Soft humming distracted me enough I bypassed a few windows to check the front porch swing.
“Odette.” I stumbled over my own feet. “I thought you’d left.”
“Without saying goodbye? Never.” She patted the spot beside her, and I sat. “I smudged the house and invoked Hecate in the upstairs guestroom where our poor Amelie rests.”
“You knew,” I surmised. “That’s why you stayed behind.” Probably why she came at all.
“The people you love are shadows to me, but I still snatch bits and pieces from others on their periphery.” Her arm snaked around me, and she pulled me down until my cheek mashed against her bony shoulder. “I don’t know why you must hurt so.” She rested her chin on top of my head. “This world seems determined to make you suffer, and I can’t see the whys or hows or whens. Sometimes I hate your mother for binding me. Sometimes I hate Maud too. They left you defenseless.”
“I’m working on it,” I assured her. “I won’t be defenseless forever.”
“Ah, bébé.” Her deep sigh rustled my hair. “I worry for you, but I do not doubt you.”
“Odette?” The smell of her skin, ocean and seagrass and sand, burned my nose in a pleasant way. “Will you sing to me?”
“Your ears would bleed.” She jostled me then jerked her chin toward the front door. “Better to leave such things to the young men inclined to serenade.”
Boaz watched us from the doorway, his expression inscrutable. “Don’t let me interrupt.”
“It’s time for me to return home.” She peppered my face with kisses then drifted over to Boaz, where she jerked to a halt, her frame trembling, and the voice that poured from her mouth was multilayered and as foreign as I imagined fae lands would be to human eyes. “You stand at a crossroads, Boaz Pritchard. Choose well, and you will have your heart’s desire. Choose poorly, and you will lose that which matters most to you.” A shudder broke the spell, and she rasped, “Choose, child, and do it soon.”
“Thank you for your wisdom, ma’am.” His tone was solemn. “Do you need a ride home?”
“I think I’ll walk.” She patted the nearest column. “Take care of our girl, old friend.”
Woolly shifted her consciousness in a wave that rippled through me, and the porch creaked agreement.
We watched until Odette vanished from sight, and then Boaz joined me.
“It’s a long walk to Tybee.” He craned his neck. “Will she be all right?”
“Odette does everything for a reason.” That much was for certain. “For all we know, she’s going to come across an accident while walking, dial 911 and save a life. Or, maybe she forgot her phone, and she stands there to bear witness to a death that otherwise might have been prevented. Either way, she sets a series of events into motion that mere mortals such as us can only begin to fathom.”
That relaxed him enough he assumed Odette’s position, draping the comforting weight of his arm across my shoulders. I folded my legs under me and settled more fully into his side while he took up the chore of rocking us. We didn’t talk. There was too much to say.
The blare of a ringtone had Boaz lifting his hips to retrieve his phone from his back pocket. “Pritchard.” He closed his eyes and listened. “Yes, sir.” A heavy exhale punched from his lungs. “Yes, sir.” His knuckles whitened around the phone. “I’ll be there, sir.” He ended the call with a mash of his thumb that could have splintered the glass. “I’m being called in. As far as the Elite are concerned, I did my job, and it’s time to get back to my unit.”
I rescued his phone before he thought better of it and hurled it in the bushes. “What about Amelie?”
“She doesn’t exist anymore, Squirt.” His heart was a relentless drumbeat in my ear. “They won’t make any allowances for her as far as I’m concerned.” His arm resettled against me. “I don’t know what we would have done without you. She has nowhere else to go, no one else to protect her.”
“I’m happy to do it.” Amelie was only the latest of Boaz’s treasures to seek asylum in my care.
Twisting on the swing, he slid his hands under my arms and lifted, hauling me across his lap so that my knees braced on the seat to either side of his hips. “Don’t make light of something that means everything to me.” Sincerity burned in his eyes. “You’re a gift that keeps giving, Grier. I open one box, and there’s another inside waiting, and another inside that and so on to infinity.” His arms linked around me, crushing me against him and forcing me to brace on his shoulders to keep from smooshing my boobs in his face, which, honestly, might have been his intention. “How do you do it? How are you this person? How are you in my arms?”
“I’m not sure who this person is yet,” I admitted. “You look at me, and you still see the girl who grew up next door, but she died in a cell in Atramentous. That Grier is a comfortable shirt I wear sometimes so I look like I fit in with you and Amelie, but it’s too small. One day I’m going to pull it on, and the buttons are going to pop off, and you’re going to see what’s really underneath.”
“I’m going to stop you there and say I’m a fan of buttons popping off any shirt you’re wearing.”
“I suspected that metaphor might get away from me.” I linked my arms behind his neck, fingernails rasping his nape. “We good?”
With his hands bracketing my hips and my thighs spilling over his, I didn’t have to shift my weight to feel his answer. “We could be very good.”
“Be serious.” I braced my forehead against his. “Just for a minute.”
The charming veneer Boaz wore like a second skin peeled away beneath my stare, revealing a passionate man stripped of his pride and arrogance. One who had fought hard to save a sibling he loved and lost her all the same. His heart was a gaping wound that made each bruise and cut easier to see. The puckered scar tissue he exposed had built up over the years we had spent apart, and it made me wonder if I wasn’t the only one who wore a familiar-looking shirt to fool people I cared for into believing nothing had changed.
“Time’s up.” The wicked curve spreading over his lips knit his fa?ade back together before my eyes. “I have to go.”
“I know.” I stayed right where I was, breathing him in. “I wish you could stay.”
“You just want me around for when you work up enough mad to holler at me about the cameras.”
“There is that.” I wanted those cameras gone yesterday, though I might be persuaded to install my own. “But I also miss you when you’re not here sucking up all the oxygen to inflate your ego.”
“Hmm.” He pressed his lips to mine. “Oxygen deprivation would explain why you haven’t wised up and left me.”
I scowled at his phone when it started going off in my hand. “Whatever they want, tell them no.”
He checked the display then answered in a clipped tone, “Whatever you want, the answer is no.”
“Boaz.” Hammering his shoulder with my fists, I gaped at him. “What are you doing?”
“Following orders, ma’am,” he told me with a wink before returning to his conversation. “Yeah, I’m on my way.” He ended the call and exhaled long and slow. “Becky says there’s a situation in Athens. Our whole unit is being deployed.”
“Is this going to be our new normal?” I leaned back to look at him. “Kisses and goodbyes?”
“I’m a soldier. This is my normal, period.” He drank in my features, his brow furrowed. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No.” I climbed out of his lap. “Slow is a good idea for us.”
Adding Amelie into the mix would complicate things before all was said and done. Gratitude might come easily to him now, but given time and space, that might change. As much as I wanted to believe he would see things from my perspective, a Pritchard attempting to view the world through High Society glasses was what started this trouble in the first place.
“You still think we’re a good idea.” He dialed up the charm. “And that we are an us.”