After Darius and Rebecca left the Desert Oasis, the truck was silent. Darius thought about how to break the ice as he steered his way through the crowded Vegas streets. Construction choked the wide street down to two lanes, and they were stuck behind a city bus, so he had plenty of time to think about it. Finally, he decided that he didn’t want to upset her further. She wasn’t much for talking about feelings, and he thought making her admit that she’d felt left out when he was talking to Audra might embarrass her. The best move would be not to bring it up at all, but to make a special effort to connect with her. To be the kind of friend he should have been all along. If he kept at it, she’d thaw eventually.

So, finally, he said, “How was the ketchup soup last night?”

She grunted. “I ordered pizza.”

“I got chicken nuggets and dropped them on the ground, so I think you came out on the better end of the deal.”

“You should have stayed for pizza, then.”

Ouch. That hadn’t gone well. He fell silent again, watching the lights at the intersection up ahead turn yellow and then red again. The truck had barely moved two inches since the last green. It looked like they weren’t going anywhere. He put the truck into park and turned up the fan.

Rebecca got on her phone again, playing some game that required her to match brightly colored pieces with other brightly colored pieces. She loved that kind of thing, but he found it incredibly boring. He’d much rather watch a cooking show. Which brought up another potential topic for conversation.

“Hey, so I saw a new recipe for gumbo on the Food Network last weekend. I was thinking about trying it. You busy on Friday? I’ve got gumbo and a hot tub.” He paused. “But not at the same time.”

“Gumbo in the hot tub would be a bad thing,” she said, her voice softening ever so slightly.

“That’s an understatement. So what do you think?”

She shrugged, slumping slightly in her seat. Now she looked exhausted, with that tightness around her eyes that suggested a long and sleepless night. He couldn’t decide if he preferred it to the pissed look she’d worn earlier or not. Probably not. Something was wrong, and he didn’t like it.

“Bec,” he said, using the nickname she hated. The one she let only him get away with. He didn’t pull it out often, but it was a nickname that carried the weight of years of friendship behind it. They didn’t pull out nicknames unless shit had gotten real, and it felt like this was one of those times. “I know something’s wrong. Either tell me, or tell me to back off.”

“I’m that transparent, am I?” she asked.

“Only to me. I know all your secrets, remember?”

“Not all of them.” She shot him a familiar wicked grin that made him relieved and worried at the same time. Relieved because she wouldn’t be grinning like that if something really terrible had happened, and worried because that grin usually meant trouble. “See, I’ve got this birthmark you’ve never seen…”

She began tugging at the waistband of her shorts as if she was going to show him, and he shielded his eyes and began to shriek in pretend fear.

“No! No! Anything but that.”

“You’re scaring the dude in the car next to us,” she said, amused.

He put his hands back on the wheel and shot an apologetic look to the dude in the car. He was a scrawny little guy who immediately started staring at the road, like he was afraid Darius might beat him up for looking at him funny. It was hard to be a big guy with a sense of humor. People always expected him to punch things, and they seemed afraid to laugh at his jokes. Or maybe his jokes just weren’t funny. He’d have to ask about that sometime, but this wasn’t the right moment.

“I think he’ll survive,” he said, inching forward a little closer to the intersection. “But you can’t change the subject. What’s going on? Is it Audra?”

“Audra?” Rebecca gave him a blank look, but eventually comprehension dawned over her face. “Oh. I was really bitchy to her, wasn’t I?”

“You’ve been bitchier. But I thought you had a problem with her. Or maybe I’d been rude to you on accident because I was worried about her. But now I’m thinking that’s not it, is it?”

“Nah.” She waved a hand. “I’m used to your knight in shining armor shtick. And I still think she’d be a good fit for you. I’m just…tired.”

“Bad dreams?” he asked.

It was a simple question with a lot of weight behind it. Rebecca’s mother had been a shifter, and she’d died when Rebecca was twelve. Some…thing with too many legs had crawled out of the desert and was eating people who stopped to take a leak or change a tire out on the highway. The thing hadn’t left anything—not even the bones—and it didn’t feed very often, so no one had realized the disappearances were anything out of the ordinary. Rebecca’s family had been driving back from a vacation at Yellowstone when her little brother needed a desperate potty break. They’d stopped to let him pee in the bushes. When the thing came out of the darkness and tried to take Rebecca, her mom had fought it off. She’d been torn to pieces right in front of Rebecca as her father piled the kids into the car and took off.

Darius couldn’t blame her dad for running. He was only kin, not a full shifter, and it had taken an entire pack and a couple of friendly mages to bring the creature down. He’d done the right thing by saving the children and bringing word to the rest of the shifter community. Rebecca didn’t blame him either. But still, she had frequent dreams of her mother’s death, and she often woke up screaming, even years later. Sometimes when she slept in his guest bedroom, her shrieks woke him up. He’d go and wake her up and hold her until she stopped shaking, but she never wanted to talk about her nightmares except to say that they were about the night her mom died.

Whatever she’d seen, it must have been terrible.

“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much last night. They were particularly bad. I’m sorry about Audra. If I scared off your only chance to get laid for the next five years, I will feel very guilty.”

He put a hand to his chest. “Am I that unattractive?”

She made a big show of sniffing. “You smell funny.”

“I’ll bet the guy in the car next to us doesn’t think I smell funny.”

He started to roll down his window and was rewarded with a scandalized look from Rebecca. The real key to breaking her out of this kind of funk, he’d found, was to distract her with ridiculous, out of character behavior. Once, he’d even done the worm in public. If that didn’t prove how much he valued her friendship, he thought nothing would.

But she was worth it. She’d stuck by him, even when he was overly shy and introverted. She’d made him ask girls to the prom in high school—or even asked them for him. (It hadn’t gone well, but he appreciated the effort.) She forced him to come out of his shell when he would have stayed at home and watched cooking shows until he turned old and grey. She worked her butt off for his business, and never once tried to use their friendship as leverage in their business relationship. In fact, she’d turned him down the few times he’d offered to give her an extra break.

Cheering her up would be worth a little public humiliation. Although he might have to draw the line at doing the worm in the middle of the street.

He caught the eye of the scrawny fellow in the car and gestured for him to roll down the window. The scrawny fellow seemed alarmed, so Darius gave him his widest smile and tried to look as harmless as possible. It must have worked, because the window slowly rolled down, and the guy said, “Yeah?”

“My friend and I are having an argument, and we need someone to settle it for us,” said Darius. “Could you help us out?”

“Maybe…” said the guy, stretching it out into a cautious drawl.

“She says that I smell, and I say that I don’t. If I gave you five dollars, would you sniff me?”

He managed to say it without even cracking a smile. Behind him, he could hear Rebecca snorting with barely restrained laughter, and that made every ounce of embarrassment worthwhile.

“You’re kidding, right?” said the guy.

“Nope. It’s not like we’re going anywhere. And if I really do smell, I’d like to know it. I can’t decide if I can trust her or not. We grew up together, and sometimes she likes to pull my leg.”

The guy considered this and then nodded. “Yeah, I got sisters. I know what you mean. So I’ll help you, but I’m not getting out of the car, and I’m not rolling my window all the way down. Carjackers. You know?”

Darius shot a significant look down at himself. “I don’t think you need to worry about carjackers right now, friend. And I’m in a marked truck. Carson Contracting?” He jerked his thumb toward the back panel of the truck, where his business information was displayed. ‘That’s me. I’m Darius Carson. It would be stupid to get into funny business with my name on the side of the truck.”

“Yeah?” The guy didn’t seem to relax very much, but he gestured. “Well, if we’re going to do this, come on. It looks like the traffic’s starting to move.”

“Wishful thinking,” murmured Rebecca.

Darius got out of the truck and walked over to the guy’s hatchback. It was a little car for a little man, and it felt very comical to lean over near the cracked open window while the guy inside stuck his nose up to the crack. He sniffed loudly.

“Get closer. I can’t smell anything.”

Feeling more than a little ridiculous, Darius stuck his neck right up to the window. Heads craned as the people in nearby cars tried to figure out what was going on. Rebecca was laughing outright now, which made all the embarrassment worth it.

“He smells like body wash!” called the guy to Rebecca. “I think it’s Old Spice.”

Darius found himself unexpectedly impressed. “You know, I do use Old Spice. Are you a professional sniffer?”

The guy laughed tentatively, as if he was still a little unsure about this whole situation. “Nah. I’m an accountant.”

“Well, good luck with that.”

“I hope she pays up. You don’t smell bad at all.”

The guy went red then, as if he’d said something scandalous. Darius wanted to reassure him, but the light turned green again, and miraculously, the cars in front of them started to move. He had to hurry back to the truck, calling out apologies, throw it in gear, and then speed off through the intersection as the light turned red again. He could only imagine how pissed off the rest of the drivers were.

But Rebecca no longer had that withdrawn, angry look on her face. She kept breaking out into random chuckles. That made it all worthwhile.