“No reason.” Either a paw or a foot landed on the back of my head. I coughed to cover up my sudden lurch forward, then refocused on her as Reyes shot a warning glare over his shoulder. “But if I did have a reason, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
“Drop the case,” Reyes said.
But the receptionist’s reaction caught my attention. A sadness came over her. She looked down and took a long drag off an e-cigarette. “Not really. I just thought maybe you were, I don’t know, investigating or something. Like undercover maybe.”
Unless she knew what I did for a living, that was an odd thing to think. “Why would I be undercover?”
She shrugged again. “Because there was an investigation, but then nothing happened.”
“Really?” I was having a hard time hearing her over Angel’s screams. Apparently Artemis was going for the jugular.
“I’m not kidding, Dutch,” Reyes said. He leaned close until his mouth was at my ear. “Drop the fucking case.”
I tried to make my next move appear completely innocent, as though I were just looking around when I turned to face off against my husband.
His gaze sparkled with a mixture of interest and frustration. His expression hard. His full mouth set. Until I dropped my gaze to it and whispered the one question I knew he wouldn’t answer: “Why?”
He eased back, the muscles in his jaw working as he turned away from me, propped an elbow on the window frame, and rested a hand at his mouth in thought.
We had agreed a few days ago no more secrets between us. Ever. Funny how long that accord didn’t last.
“Besides, if you were undercover,” the girl continued, “you’d know more about copiers than you do. You would have brushed up on them so you didn’t look like you were undercover.”
“Ah”—I raised an index finger and turned back to her—“but maybe that was all part of my master plan. Maybe I went in without knowing that much about copiers to throw you off my scent, so to speak. If I’d known too much…” Okay, that sounded dumb, even to me. “Never mind. What’s your name, hon?”
“Tiana.”
“Tiana. That’s gorgeous.”
She shrugged and nodded a shy thank you.
“Can we go somewhere to talk?”
As she mulled over my proposition, I ignored Angel’s pleas for help and my husband’s sudden shift into a draconian style of domesticity. Thankfully, Angel’s cries were more laughter than agony. But Reyes’s mistaken impression that I’d actually comply with his ridiculous demands lay somewhere in that gray area between adorable and assault with intent to kill.
Tiana nodded and said, “Okay. As long as it’s far away from here.”
*
To say that the receptionist was paranoid would have been an understatement had she not had good reason. We sat in an out-of-the-way restaurant in Rio Rancho called the Turtle Mountain Brewing Company, which was about twenty minutes from where she worked.
Reyes had dematerialized the moment I started Misery, his heat scalding my skin and leaving it warm the entire trip. I’d lost both my other two passengers when Artemis plowed into Angel as I was going seventy on Paseo Del Norte. I watched as they fell onto the pavement. Cringed as car after car rolled over them. Or, well, through them. They were so into re-creating the Battle of Gettysburg that they didn’t notice, thank goodness.
The devastation of losing my passengers didn’t affect my appetite in the least. I was enjoying a killer green chile pizza called the Chimayo. I wanted to marry the pizza and have its babies, but the server said it was already spoken for. Damn it.
My jesting, however, had eased the tension roiling in Tiana’s stomach. She chowed down on a sub called the Sun Mountain. It looked amazing, and I had to resist the urge to ask for a bite. At least until we got to know each other better. I gave it ten minutes.
“You don’t understand. It’s not any one thing,” she explained. We were, of course, discussing her coworker. “I can’t really put my finger on it. I mean, Eve and her husband are, like, super religious.”
“Religious?”
“Yeah, but not your everyday kind of religious. They’re like the nut kind of religious. They believe they are here for a reason.”
“Here?”
“On Earth. They think God put them here to…” She laughed softly as though the very thought made her uncomfortable. “I can’t even say this out loud without cringing, but they think God put them here to fight evil.”
“Okay,” I said, a little taken aback. “Well, it’s good to know we have someone on our side, yes?”
She let out a breath that was part amusement and part relief. It must have felt good to talk with someone about her concerns.
“You don’t think they’re the good guys?” I asked.
“I think they think they are, but they go about it the wrong way. I’m surprised Dr. Schwab hasn’t fired Eve. Especially after her latest catastrophe.”
That perked me right up. I encouraged her to elaborate by inching closer.
She met me halfway. “She told one of our mothers that her son was evil. Told her to be careful and watch for signs of the beast.”