Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4) (41 page)

His throat had closed down too hard to make words, so he nodded. That was as good—and true—an explanation as any he might have thought up.

“Are you better now? Because if you still need to go away to be better, it’s okay. You have to be careful about germs. They make
diseases
.”

He pulled her close and hugged her tight. “I’m better, Luce,” he rasped. “I’m getting better.”

He stood, and she held out her hand for him to take. As a family of three, they walked over to the new paddock, where two ponies—bigger than Trick had expected them to be, one the pinto called Rags, and the other a bay named Pete—held court with Tucker, Faith, and Demon, carrying Lana on his shoulders.

Demon handed Lana off to her mother and saddled the ponies, and then he and Trick lifted their kids into them. Demon and Faith did another handoff of Lana, and Juliana and Faith took the ponies by their leads and wandered off through the yard.

One-and-a-half-year-old Lana screeched with disappointment, and Demon swooped her in a great circle until the screech became a squeal of joy.

Lucie looked back, her hands around the horn of the saddle, her face blazing with glee. “Look, Trick! I’m riding a pony!”

“I see, Luce! You look great!”

“I know I do! This is a great day!”

When they turned the corner around the house, out of sight, Trick looked back and found Demon’s eyes on him.

“I’m okay, Deme. Working my way back.”

“I know, bro. I get it.”

~oOo~

A few days before Christmas, Trick took his girls back to Los Angeles for the day. The Griffith Observatory had scheduled one of its ‘Star Parties,’ and he’d promised Lucie, a lifetime ago, that he’d take her when she could use a telescope to see the stars.

He’d been back nearly six weeks. Almost as long as he’d been away. He marked time in his new life that way, and he thought there might be a power in having lived longer past it than he’d lived through it. He looked to the new year, less than two weeks away now, as the time when the past would stay in the past.

There was no concrete reason why that would be true, but he felt a confidence in it nevertheless.

In the meantime, he was out of the clubhouse and, to all practical purposes, living with Juliana and Lucie. They’d been talking about combing households, but their identical apartments were too small to accommodate both of their lives. He’d never thought of his material life as cluttered until he’d examined his possessions with an eye toward moving into someone else’s life.

He had a lot of books. And art supplies. Not much else, but a lot of those—and no will to thin them out.

But he had a better idea. He had a couple of better ideas.

He hoped his girls would agree.

They arrived in L.A. early and started the day at the Santa Monica Pier. They took Lucie on the Ferris wheel, played some games, and watched as a happy pink clown painted a sparkly unicorn on her cheek. Then they got hot dogs from a cart—Trick got falafel from a neighboring cart—and headed off to the next stop.

Lucie hadn’t been completely done with the Pier, but she hadn’t complained much. She rarely did.

The first time Trick brought Juliana to L.A., he’d had a specific place in mind. They’d never arrived there; their ride through the canyons and their heavy conversation over lunch had rerouted his plan. On this day, he meant to make sure they got there. So he insisted, just a little, and Lucie stopped dragging on his hand and agreed to leave the Pier.

Then he drove them to UCLA.

Though his studies had seen the full onset of his PTSD, and his first unmanageable attack, he’d loved his time on campus. He hadn’t had any clue what kind of job he’d wanted, so he hadn’t approached his coursework with an eye toward being hirable. He’d simply explored, chased his interests, and learned as much as he could, finally landing on a major he found interesting.

Some, maybe most, of his classmates had focused on doing what they had to do to get the paper that gave them some kind of magic key to prosperity, and Trick—wandering around campus in his dreads and piercings, letting his beard get bushy, getting new ink at every chance, even on his hands, taking philosophy and theory courses and arguing with the professors—had a rep as a freak.

He was accustomed to that rep now.

His favorite place on the campus was the reading room at the Powell Library. The whole building was gorgeous, a cathedral of knowledge, but the reading room—not once in all his time on campus, all the hundreds of times he’d retreated to the reverent quiet of that space—had he ever entered without pausing to look up and marvel.

To Trick, it was the most beautiful place on Earth, either natural or manmade. The ideal nexus of beauty and purpose, an almost holy perfection, clouded in silence, that made his knees want to bend in supplication.

It was impossible for him to believe that the people who had designed and built such a spectacular space, whose hands had formed it, could have had anything other than good hearts and clear consciences. So much pure perfection couldn’t have existed otherwise.

He had no expectation that either Juliana or Lucie would feel the same awe that he felt, but he wanted them to see it, and to know that he felt it.

So he took their hands and led them up the wide stairs. When they came into the room, he stopped and looked. Many months had passed since he’d last been here, and an eternity as well, but the same calm suffused him, and he closed his eyes. Every day, he felt a little better. Occasionally, he felt a lot better. There had even been brief moments of perfect forgetfulness.

Now, standing between Juliana and Lucie, holding their hands, in his favorite place in the world, with his favorite people, he felt normal.

He could have cried. He might have, but Lucie pulled on his hand at just that moment and whispered in her not-quiet-at-all way, “It looks like angels made it, way up in heaven. Did they use their wings to fly high and bring it down through the stars?”

Yes. That was it exactly.

~oOo~

They stopped for a quick dinner and then, as the sun was lowering into the horizon, they arrived at the Griffith Observatory. Before they went into the building, Trick led them to the overlook, where they could watch the sunset.

They watched for a while, and Trick pointed out some of the buildings in the cityscape below. Then, as Juliana finished telling Lucie the story of the Hollywood sign, he took two small boxes from his jacket, one a cube and one a flat oblong, and held them out to his girls, the cube to Juliana and the oblong to Lucie.

Juliana gasped.

“A present?” Lucie asked, delighted. The glittery unicorn swelled under her smiling cheek. “But Christmas isn’t here yet.”

“I know. This isn’t a Christmas present. But don’t open it yet. I want to say something first. Can you be patient?”

Lucie nodded. Juliana simply stared at him, her eyes beginning to sparkle in the reddish sunset.

He turned to Lucie and crouched down. “I love you both with my whole heart and soul. When I was away, I was lonelier for you than anything. I don’t ever want to be lonely for you again. I want you in my life forever. So I would like to marry you, if that’s okay.”

Lucie furrowed her brow at him, still smiling, but confused. “I told Mami that I wanted to marry you but she said I couldn’t because only grownups could get married.”

“Well, that’s true, but this would be a different kind of married. I would marry your mami the grownup way, but to you it would be a promise to love you forever and ever.”

“That’s what Nikki says married is.”

Trick still hadn’t looked up at Juliana. Doing so now, he saw that tears streamed down her face. She had her box clenched tightly in her fist; her hand shook.

He wasn’t sure how to take that, so he turned back to Lucie.

Maybe he’d done this wrong—he’d done this wrong. Ah, fuck. He never should have asked Lucie first. He’d thought he knew the answer, so he’d thought it was safe, and that he could make up to Lucie the hurt he’d caused her. But if Juliana meant to say no, then he’d just fucked up fantastically.

“I promise to love you forever and ever, too. Can I open my present now?”

“Yes, you can.” He felt sick now. Lucie opened her box and pulled out the little silver charm bracelet. Dangling from it were two small silver charms: a heart, one side enameled in vibrant red, the other side engraved with this date; and a round Earth, its features etched in detail. “Those are because you’re my heart and my world.”

“You give good presents!” She threw her little arms around his neck, and he held her close.

“Lulu, you forgot to say something.” The strain in Juliana’s voice stabbed at Trick’s heart and his conscience.

“I didn’t forget, Mami. I didn’t have a chance yet. Thank you, thank you!” She kissed his cheek. “Will you help me put it on?”

In no rush now to face Juliana, Trick fastened the bracelet around Lucie’s wrist. While she shook her hand back and forth, watching the charms dangle, he finally stood and opened his mouth to apologize to her mother.

“Yes,” Juliana croaked before he could speak. “God, yes.”

She’d rendered him speechless, and now he was afraid to believe what he’d heard. “Wh-I-I…” He cleared his throat. “I did it wrong. I’m sorry. I have something to say to you, too.”

“You don’t have to. That was perfect. Yes. I will marry you the grownup way.” Mirroring her daughter’s earlier move, she threw her arms around his neck.

He felt nothing but joy.

Even weeks later, Juliana still stopped for a second—just a second—to admire her ring every time the light hit it. A black opal surrounded by diamonds. Antique. Unusual. And perfect. Opal was her birthstone; black opal was her favorite.

She put her hand back on the file drawer and finished closing it.

“Hey Julie, can you call the courthouse and see if they’ve assigned the Shah case yet? It’s not showing online yet, but you seem to know somebody with pull over there.”

It was true that she had good relationships with the clerks and knew how to finesse results from them. Turning back to her desk, she smiled at Quincy Harris, one of her new bosses. “It’s nearly five, so I’m not sure I’ll catch anybody worth catching, but I can try.”

“Wait—I didn’t realize it was so late already. You need to pick up Lucie. And don’t you have class?”

“Yep. I have my seminar in constitutional law tonight.” She reached for her desk phone, prepared to make the call, but Quincy came over and put his hand over hers.

“Never mind. Go get Lucie and do your thing. I don’t want to make you late.”

Trick took care of Lucie while she was in class, but he couldn’t get away from the shop until after it closed at six—which was when her class started. So their new plan on class nights this semester: Juliana picked Lucie up at preschool and took her to Hoosier and Bibi’s, where she helped her ‘Granny Beebs’ make dinner. Trick picked her up, staying for dinner, and had Lucie home, bathed, and tucked in bed by the time Juliana got home from class.

It was perfect.

She pushed Quincy’s hand gently away, the fire and sparkle in her ring catching her eye again. “It’s fine, Quince. I can take the time to make this call. But they’re not going to answer at all in about three minutes, so shoo.”

A boss who understood that life away from work was important, too. Three bosses who understood that. As she dialed the courthouse, Juliana smiled. She should send Emily Garcia a thank-you card.

~oOo~

She came into the apartment after class that night and found Trick stretched out on the sofa, reading. He sat up as she set her bag down and draped her jacket over the back of a dining chair. Her apartment was starting to feel a bit crowded, as Trick’s things crept down from his. But they both liked things neat, so it hadn’t gotten overwhelming yet.

He was doing so much better. Since they’d been back together, he’d been making steady improvements: gaining weight, engaging more, flinching away from touch less. His nightmares still vexed him, but each day he’d become more the Trick she’d known.

And then, after the holidays, almost as if the new year itself had brought about a cure, he’d just been…
better
. Better even than he’d been since they’d first been together. In the three weeks since New Year’s Day, he’d had two nightmares. Before that, on occasion even before he’d been taken, and with frequency afterward, he’d had two nightmares a
night
.

“Hey,” he said as she sat next to him. “How was class?”

“Interesting. I’m starting to think I want to specialize more broadly than immigration law. Maybe human rights.” She laughed. “There’s no real money in that, either.”

He hooked his arm over her shoulders and pulled her close, kissing her temple. “I didn’t think you were in it for the money.”

“I’m not. I’d go into patent law if that were the case. I feel disloyal, though. I got into this because of what happened to my family. I wanted to fix the system.” With a rough laugh at her own naïveté, she added, “I just keep learning more how screwed up the system is. Like it was designed to be screwed up.” She thought about the impunity with which the government could, at its will and whim, seize and hold people and their property, the gaping loopholes in the law that allowed due process to be thwarted and basic human rights to be ignored, the ways it seemed intentionally designed, or at least interpreted, to protect only those who had wealth and power, and she despaired.