I scrutinized his face. When Sean first moved into the Avalon subdivision, he’d caused a mild epidemic of swooning. If someone looked up “ex-military badass” in the dictionary, they would find his picture. He was closing on thirty, with a handsome face he kept clean-shaven, russet-brown hair cut short, and an athletic, powerful body. He was strong and fast, and crossing him was a dumb idea. He was also a werewolf without a planet, something the overwhelming majority of people on Earth had no idea existed. Several months ago, while Sean helped me defend the Avalon subdivision from an interstellar assassin, he’d learned about his origins and then left to find himself. He ended up being trapped in an interstellar war in a place called Nexus, and it took all my resources to break him free of it.
The war took a toll. A long scar now marked his face. The pre-Nexus Sean had been arrogant and aggressive. This new Sean was quiet and patient, and if you peered into his clear amber eyes, you would find a steel hardness. Sometimes you would see nothing at all, as if you were gazing into the eyes of a tiger. No hunger, no rage, just an inscrutable watchfulness. Sean and I had gone to the movies three nights ago, and a drunk guy tried to pick a fight with us outside the theater after the show. Sean looked at him, and whatever that man saw in Sean’s eyes must’ve cut right through the alcohol haze, because the drunk turned around without a word and walked away.
I could handle the arrogance and the anger, but that watchful nothing alarmed me. He hid it well enough. I saw him have conversations with people around the neighborhood, and none of them ran away screaming. But the nothing was still there. He didn’t say more than two words to me through the whole evening. With his other neighbors, he took pains to pretend to be normal, but I knew exactly what he went through. With me he was himself, and that Sean held the door open for me, offered me his jacket when he thought I was cold, and put himself between me and the drunk, but he wasn’t talking. Whatever he had lived through on Nexus had pushed him outside the normal human life and I wasn’t sure I could pull him back into the light.
“How did you know?” he asked. “I stayed off the inn grounds.”
“The peace summit gave the inn a boost. Gertrude Hunt is spreading its roots and you skimmed the zone of the new growth.” I pushed slightly. The boundary of the inn glowed with pale green for a second and faded again. “That’s the new boundary.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll keep it in mind. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Couldn’t sleep?” I pulled the cardigan tighter around myself.
“Just have a feeling, that’s all.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“Like something is going to happen.”
“If something is going to happen, we might as well wait inside.”
And I just invited him in. In the middle of the night. While wearing a cardigan and a Hello Kitty sleeping T-shirt that barely came to my mid-thigh. What exactly was I doing?
“Do you want to come in?” My mouth just kept going. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
Brilliant.
An amber sheen rolled over his eyes. “At two o’clock in the morning real men drink coffee. Black.”
He took his coffee with cream. Was that a joke? Please be a joke.
“Aha. And do they wait to drink it until it’s old and bitter and then compare the chest hair growth it produced?”
“Possibly.”
Definitely a joke. Hope sparked inside me. It was tiny, but it was so much better than nothing.
“Well, if any men here would dare to drink a cup of sissy hazelnut coffee with lots of cream, they are welcome to come inside.”
He leaned a little closer. “Are you inviting me in?” His voice held just a touch of suggestion to it.
Suddenly I wasn’t so cold anymore. “Well, you’re already here, it’s freezing, and we can’t just stand here on the balcony and talk. Someone might see us and get the wrong idea.”
Actually, nobody would see us, because it was the middle of the night and if we got in trouble, the inn would screen us from the street.
He leapt off the branch and landed softly next to me. He was so very… tall. And standing too close. And looking at me.
“Wouldn’t people get the wrong idea if they see me sneaking into your house in the middle of the night?”
I opened my mouth, trying to think of something clever to say.
The sky above Park Street split in an electric explosion of yellow lightning and spat a boost bike.
Sean whipped around.
The needle-shaped aboveground craft tore down the road a foot above the payment, its engine roaring loud enough to wake the dead. The windows in the inn vibrated. Car alarms blared down the street.
Oh no.
The deafening blast of sound receded and came back, growing louder. The idiot had turned around and was coming back this way. Sean took off, leaping over the balcony.
“Smother cannon,” I barked.
The roof of the inn split open, the shingles flowing like melted wax, and a three-foot-long cannon barrel slid out.
The boost bike thundered, engine roaring.
Lights came on in the two closest houses. Damn it.
The boost bike shot into my view.
“Fire.”
The cannon made a metallic ting. The lights in the Ramirez residence went out. The lamp post turned dark. The engine of the boost bike died like someone had thrown a switch.
An electromagnetic pulse is a terribly useful thing.