SAN FRANCISCO flirted with Quinn from behind its veil of fog and drizzle. It stretched out in front of him, a lushly curved and redolent landscape of mounds and flats shimmering between thinning misty patches, a coy Rubenesque tease, casually seducing him with a peekaboo dance. He’d woken up too early to do anything other than make coffee, dress his cat in a sweater, and take her to the one spot he’d found he could breathe without the walls closing in on him—the warehouse’s rooftop shanty-house tent overlooking San Francisco Bay.
Unfortunately, it was also where everyone was able to find him.
A thick faux mink blanket kept back most of the Sunday morning chill, and Harley settled her floppy body beneath the crimson cover with a contented sigh, her whippet-thin tail slowly marking time in slow slashes over his toes. Along with the cat, he’d brought up a large, thick-walled thermos big enough to hold nearly a quart of coffee and a book he’d been meaning to finish for years, but as captivating as Kingsbury’s world-building was, Quinn’s thoughts wandered away from the maran-Kaiel of Geta and back to the profane destruction of his peaceful life.
The truck didn’t make sense. The fire didn’t make sense. Someone fucking up his car and house was insane, but as often as Quinn turned the events over in his mind, he couldn’t find a connection to an event or person to the craziness he’d found himself in. And if the police didn’t find one soon, he’d go crazy living in his older brother’s back pocket.
“Or I’ll kill all of them.” He spoke to Harley’s serpentine tail, nudging at his cat’s belly with his bare toes. She lazily grabbed at them, a molasses-fluid movement beneath the plush cover, and her teeth gently gnawed at his anklebone, a halfhearted attack she lost interest in nearly as soon as she launched it. A few licks at the barely fanged skin, and she went slack again, her soft, even snorfling tickling the bottom of Quinn’s foot.
It was a comfortable three-sided tent, and Miki’d built a nest out of papasan frames and about a thousand soft pillows on the large riser Kane’d built to keep the area out of any standing water. The Miki-nest was set to the side, away from a circle of chairs and tables where they normally gathered on clear nights, a slice of an Irish pub set above the busy streets below.
In the rain-drenched mornings, however, the nest was all Quinn’s.
He dreaded the sound of the rooftop door opening, its telltale creak nearly as ominous as any below-board thump written by Poe, but he knew it would come. Hardly an hour went by without someone seeking him out and hunting him down, as if he’d become a fragile glass ornament being tossed around in a game of hot potato.
“It’s because Mum raised them. She always has to poke. And she’s passed that on to them. Each and every single one of them. Double dose for Con,” Quinn muttered at his oblivious and uncaring cat. Nudging Harley again got him a tiny mewl, its sweet rasp almost drowned out by the squeak of the access door opening. “Fuck, it’s like clockwork. Kane just won’t leave—”
The man stepping through the swirling fog definitely wasn’t his older brother. Kane never in his life possessed the liquid grace and feral prowl of the sienna-haired man walking across the warehouse rooftop. No, the slender pour of muscle and sinew coming toward him was Kane’s lover, Miki, a sure sign Quinn’s older brother was stooping to playing dirty to roust him out of his solitude.
But the oddly conflicted expression on Miki’s face turned Quinn’s snarling protest to be left alone to dust in his throat.
Quinn moved over without thinking, opening up a space for Miki. He was ill-dressed for the brisk weather, a thin T-shirt and jeans holier than Quinn’s grandmother, the ex-nun. He lifted up the edge of the blanket and waited for Miki to get settled under in its toasty warmth.
Miki was having none of it.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Do I look like I’m going to crawl under there—”
“It’s freezing, and your lips are turning blue. I have a blanket, hot coffee, and the pillows,” Quinn pointed out. “It’s stupid to stand there to talk to me when you could be warm. And why wouldn’t you want to be warm?”
Miki’s hazel eyes churned gold and flat, but he shucked his shoes off, then climbed in under the blanket. Grumbling under his breath, he shivered against Quinn. “Like some fucking slumber party or something. You guys are so damned weird.”
“Weird but warm.” Quinn felt Harley slither over his ankles, more than likely trying to get away from the shot of cold air he’d let in.
A moment passed, then two, and just when Quinn was about to ask what was wrong, Miki spat out, “Your fucking cousin’s an asshole.”