I was famished. We ate every bite, and then leaned back in the squeaky booth, feeling dopey on food overload.
Kaidan sat up abruptly and a look of gloom passed over his face. He motioned at me to duck lower in the booth, so I slid downward. The fearful look in his eyes reminded me of when his father had come home.
“Here comes trouble,” he whispered. I started to turn my head but he hissed, “Don’t look!”
“Where?” I asked. I was looking just at him now. He tilted his head in the direction of our waitress behind the nearby counter.
“Cover your badge,” he whispered. I looked around and snatched up the dessert menu, holding it in front of me.
I waited a second, then moved my eyes toward the waitress. She was pouring water into the coffeemaker. Her hand shook as she poured. Then she stopped to steady herself on the counter. Her hazy gray darkened, and her chin quivered. The thing that struck me most was that her white cloud, her guardian angel, was erratic, jumping around in agitation. I’d seen them do that before on occasion, but I didn’t understand why. After a moment it calmed.
The cook behind the window asked the waitress a question about an order and she snapped a response.
“It’s gone,” Kaidan whispered with relief.
“What just happened?” I asked.
“The demon spirit. You couldn’t see him?”
“I didn’t see anything.” I looked around, pressing myself smaller into the booth.
“All Neph have the ability to see them. You must not be willing.”
Our waitress came to us with undisguised impatience.
“Anything else?”
“No, thank you,” I told her. “Everything was good.”
She smacked the check on the table and took away our dishes without another word. Kaidan dug his wallet from his back pocket and laid a twenty on top of the check.
“Do you think she’s mad at us?” I asked. Although I could see emotions, I had no way of knowing their source.
“Why would she be? She’s frustrated because she can’t comprehend why she’s feeling a surge of dark emotion out of nowhere. She’ll most likely try to place the blame on something—usually another person, lack of sleep, hormones, anything—rather than dealing with the emotion. And thus begins the cycle.”
“So you’re saying”—I leaned toward him to whisper across the table—“that our waitress was just visited by a demon?”
He nodded, arranging the salt, pepper, sugars, and condiments in a neat row.
I thought about our bill and did the math in my head. She was getting about a five-dollar tip. Something told me her troubles began with money. I dug a ten-dollar bill from the savings I kept in my pocketbook and placed it on top of Kaidan’s twenty.
“You know you can’t buy happiness,” he said to me. He was so devilishly handsome that I shivered and cleared my throat. I looked back at our waitress, whose guardian angel seemed to be embracing her.
“Are the guardian angels always with them?” I asked, still watching it.
“Yup. They’re with their humans when they visit the loo... even when they’re having sex.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “You just had to go there.”
“You asked. And don’t worry. They’re way too pure and obedient to be voyeurs.”
It felt disrespectful, talking about the angels like that. I tried to think of another question.
“So the demons who visit people are in spirit form?”
“That’s right. Good thing this is a long trip. I have a lot to teach you.”
He stood, so I followed, just as our waitress came over. She eyed the two bills on the table.
“I’ll get your change,” she said.
“No, it’s yours,” Kaidan purred. He looked at her too long and her colors went from the pale green of gratitude to a rush of red.
“Yes, thank you again!” I said, louder than I’d meant to. “Have a great day!”
I nudged Kaidan’s ankle with my foot and he moved. We walked out into a beautiful Shawnee, Oklahoma, morning with our feet crunching loose pebbles in the pavement.
“This is going to be a long trip if you give girls the bedroom eyes every time we stop.” I tried to keep my tone light.
“Bedroom eyes?” he asked. We were climbing up into his car now. He sat in the driver’s seat and turned toward me. His hair flopped over his forehead, curling up at the ends against his brows. There was no roundness to his face—it was all squared-off edges. But it was those blue eyes that did it for me.
“As if you don’t know what you’re doing,” I said.
“I’m working.”
Hmph. Well.
“That poor girl has had a bad enough day without you filling her head with ideas, too.” I pulled on my seat belt with more than the necessary force and he started the car.
“I think she’s perfectly capable of coming up with ideas on her own. One might think you’re jealous, talking like that, but I can see you’re not. It’s uncanny. You’re actually concerned for her?”
“Why is that so hard to believe?”
“You don’t even know her,” he pointed out.