trying to tell me, and I had been too dense to see it. But how could I have even guessed? “Who else knows?” I asked somewhat fearfully.

He smiled without showing his teeth, looking almost shy. “I told Ripley. But she has her own past to deal with and she will keep her mouth shut.”

“Trent?” I accused.

“Trent knows everything,” he muttered. Seeing my unease, he added, “He knows only because his father needed a genetic blueprint to help base your treatment on. Mr. Kalamack could have used Robbie's, but the repair would have been slower and not as perfect. When your dad asked, I said yes. Not just for you, but so Robbie wouldn't have a summer of missing memories.”

I made a face, remembering. Or remembering not remembering, maybe.

“So Trent knows I'm your birth father, but not why.” Takata leaned into his chair with his tall glass of milk, his long leg hitting the table leg on my side before jerking it back. “It was none of his business,” he said defensively.

I couldn't taste my toast anymore, and I set it down. I stared at my soup, took a breath to find my courage, then said softly, “Why?”

“Thank you,” Takata whispered.

His eyes were heavy with moisture when I looked, but he was smiling. He set his glass down and stared out the window at the growing brightness. “Your dad and I met your mother at the university.”

I'd heard this before, just not knowing that the other guy had been Takata. “She said she met my dad when she signed up for a ley line class she had no business being in. That she took it to meet the gorgeous hunk of witch in front of her, but ended up falling in love with his best friend.”

His smile grew, showing his teeth. “I'd love to know which one of us she considered the hunk of witch.”

Confused, I pulled my soup closer. “But my dad, Monty, I mean, was human.”

Takata's head was bobbing. “There was a lot more prejudice back then. No, not more, just that no one was as afraid to show it. To avoid getting a lot of flack, he told everyone he was a witch. Until your mother, he would ransack my closet just to smell right.”

I thought about that for a moment, then returned to eating.

“Your dad and me?” he continued, his pleasant voice seeming to fill the kitchen and sounding right. “I don't know how we got through those last years without killing each other. We both loved your mother, and she loved both of us.” He hesitated, then added, “For different reasons. She thought it was hilarious when her scent charms worked so well that even the instructors couldn't tell he was a human. His ley line skills were more than good enough. It was crazy, the both of us vying for her, and her caught in the middle.”

I glanced up and he dropped his eyes.

“But I got her pregnant with Robbie right as my music career started to take off. West Coast take off, not just local stuff. It changed everything.” His gaze went unfocused. “It threatened to steal both her and my dreams—what we thought we wanted.”

I felt him look at me, and I said nothing, tilting my bowl to get the last of my soup.

“Your dad always blamed me for getting her pregnant when she could have finished her studies to go on to be one of the premier spell-developers in the state.”

“She's that good?” I asked, taking another bite of toast.

Takata smiled. “You won every Halloween contest you ever entered. She continually developed potions to pass the I.S.'s increasingly sensitive
detection charms for your dad. She told me once that Jenks thought she was light on the magic, almost a warlock. It wasn't because she was not spelling, but because she was.”

My head went up and down, and I wiped the butter off my fingers. Crap, I had forgotten to pick Jenks up at the gate. I hadn't even slowed down long enough for them to get it open. Maybe Ivy would go get him. I wasn't going back there.

“Okay, I got the picture,” I said. “I get my earth magic from her. And Trent says you're good at ley lines?”

He shrugged, tossing his head to make his dreadlocks swing. “I used to be. I don't use them much. Least not consciously.”

I remembered sitting next to him on the winter solstice and seeing him jump when the circle at Fountain Square closed. Yeah, I probably got my ley line skill from him. “So you got my mom pregnant and decided your dreams were more important than hers and left,” I accused.

A deep flush colored his pale complexion. “I asked her to come with me to California,” he said, pained. “I promised her we could raise a family and build both our careers at the same time, but she was smarter than me.” Takata crossed his arms over his thin chest and shrugged. “She knew something would suffer, and she didn't want me to look back and blame her and the baby for taking my one shot at greatness away.”

He sounded bitter, and I picked at what was left of my toast.

“Monty loved her as much as I did. As much as I do,” he reiterated. “He wanted to marry her, but he never asked because he knew she wanted children and couldn't give them to her. It made him feel inadequate, especially when I kept reminding him of it,” he admitted, tired eyes dropping in old guilt. “So when she wouldn't follow me to California, he asked her to marry him, seeing as she was going to get the child she always wanted.”

I watched his face twitch as he relived the memory. “And she said yes,” he said softly. “It hurt more than I like to admit—that she stayed with him and that peon I.S. job he took on a dare instead of coming with me and the chance for a big house with a pool and a hot tub. Looking back, I know I had been stupid, but I left thinking I was doing the right thing.”

When desire's sold for freedom/and need exchanged for fame/those choices made in ignorance/turn to bloodstained dreams of shame.
Son of a bitch.

His gaze flicked to mine and held. “Monty and your mother would be happy. I was going to California with the band. My child would be raised in a loving home. I thought I had cut all the ties. Maybe if I'd never come back it would have been okay, but I did.”

I dabbed my finger on the crumbs and ate them. This all felt like a bad dream that had nothing to do with me.

“So I went on to make it big,” Takata said with a sigh. “I didn't have a clue how much I had screwed my life up. Not even when your mom flew out to one of the shows one night. She said she wanted another child, and like a stupid ass, I went along with it.”

His eyes watched his long hands, carefully arranging the spoon in the bowl. “That was my mistake,” he said, more to himself than me. “Robbie had been an accident that your dad stole from me, but I gave him you. And seeing his eager smile when you were put in his arms made me realize how pathetically worthless my life was. Is.”

“Your life isn't worthless,” I said, not knowing why. “You touch thousands of people with your music.”

He smiled bitterly. “What do I have to show for it? Selfishly now, what do I have?” His hands waved in frustration. “A big house? A fancy tour bus? Things. Look at what I could have been doing with my life—all wasted. Look at what your mother and Monty did.”

His voice was getting louder, and I looked past him to the empty hall, worried he might wake her up.

“Look at what you are,” he said, bringing my attention back. “You and Robbie. You are something real that they can point to and say, ‘I helped make that person great. I held that person's hand until they could make it on their own. I did something real and irrefutable.'”

Clearly frustrated, he slumped with his long arms on the table and stared at nothing. “I had the chance to be a part of what life is about, and I
gave it
to someone else, pretending to know about life when all I have is what you can get by looking in other people's windows.”

Left looking in the window, red ribbons hide my face.
I pushed my plate away, not hungry anymore. “I'm sorry.”

Takata met my eyes from under a lowered brow. “Your dad always said I was a selfish bastard. He's right.”

I moved the spoon in a figure eight. Not clockwise, not counterclockwise. Balanced and empty of intent. “You give,” I said softly. “Just to strangers, afraid that if you give to people you love, they might reject you.” My attention came up, pulled by his silence. “It's not too late,” I said. “You're only, what, fifty-something? You've got a hundred more years.”

“I can't,” he said, his expression asking for understanding. “Alice is finally thinking of going back into research and development, and I'm not going to ask her to leave that and start a second family.” A sigh shifted his thin shoulders. “It would be too hard.”

I looked at him, taking my coffee up but not drinking it. “Hard if she said no, or hard if she said yes?”

His lips parted. He seemed like he wanted to say something but was afraid. Lifting one shoulder and letting it fall, I took a sip and gazed out the window. Memories of struggling to live with Ivy and Jenks lifted through me. Jenks was going to be really ticked I'd forgotten him at Trent's. “Anything worth having is going to be hard,” I whispered.

Takata took a long, slow breath. “I thought I was supposed to be the font of philosophical wise-old-man shit here, not you.”

He was smiling wanly when I looked at him. I couldn't deal with this right now. Maybe after I had a chance to figure out what it meant. Pushing my chair back, I stood. “Thanks for dinner. I have to go home and get some stuff. Will you stay here until I get back?”

Takata's eyes went wide in question. “What are you doing?”

I set my bowl and plate in the sink before I wadded up my napkin and threw it away. “I have to make up some spells, and I don't want to leave my mom alone, so until she wakes up, I'm going to work here. I need to run back to the church for some stuff. Will you wait until I get back before you leave?”
Can you do that much for me?
I thought bitterly.

“Uh,” he stammered, long face empty as he was caught off guard, “I
was going to stay until she wakes up so you don't have to come back. But maybe I can help you. I can't cook, but I can chop herbs.”