For Love or Magic (12 page)

“And three months later, he was dead.” Much to my shock and horror, my vision blurred. I sniffed and blinked and the tears rolled down my face and dropped onto my shirt. I could feel my chin quivering and my lips quaking and I knew that the skin behind my eyebrows was turning bright red, the way it always did when I cried hard.

Goddamn him,
I thought.
Goddamn him.

Emerson reached across Amber's desk, retrieved a box of Kleenex, and handed it to me. He let me swipe at my face for a moment, and just when I thought I had gathered myself, Seamus moved closer to me, situating himself protectively between me and my father, and that set me off again.

Dumb dog.

“Oh, punkin,” Emerson said, his voice soft and full of compassion. “I'm real sorry about that.”

I swiped at my face and tried to keep my voice even. “Did you kill him?”

He shook his head. “All I wanted was for you to have a safe place to land if anything ever happened. I never meant for it all to happen this way.”

“That doesn't answer my question. Jesus. I shouldn't have to parse every word to see if you're telling me the whole truth. Do you realize how fucked up that is?”

“Watch your language,” Emerson said. “I raised you to talk like a lady.”

“You didn't raise me at all,” I shot back. “Mom did, and when she was gone, I finished the job on my own. You worked, and used us as lab rats.”

Emerson sighed, and took a moment to compose himself before sidestepping that subject altogether. “I bought a house so you'd have a place to go when things fell apart. I wanted you to have a community, a safe place to land when Judd's cheating came out. I knew you wouldn't let me do that for you, so I used your husband.”

I snorted. “A safe place full of
magicals
? You're gonna tell me that's just a coincidence?”

“It's who you are,” he said.

“You don't know me,” I shot back. “You don't know who I am. You had no right to dose that lasagna. I had Mom bind my powers for a reason, because that's what
I
wanted.”

He looked at me, his expression sad. “You know as well as I do that your magic was always going to come back, someday. You can't bind magic forever. Magic always finds its way back, and I wanted to make sure you were in a safe place when it did. Did I go about that the wrong way? Well, maybe I did. And I'm sorry for it, but I'm just trying to protect you.”

“What about these people?” I said. “What are you trying to do to them?”

He gave me a confused look. “What are you talking about?”

“Mom…” I said, barely able to choke out the word. “When she bound my magic. Before she died. She told me that you'd try to use me to do it all again. She told me I had to run…” I trailed off, staring at my father's stunned expression.

“Punkin…” he said, and reached for me, but I stepped back.

“Don't touch me,” I said.

He watched me for a while, his expression perplexed, but I couldn't tell if it was genuine or not. I was too upset. I took in a shaky breath and wiped more tears from my face, willing myself to calm down. I couldn't arm my bullshit detector if I was all frazzled.

“I'm sorry your mother told you that,” he said after a long moment. “She was angry, and scared, and—”

“Because she was
dying,
” I shot at him. “Because of something
you
did.”

His eyes flared, and his face reddened. “If I had thought for one second that things would go as badly as they did…”

“If you were so sure it was going to be okay, then why weren't you in that basement with us?”

“Don't,”
he said, and in the force of that one word, I felt like a little girl again, chastened and submissive to the father she both feared and loved. “I lost everything that day,” he said after a few moments. “I came home to a town where I'd had friends to find them dead. My wife, dead. My daughter, gone.” He took a deep breath, gained control, and met my eye. “I'm not innocent. I was overseeing that experiment. I knew what they were trying to do. I didn't know it would go so wrong. You have to believe me, if I'd had any idea—”

“Stop.” I shook my head and held up my hands, pushing the memories away. My mother's eyes going blank and turning toward the ceiling. Del's empty house, with lights on and the TV playing, as I drove my mother's car out of town to abandon it at a bus stop in Portland, Maine. “Twenty-eight people died, including Mom, and I had to watch it happen while you sipped chardonnay in Martha's Vineyard. So don't you
ever
talk to me about that day again.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding, his voice hoarse. “Okay.”

We stood there, both of us breathing hard, and I tried to get a grip on myself. My hands were shaking, and I felt like the tiniest nudge could send me toppling over. I had taken the documents my mother had, in her prescience, prepared for me and run from it all. I had sealed off that part of my life, and thought about it as little as possible. That was how I'd gotten through it, and I had no desire to go back.

“I will say one thing,” he said finally. “I don't know what your mother told you. She might have believed it, I don't … I don't know. She was angry with me, and she had good reason. I wasn't a very good husband. Wasn't a great father, either. But you are not a danger to the people here. You can stay, or you can go, but I need you to know that. I love this town. My work here is to make things better. There are magicals here, and I just wanted to give you a place where you didn't have to hide who you were. That's all I ever wanted for you.”

“Stop,” I said, and swiped at my face. I had no more will to fight him, and when he put his arms around me and held me to his chest, I broke. I leaned into him and God help me, even in the clutches of the dragon, I felt safe for the first time in a really,
really
long time.

“I am so sorry, punkin,” he said, kissing the top of my head. There was emotion in his voice, and I believed it. I knew he loved me. I knew he missed me. I knew he was sorry, and that he wanted to know me. I just wasn't stupid enough to believe that was all there was to it, and that's what made it so hard. He was a wonderful, loving, funny, adorable man, but he was also one of the most ruthless bastards I'd ever known. Which Emerson Streat you got depended entirely on what he wanted at the moment, and I couldn't handle that. At least with Judd, I always knew he was working an angle. With my father, it was never clear, you never knew exactly where you stood, if it was in a safe haven or over a trapdoor that could drop you at any moment.

After a while, I pulled away from him. I ran through a handful of tissues getting all the tearful gunk off my face and pulled Seamus to my side as I headed toward the door.

“What can I do to make it up to you?” Emerson said. “Ask me for anything, it's done.”

I stared up at him. I was exhausted. My mind was in a whirl. I had no idea what he wanted, and until I found out, there was no way I could leave. He'd just find another way to pull me back in again. Whatever dance we were doing, we were dancing it here, and we were dancing it now.

“There's a guy from town who kind of ran off a few months back,” I said. “He was ASF.”

Emerson's expression gave away nothing. Maybe he was the reason Tobias disappeared, maybe he wasn't. But either way, he had the power to help.

“He might have gone away because he wanted to, but if he didn't, if ASF called him away or if—god help you—you had something to do with it, I want you to get him back. Free and clear from either agency, if that's what he wants.”

At least he didn't pretend that he didn't have the power to do exactly what I'd asked. “I'll do what I can.”

“Good.” I tightened my grip on Seamus's leash and resisted the urge, on the chance it might help Tobias, to tell him it wouldn't make a difference in our relationship no matter what he did. “I have to go.”

“Wait.” Emerson walked up to me, glancing quickly outside to see if there was anyone there who might see. There wasn't. He held out his hands, and golden light dashed around them. A moment later, he had the stem of a brilliant pink gerbera daisy in his hands, and held it out to me.

I stared at it, flooded with memories of a childhood filled with those daisies. Whenever he'd been gone too long on a business trip, whenever I skinned a knee, whenever I was sad or upset, he'd made me a magical daisy, and I'd loved every one. They'd fade away after a few hours, so you never had to watch them wither and die. They were beautiful, and then they were—
poof!
—gone.

And I'd been dreaming of them for years.

I looked up at his face in quiet wonder. Most of the agency magicals were truly dangerous, with powers that could kill. My father had creative magic, he made imaginary
flowers,
for Christ's sake, and yet, there he'd been, running the most dangerous magical agency the world had ever known. I'd often wondered at the more mundane skills he'd used to move to the top, to inspire the loyalty and respect of magicals who could kill him with just a thought. This man was capable of things I couldn't begin to imagine, and yet, his essential nature was gentle.

And treacherous.

“No, thank you,” I said finally. Then I pulled on Seamus's leash and left.

 

Chapter 7

Once the decision was made to stay, there was really nothing left to do but go to work. My first shift at Happy Larry's was that afternoon, and I kind of liked it. I made a doggie lean-to out of pallets for Seamus, and set it up for him out in the back alley with food and water, shoveled up after him at the end of my shift, and it worked out pretty well. I'd tucked a pocket mixology book in the back of my jeans just in case, but mostly it was just pulling drafts and pouring the occasional whiskey neat. By the time I went home at 2:45 in the morning, I felt too tired to think about my father very much, and that was fine by me.

By my second shift the following day, I felt like I'd been working there forever. The crowd was mainly guys with names like Red and Skinner, sporting inadvisable facial hair and wearing torn jeans and old, faded flannel shirts, and who would say things like, “Fuckin' A!” and, “Wanna go and make out in my truck?”

“No,” I told Frankie Biggs, and slid his beer across the bar to him. It was quarter after five in the afternoon, and I'd been on my shift for little better than an hour, but already I was in no mood for this bullshit.

“Why not?” he said. “I got air-conditioning.”

“Well, in that case,” I said,
“no.”

He grinned at me, and I still couldn't see his teeth for his big, thick moustache. “C'mon, Eliot. I never made out with a chick with a dude's name before. It's kind of hot.”

“I've made out with chicks with dude's names.” That wasn't really true, although I had kissed a boy named Kelly once. “Trust me, it's overrated.”

Frankie hesitated for a moment, his head angling to the side a bit, like a dog who knows something interesting just happened, but isn't sure what it was.

“Did I just break you?” I asked after a protracted silence.

“No.” He cleared his throat, put his hands on the bar, and went for it again. You had to hand it to Frankie; he wasn't smart, but he had determination.

“It's slow in here,” Frankie said. “Come on outside with me. Life's short.”

“Yours is gonna be real short if you don't stop bugging me.”

“Give me one good reason why not, and I'll leave you alone.”

“I'll give you two. One, I'm married.” I held out my fist for him to check out the pathetic wedding set Judd had insulted me with; the only thing it was ever good for was keeping guys like Frankie off my back. “And two, you've got a crazy girlfriend.”

I nodded toward the worn-out pool table in the corner over which Amber Dorsey gyrated to “Sweet Home, Alabama” while lining up her shot. She'd been there at five on my last shift, too; it was possible Emerson was sending her out to keep an eye on me, but it was more likely that she was just a hard-core barfly. Even if Frankie Biggs tempted me—and let's be absolutely clear, he didn't—I had no intention of getting between him and the wildcat.

“Aw, she's not my girlfriend,” Frankie said.

“Either way, she's your problem, and I'm not making her mine.” And with that, I made myself busy cutting lemons. I glanced around the room, and my eyes caught on Desmond, who was sitting in his booth in the corner, reading. I couldn't tell what he was reading this time, but it wasn't the Sartre, which was reassuring.

“Hey.” Skinny fingers with long, red nails snapped in my face and I stepped back a bit to see Amber shoving her empty martini glass at me. “I want another Cosmo.”

“You got it.” I slid the lemons—and more importantly, the knife—way out of her reach, then grabbed her glass and smiled at her, remembering advice my mother had given me when I was very young;
don't poke the crazy bear.
If ever there was a woman that advice applied to, it was Amber Dorsey. I let her be as rude as she wanted, never complained that she didn't tip, and pretended I didn't hear her when she called me a bitch under her breath, which happened on occasion, usually after Frankie tried to get somewhere with me. I was grateful she didn't know that what I was serving her wasn't, strictly speaking, a Cosmo; it was Hawaiian punch decanted into a pitcher and pretending to be cranberry juice, mixed with a shot of the world's cheapest vodka and a dash of lime.

Larry might be happy, but that's only because he's a cheap goddamn bastard.

She watched me, her eyes narrowing. “Are you
really
Mr. Streat's daughter?”