—— CHAPTER TEN ——
The earlier fire in Callie’s belly had disappeared along with the flames in her hands. Bravery came much easier when the consequences of your actions could be ignored. That’s what adrenaline was for, to blind us from peering toward the future. The churning worry in her gut shifted its focus from what kissing Derek meant for her future to how big the Bianca blowout would be. Violence wasn’t in her handbag. Yet she was the one who’d escalated the interaction with Bianca. She hadn’t intended to burn the other woman. Intent required forethought.
She’d melted fabric to another person. Callie’s stomach pitched and she swallowed the result of her guilt. Derek parked the bike, and she climbed off quickly. Sucking down quick breaths of clean air had to clear her head, right?
“You’re not going to puke, are you?” That Derek, he was all class.
She scowled at him as she shoved her helmet into his hand.
“I’m surprised you didn’t take me home,” she muttered. She was even more thankful he hadn’t taken her to the Charmer. Instead, he’d brought her to the outskirts of Gem City. They’d climbed in elevation, and the thinner air was actually calming her. The empty road and huge spaces between buildings around them would make it a great place to lose someone. Permanently. Her heartbeat started to sprint as her thoughts turned morbid.
Derek’s brows pinched together as though to hold back his menace. He scrubbed an open hand against his face, but it couldn’t siphon the emotion. “Too much to talk about.”
“Talking?” She didn’t hide her skepticism. She lit a woman up. Exposed them. If the consequences were merely a chat, why were they out in BFE?
“You took it upon yourself to question Bianca, who you know nothing about, without me.” He flung his hands wide, measuring the problem. The hard chest she’d pressed against earlier rose and fell rapidly. The cotton of his shirt strained. She knew the feeling.
“She found me. What was I supposed to do?”
“You couldn’t have just made nice with her until I got back?”
“You couldn’t have warned me my hands might be on fucking fire when she was around?”
He rocked on his heels, an unbidden reaction to the invisible slap, and then slowly dropped his hands to his side.
“Yeah. Want to explain how my formerly-normal hands—that now turn to ice around soul magic users—pulled some seventh-circle shit next to Bianca?”
He wrapped a hand around his nape. It wasn’t going to warm his brain stem or generate better answers, but Callie kept that to herself. The move jutted his elbow in the air like a leather-clad flag. As long as it wasn’t a rallying signal, she’d wait. “Well? Any bright ideas there?”
“It’s the same thing as last time.” Regret twisted his features.
The big man winced, and her chest tightened, but that didn’t change the situation. Her voice lost its edge. “I’m going to need more than that, Derek.”
He nodded. “Can we go inside first?”
None of the small adobe buildings surrounding them looked particularly inviting. “Where exactly?”
He hiked a thumb toward the building behind him. “Maria’s.”
The restaurant name was familiar, but she never had reason to spend time in the city’s outer edges. The little restaurant was more akin to a home from the outside, but as they neared it she saw there was a hand-painted sign on the door reading: Maria’s Cantina.
A woman not much older than Callie led them down two sets of stairs and past whitewashed walls covered with license plates and painting of cowboys with ten-gallon hats to a table with tile inlay. She handed over two laminated menus. “What can I get you to drink? House margarita?”
Callie’s stomach rebelled at even the mention. “Water’s fine.”
The hint of a smile played at the corner of Derek’s mouth. “House is fine for me. Rocks. No salt.”
The waitress snatched a leftover newspaper from their table and then left quickly to fetch their drinks. She didn’t need to see the headline to know police had found another body missing hands. Fucking Ford and his threats. They followed her even to down-home restaurants on the outskirts of town.
Callie fought to stay in the moment. “I didn’t peg you as a margarita man.” Her judgment was real. Last time he’d ordered one, he hadn’t taken a sip.
“It’s the best drink they’ve got. Plus, it’s become a tequila kind of night.”
In the hierarchy of booze-as-medicine-for-emotional-woes, it clearly went beer, wine, rum, vodka, tequila, and then whiskey. However, depending on your defining experiences, one could, possibly, swap the top three into almost any order. Regardless, Derek was bypassing the beer and going straight to the hard stuff, and that didn’t bode well.
Callie shrugged. Not much she could do about it now. “Do I need to wait until you’ve ingested more booze to get an answer about my newfound magical ability?”
“She’ll be back quick.” He offered her a quick smile.
Callie glared. His charm wasn’t working now.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “The magic is functioning as it did before. You’re just detecting something different.”
“‘Different’? Derek, I like you, but come the fuck on.”
He grinned at her, more focused on the compliment than Callie’s exasperation. “What?”
“You owe me more than some cryptic answer. Your Charmer changed me, and now I’m playing a perpetual game of hot/cold, and unlike you, I’m finding it pretty goddamn unamusing.”
“True enough.” He paused while the waitress delivered their drinks, nudging the pink and green sugar skulls adorning the table to the side, and nodded when they admitted they hadn’t looked at their menus yet. When she left, he continued. “Remember I told you how the people with less-than-whole souls make your hands go cold?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t explain the fiery hands.”
“It kind of does.” His teasing tone might have made her fluttery another time. However, Callie’s bullshit tank was full. Either her unwavering stare would crack him, or the tequila would. Either way, she’d cling to her dark mood until he fessed up.
“The opposite thing is happening,” he finally added when it was clear she wasn’t about to speak again until he shared more. “I told you before, the heat is a reaction to too much soul magic.”
“That wasn’t just heat. I swear to God there was literally fire inside my hands. My skin was damn near flayed.” She’d have nightmares remembering how true it’d been in the moment, even though all signs of the earlier carnage had disappeared.
He sighed. It was a heavy, masculine sound. She could bewilder this man. Callie softened enough to take a sip of her water and settle into her chair. “That’s because Bianca wasn’t your normal soul renter,” he said.
“What’s so special about her?” Did it sound like she was pouting? Callie had to snap out of that.
“To cause that kind of reaction in you? She’d have to have more than two souls in her. Might explain why she’s always moving.” He tacked on the last sentence absent-mindedly.
Callie snatched it. “‘Always moving’? Why?”
“It’s hard enough getting two souls to share a single body. Imagine a walk-in closet as your living space. If you had one roommate, it’d be all asses and elbows. Uncomfortable, but endurable. Now shove four people in the same space. Even breathing would get hard in those cramped quarters.”
Derek didn’t strike her as the kind of man who shared spaces at all. Each time she wrapped her arms around him on the motorcycle, his body stiffened, and not in a “touch my dick” kind of way. Only after a moment and a deep breath could he begin relax into her presence.
Undeterred, Callie asked, “What does that have to do with her moving?”
She’d have nightmares about what she did to Bianca. The more she could diminish her guilt with facts, the better.
“We’ve got bigger problems than the stupid shit Bianca does,” Derek said.
She rolled her eyes.
“What?” Derek asked, half amused, half irritated.
“We were there specifically for her. So, I’m calling your bluff there. We need to talk about her.”
“About what she knows about Tess,” he corrected in a patronizing tone. He consistently made her blood boil, but not always for the best reasons.
“Maybe the reason why Bianca’s been maxing out her body on souls is related.” Callie’s words were meant to taunt, but Derek eyes brightened.
“You just might be on to something, doll.” He scratched his chin, and a few moments later, he nodded. She looked down to finally peruse the menu; an entire page was dedicated to enchiladas. Even in the short time she’d known him, she had picked up that silence often pulled more truth out of Derek than cajoling. If one could base such an assessment on mere days together.
The waitress returned while Derek was still lost in thought, so Callie ordered Christmas-style chicken enchiladas for them both, with the waitress’s promise it was the thing everyone ordered. Her sides began to ache as she clenched her stomach. Faking calm and being relaxed were two different things. She could only pretend for so long. Gulping half the glass of water in front of her didn’t help, but she wasn’t willing to drop her guard enough to steal a swig of Derek’s golden margarita.
The restaurant wasn’t loud enough to drown all the unanswered questions still bouncing around her head. Maybe they’d learned how to swim. “What’s it feel like to rent a soul?” She might be shitty at small talk, but she could offer top-notch random outbursts.
He snapped out of his thoughts. “I hear it’s different for everyone.”
“What’s it like for you?”
He avoided eye contact. “Never done it.”
“How can you work for him, if you’ve never used his services?”
His attention snapped to her. Bright eyes met her questioning gaze. “I’m good at my job. I don’t need to dabble in the magic to make people give souls back.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m working in exchange for one, so—”
“—so you can’t possibly fathom why anyone would want to be in this world if they weren’t hooked on borrowing souls?”
She hadn’t meant that. Or had she? His words rang true to her. She sucked in her bottom lip, and he watched it possessively. Heat zinged down her spine. “You’ve got a marketable skill. You leverage it,” she said simply, “I’m not judging.” Well, she had been, but given tonight’s events, she was willing to adjust her view.
His responding grunt rumbled from deep in his chest and he delivered it with a scowl. She was sure she’d dug four feet of her own grave by this point. Olive branch time. “Why does having extra souls—like beaucoup extra souls—make Bianca move more?”
Derek indulged in his margarita, taking a long sip. Tequila might actually help this conversation along. “All those souls are looking to escape. You can placate them with contact with others.”
Callie thought back to earlier in the night, forced herself to remember Bianca before the flames, before the melted fabric stench had lodged itself in her sinuses. “So that’s why she was touching everyone in that restaurant. Did she hurt them?”
“I don’t really know,” he admitted, as though the words sounded foreign to him. “We’d have to talk to the Charmer. But I wonder if she’s picking up some of Tess’s abilities.”
There had to be a way to do this without talking to the Soul Charmer. Callie racked her brain, attempting to remember what made Tess so special without showcasing yet another inadequacy and asking.
“She steals people’s energy,” he supplied.
She nodded as if she’d already known. “You think she was taking hits of energy off those people tonight?”
“I don’t think anything. Just spitballing.”
“Even if she was, that doesn’t explain why Tess is ripping off the Charmer.” Callie couldn’t imagine not being terrified of the man. She’d held her own only because it was that or die. Badassery came easy when the alternative required a pine box.
To that same end, did the Soul Charmer really need her and Derek traipsing around after this crazy lady and her minion? “Why doesn’t he just take care of her?” Callie asked.
“He doesn’t have to.” He responded so quickly she did a double take.
“Would he make you … ” she trailed off, not wanting to offend him by finishing the thought.
“It’s not like that,” he snapped. “I’ve got hard lines. I don’t permanently damage anyone. Ever. I might break a bone here or there, but I won’t have someone’s death on my record.”
“O-kay.”
He groaned. “Now I have to apologize. Damn it. Tonight’s fucked. Look, magic is crazy complicated. If the Charmer attacks Tess without knowing exactly what’s up, the consequences could be seriously nasty. He’ll be the one to enact them, though. Plus, soul renting is a small world and people have long memories. We don’t know enough about who she might be working with to act.”
“Is that what we’re doing? Gathering info so the Charmer can know when to strike?” What did that mean? Was he planning to kill her? Every time Callie thought it couldn’t get any worse …
“Yeah, doll. We’re the foot soldiers on this one. Even you, with your magic hands.” His melodic teasing voice pleased her more this time. He responded to her genuine smile in kind.
“Well, when you give a girl weapons—”
“We’re going to talk about that. Not now, because I’m too exhausted, but I won’t forget.”
Of course he wouldn’t.