Page 12 of Outside the Veil (Endangered Fae #1)

Chapter seven

Taking the Boy Out of the City

F inn woke the next morning with a ferocious headache. He rocked back and forth, curled over his knees, whimpering and moaning. When Tia Carmen brought him tea, he subsided into a listless heap on his air mattress.

“ Qué hacía? ” she whispered to Diego, outside his room.

“He tried his hand at, ah, modern art yesterday. The glue made him sick.” He led her to the kitchen to show her.

“ Ay, dios! ” Her hands flew up to cover her mouth. “Do you have anything left to drink out of?”

“I have plastic cups. And coffee mugs. I’ve decided to keep it. Rather pretty in a funky sort of way, don’t you think?”

She walked around it once and nodded. “It is better than some things you see in the museums. But I think if you want to keep the rest of your things, we should get him something más seguro …safer to work with.”

From the chest she kept stocked for visiting grandchildren, she brought up a full box of sixty-four crayons. “Paper I think you have, Santiago. Now don’t leave him alone so long again.”

After she left, Diego brought crayons and paper to Finn’s bed. “Feeling better?”

“A mite.” He opened one eye a crack. “Are you angry with me?”

“No, no. Just, in the future, please don’t rearrange things without asking me first.” He lifted a lock of hair out of Finn’s eyes. “I brought you a present.”

Finn turned onto one elbow, his pained expression turning to wonder when Diego opened the box of crayons. “Ooo, lovely. What are these?”

“Colored wax, mostly. But you can draw with them.” He took out the burnt sienna and demonstrated, sketching a few simple shapes. “Any color you might want.”

“Thank you…” Finn’s voice cracked.

“What is it?”

“You’ve been so very kind to me. I think I’ve brought you nothing but trouble.”

“Shh, that’s not true.” Diego patted his shoulder. “I’ll be staying home today. We have something to talk about. Later, when you feel better.”

Meanwhile, he had phone calls to make. First, to Miriam.

“Excellent!” she enthused. “I knew you’d come around, kiddo. Now don’t you worry. I’ll arrange everything. You just sit back and wait for my phone call. When do you want to go?”

“I thought maybe on Thursday. So we’re not driving in weekend traffic.”

“Always thinking. Your passport’s valid? And your friend’s?”

Diego’s heart stuttered. Passports. God. One needed those now to cross the border.

“You there, hon?”

“Yes, sorry.” He rummaged in the drawer for his passport and checked the date. “Just making sure. Mine’s good.”

“And his?”

“Finn’s from Ireland,” Diego blurted out, to stall for time.

“Oh, he’s all set, then. I’ll call you back this afternoon.”

Why hadn’t he thought of that? Even before the tightening of border security, Finn would still have needed identification. A driver’s license. Something. They asked for everyone’s…

No, wait. They asked for every human’s ID. A solution presented itself, if Finn would agree to it.

He placed the next call to his father in Miami. After his mother died, his father had moved back to Florida, where the bulk of his family lived so he no longer had to struggle with English.

“ Hola, Papi. ”

“ Diego! Cómo estás?”

“Fine, fine,” he continued in Spanish. If he spoke anything else, his father would pretend not to understand. “Papi, I wanted to tell you I would be away for a while. Up in Canada.”

“Why would you go there? Isn’t it cold?”

“My agent thinks it will be good for me. For my writing. To get out of the city.”

“ Mijo , don’t you have a real job yet?”

“This is my real job. Please, I don’t want to start this again.”

“Then why not come down here? Where you have family and sunshine. Where we can make sure you have enough to eat.”

“I get enough to eat. Please don’t worry. I wanted to leave the number in case you or Analisa need to find me.”

“You truly want me to tell your sister? She will call, whether she needs to or not.”

Diego smiled. Yes, she would, to complain about her husband and to gossip about the cousins. “That’s all right, Papi. I don’t mind.”

“Don’t get eaten by bears.”

He laughed and assured his father he wouldn’t.

That had been nearly painless, unlike their conversations a few years ago when Diego had first come out to his family.

His sister had been shocked but accepting.

His father had ranted and cried and hounded him for months about getting help for his ‘illness’.

Eventually the hand twisting and hair tearing had given way to a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

Papi didn’t ask about his personal life, he didn’t offer any details, and relations evened out to stilted but civil.

Father John at the mission was next, to let him know he wouldn’t be able to do his usual rounds for a while. “Go, Diego,” Father John reassured him. “Someone else will look in on everyone and make sure the cold weather warnings get out. You need a rest.”

The last phone call went to Mitch’s voicemail. Cowardly, perhaps, to leave a message, though Diego wasn’t sure he owed him even that much any longer. He simply couldn’t stand the thought of Mitch thinking he had slunk away and gone into hiding.

Around noon, after three false starts on a new story, he got up to check on Finn.

The pooka sprawled on his stomach, one foot idly waving in the air, the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth.

A dozen sheets of paper littered the floor around him, most with random scribbles that appeared to be experiments in crayon technique.

The one he leaned over now in such intense concentration seemed a more structured effort, a mosaic of carefully interlocked, jagged shapes.

Finn finished the shape drawn in Mango Tango, placed the crayon with the growing pile he had already used and nearly stuck his nose inside the box to search for the next one. He pulled out Eggplant, turned it in the light, and nodded in satisfaction before he noticed Diego crouched beside him.

He held out the clipboard. “What do you think?”

Diego studied it, the same anxiety gripping him as when a four-year-old handed him a picture he couldn’t decipher. He always guessed wrong, earning him that brain-addling, scornful look only the pre-school set could manage.

“It’s…well….”

Finn sat up. “You don’t like it?”

“What is it?”

“Colors. They all have such different flavors.”

“You haven’t been eating them, have you?”

“No, you mistake my meaning. They all speak to me in different voices. It’s all a jumble in the box. On the paper, they sing more distinctly.”

Diego stared at him, certain he still suffered from the effects of the glue, then studied the paper again.

“Like Jasper Johns,” Finn tried again.

Ah. It did bear some resemblance to False Start from the museum’s special exhibit. Interesting that of all the artists Finn had seen that day, he would find an affinity with someone so modern.

“I do like it. It’s lively. Exuberant. Very well done for someone who claims he doesn’t understand art.

” Diego handed the picture back. “Finn, if I could get you to one of the wild places that are left, would you want to go? That is, even if it means spending more than twelve hours in a car? I know there’s a lot of aluminum and fiberglass in cars now but still, all that steel in the frame—”

Finn interrupted by flinging his arms around Diego’s neck. “Yes, yes, I would wish to go! Put me in iron shackles. Shut me in an iron box. I don’t care one whit. If there will be wilderness at the journey’s end, I will endure anything.”

“There’s just one thing.”

“Besides being shut up in a hurtling, metal machine?”

“Easy there.” Diego rubbed Finn’s arms, trying to soothe his shaking. “Right. Besides that. You’d need certain papers to cross the border and we’ve no way to get them for you. Not legally, anyway. And I can’t afford the illegal way.”

“Ah. A letter of passage?”

“Yes, something like that. So I need to ask you to do something for me and I feel sort of ashamed asking it.”

“What would you ask of me, my hero?” Finn sat back, a wary light in his eyes.

“Until we cross the border, would you consider being my dog?”

Finn blinked at him and then let out an amused snort. “Diego, you shouldn’t fear to ask me such simple things. Save your worries for when you must have something truly difficult of me.”

“Even if it means wearing a collar for me?”

Finn flashed him a wicked grin. “Even so.”

Diego groaned when his alarm sounded at four in the morning.

It had all seemed like such a good idea—beat the rush hour traffic out of the metro area, leave enough time for stops and getting lost and still arrive at the cabin before full dark.

Now the shaky, stomach roiling sensation of forcing his body out of bed too early on a few minutes’ sleep made him want to burrow back under the covers and forget the whole thing.

The truck, though, had been delivered the evening before.

A Ridgeline, much larger than Diego was comfortable driving, but Miriam insisted he would need something built for bad roads.

All the luggage waited in the front hall and, perhaps by this time, an overexcited pooka as well.

The pastor who served as the property’s part-time caretaker would be expecting them and Miriam would kill him if he backed out now.

He had just stuck a foot outside the covers when a sudden weight depressed the mattress. Hard-nailed paws landed on his bare chest. A long tongue licked his face until he thought he might drown.

“Up, slugabed! I heard the clock. Up!”

“Finn, please.” He pushed away the wet nose nuzzling at his ear. “You might want to move your big paws if you want me to get out of bed.”

“Your pardon.”

Diego rolled up and switched on the light. A huge black dog sat at the foot of his bed, tongue lolling in a canine grin. “Does it suit?” the dog asked, feathered tail wagging madly.

“You look like a German shepherd had an affair with a wolf.”

“Is this a bad thing?”