Page 18 of Outside the Veil (Endangered Fae #1)

Chapter ten

Visitation

T ara turned the wide brim of her hat around and around in her fingers. “I wish I had better news for you, Mr. Sandoval. I really do.”

She’d seen guys upset over losing dogs before but this man was crushed flat.

Good-looking, in a young Antonio Banderas kind of way.

At least he probably cleaned up nice when he showered and shaved and got some sleep.

He sat on the top porch step and held the collar in both hands, staring at it as if it might talk to him.

“He must have been something special, eh?”

His brittle laugh made her cringe. Any second now, he’ll fall apart. He surprised her, though, answering in a gentle, steady tone.

“Special, yes. That’s a good way to put it. Thank you. For bringing it out to me.”

“No trouble at all. I was up this way. Like I said, we’ll all keep an eye out. Ask visitors if they’ve seen him.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You going to be here for a few days yet, Mr. Sandoval?”

He nodded, eyes on the collar again. “I… Probably. I’ll call you when I decide to go back home.”

Tara climbed into her jeep and drove off, her heart aching for the dejected figure on the steps, dwarfed by that enormous house.

“It’s not as if he was a tame lion,” Diego whispered to his reflection in the window. The line from the children’s book failed to comfort him, though.

I should pack up and go home.

He didn’t. He delayed another day and another. The weather looked threatening. He didn’t feel well. Finn might come back. He couldn’t disappear without saying goodbye.

The book still hung over his head, so he tried his best to forge on, Finn’s taped voice both a comfort and a torment.

Chapter 7—Relationships

Your liaisons with humans all seem to have been short ones. A night or two at most. Haven’t you ever had longer affairs?

“With humans? Yes.”

And?

“I truly don’t want to discuss it. Could we talk about something else? Anything else?”

How about relations with nonhumans?

“Oh, well, those can’t be helped. When one is a duck in the springtime and approached by an amorous female…”

Um, I didn’t mean that. Other intelligent beings.

“Ducks are far from stupid.”

(The long pause on the tape is me counting to ten.)

Other magical beings, I meant.

“Why didn’t you say so, then? Merciful currents, how am I to glean your meaning when you’re so circuitous?

Yes, from time to time one of the sidhe would catch my eye, or a merrow.

There was a silkie off the southern coast who would swim upriver in the summers to guest with me.

She was quite lovely. Silken hair and silver-shimmer skin. And the way she wrapped her…”

(Thistle rhapsodizes at some length about the silkie’s talents.)

“I’ve embarrassed you somehow.”

No, not at all.

“Ah. You often turn such a fascinating shade of crimson.”

Fine, maybe a little.

“So I shouldn’t tell you about the five mer-siblings I had in one night?”

All at once?

“Interesting thought, but no. Mind you, I was a wee bit tired in the morning.”

I bet. But if you’re sleeping with multiple partners, don’t some get jealous?

“Sleeping with? That would be one of those odd things you say when you mean something else, wouldn’t it? A…what’s the word…a euphemism. No one was sleeping, bucko.”

You know what I meant.

“Are you quite well? You’re nearly purple now.

Truly, I don’t quite understand it but, yes, some of the sidhe can be territorial regarding their lovers.

One found me entwined in her husband’s arms. Enraged, she encased me in a prison of hardened swamp mud until I begged pardon to her satisfaction.

Dreadful stench, stayed in my nostrils for weeks.

You would think I’d devoured her children, the way she ranted. ”

Diego slumped on the porch steps, staring at the coffee he couldn’t drink.

The empty black space lodged under his heart threatened to engulf him.

He might have felt better if he could have mustered some anger.

Good, solid, justified anger. But how could he be furious with someone for whom constancy and fidelity were foreign concepts?

How could he justify even a moment’s annoyance when he had repeatedly pushed Finn away?

I’m a damned fool.

He’d sunk so far into brooding, the irritating sound didn’t register as the phone until the seventh or eighth ring. He cleared his throat twice before he could force out a hello.

“Diego? You sound like hell.”

“Miriam. I’m not…feeling very well.”

“You had a seizure last night?”

“No, nothing like that.”

During the pause, he could picture Miriam’s frown.

“Oh, shit, sweetie. Did you lose another one?”

“Excuse me?”

“Finn. Has he left you?”

“Can we keep this professional today, please? I can’t handle anything else right now.”

“’Kay, sorry. I emailed a contract offer to you. If you’re good with it, send me a thumbs-up and I’ll FedEx the docs to you to sign. It’s a fair deal, kiddo, but you let me know if it’s enough.”

“All right.”

“Your first book deal and that’s the best you can manage,” she muttered. “You need me to come up there?”

“No. Miriam. Look, I’m… I’m so sorry. Thank you. Really. I’ll jump up and down and holler and whoop when I feel better.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

He closed his eyes as he hung up the phone and tried to find some spark of triumph or joy. Nothing.

“I have to go home,” he told his ghastly reflection.

Home, where people needed him. Home, where all the sounds had names and the nights were never half so dark.

Home, where the oppressive silence of his empty apartment waited for him.

With the afternoon well underway, he couldn’t start for home until morning.

He packed instead, trying not to think about each thing Finn had worn or touched.

His eyes stung when he picked up Finn’s sneakers.

Those beautiful feet. Maybe he should leave Finn’s clothes, just in case.

And the food in the fridge. He’d leave that out, too. Someone would eat it out in the woods.

That evening he gagged down a piece of dry toast, sat down to read the offer, and choked on his water when he reached the proposed figures. A fair deal, Miriam had said. For him, the sum represented a king’s ransom, a nice parcel of isolated land and a comfortable cottage’s worth. Without Finn.

He buried his head in his hands and wished he could cry.

Three-quarters full, the moon glared at Diego through the front room windows. Why are you still here , it seemed to say. You’re an idiot twice over because you never belonged here or with him in the first place.

He entertained thoughts of suicide. In a purely theatrical sense since he could never carry through with it, but the morbid scenes persisted.

Park Rangers arriving days too late to find his body stretched out on the front steps in a pool of dried blood, flies buzzing around his sightless eyes.

Finn’s return greeted by the dry sound of his feet scraping the side of the kitchen stool he’d stepped from, his body swinging in a slow circle from the rope tied to the rafters.

There were practical issues, of course. He didn’t own a gun and wouldn’t know how to use one.

The thought of slitting his wrists and leaving all that blood for someone else to clean up made him ill.

The ceilings were too high here for him to reach the rafters, and he didn’t think the ceiling fan in the kitchen would support a man’s weight.

Most of all, his father had been through enough and how would his sister explain to her children that Tio Diego had committed such a cowardly act?

A scratch at the door jerked him from his brooding.

He stood in the dark, heart pounding, and listened.

There. Another hissing scratch, as if fingernails were being drawn across the wood.

He held his breath and eased toward the door, not certain why he tried to walk so quietly. Probably a raccoon or a few leaves.

He flipped on the houselights, porch, side spot and garage. A hasty scrabbling followed, and the retreat of heavy feet down the front steps. Two feet, not four.

“Finn?” The word escaped as a whisper. But Finn would have said something, wouldn’t he? Something terrible must have happened. Hurt and frightened, he might not be able to speak.

Diego’s hand trembled on the doorknob. Gripped by unreasoning fear, he stood paralyzed. What if it was someone else? Something else? But, damn it, he couldn’t let Finn slip away again.

With a low sound in his throat, he rushed to the fireplace, grabbed the tongs then flung open the door. The porch stood empty. He took a step out. The tongs rattled in his shaky grip. He reached back and eased the door shut behind him.

“Anyone out here?”

The wind whipped in a sudden gust, its voice through the porch columns a bestial moan. Movement caught the edge of his vision and Diego spun to his left toward the garage. A pale, naked figure stood just outside the circle of light, staring up at him. Wild ebony hair twitched in the wind.

“ Dios . Finn.” Diego’s lungs restarted and he held a hand out at he walked, one careful step at a time, toward the garage. “Stay there, please. Don’t move. I’ll come to you. What’s happened? Are you hurt? Finn? Talk to me…”

He placed the fire tongs on the grass, realizing belatedly how threatening they would look.

Finn made no movement toward him, or away, as he edged closer.

The sense of something profoundly wrong escalated with each step.

Finn’s skin stretched taut across too prominent bones.

Dark patches mottled his arms and chest. His eyes, half hidden under his matted hair, stared unblinking from sunken hollows.

Diego stopped out of arm’s reach. “Give me something here, Finn. Anything. You’re scaring the hell out of me.”

Finn’s lips stretched into a chill smile, exposing yellow, pitted teeth. Diego staggered back when a wall of carrion stench slammed into him.

Oh, God, not Finn. This thing is not Finn…

The thing’s mouth never moved from its obscene leer, but as the wind rose, saturated with the stench of decay, it whispered his name.

His limbs leaden and trembling, Diego stumbled back another step. He had to get away, to run, but his legs wouldn’t obey.

A shrill scream ripped the air, far from human.

He jerked his head around toward the trees.

Blacker than the shadows, a huge horse erupted from the woods.

Riderless, sparks flew with every strike of its hooves on stone.

Its eyes blazed crimson flame as it bore down on him.

Caught between nightmare and nightmare, Diego lost the ability to move in any direction.

A thousand tortured voices shrieked on the wind. The Finn-thing’s mouth stretched further, opening wide enough to swallow his head, as if its jaws unhinged like a serpent’s. With an impossible leap, it sprang upon him and seized his arms.

The night shattered into a thousand jagged splinters.