Gods and Ends (Ordinary Magic Book 3)

  And so was he.

  Except for when I closed my eyes, when I dreamed at night, or when a shadow shifted in my quiet house. Then he was everywhere, his hatred, his anger, his cruelty.

  I heard the gun in every loud noise, and in every soft silence, Rossi’s apology, “Forgive me, Delaney” right before he had shoved me into that gun, that bullet, that death. I hadn’t seen Rossi since I’d come back to life. The scratch on my neck he’d given me to prove his claim was gone, healing like a normal scratch.

  Leaving a lot of confusion behind.

  “You can start by telling me where you just went right then.” Ryder’s voice was easy, gentle. The tone he’d been using an awful lot with me lately. A tone that reminded me that maybe I wasn’t as whole and healed and strong as I hoped I was.

  I was getting there, I just wasn’t at the finish line yet.

  I rubbed my fingers through the cool condensation on my glass, trying to pull up the nerve to tell him the truth. Oh, who was I kidding? I’d never been good at lying to him.

  I lifted my gaze, and was caught by the green of his eyes, the smile that did not hold pity, only interest, only love.

  How had I gotten so lucky?

  “It’s my home. I grew up there. I love it. I know I love it.”

  He waited while I fiddled with my napkin. I thought about stealing another French fry just to sort of lighten the mood, but had a feeling he wouldn’t fall for it.

  “A lot of my good memories, years of them are in that house. But since the fight. I just can’t see past it.”

  “Move in with me.”

  And wow, that was not what I had expected. I thought he was going to offer to sleep over a few nights, maybe suggest I get someone in there to cleanse the vibes or smudge the spirits or make me buy a cat or some such thing.

  He took the utter surprise on my face in stride. “It doesn’t have to be permanent, but for a little while, a few days, a few weeks, move in with me. You can have the spare room if you want your own space. Your own bed.” He paused, then carried on as if he didn’t want to give me a chance to argue. “Spud loves you. Dog has good taste.”

  “Spud loves me, huh?”

  “Head-over-heels for you.”

  I smiled and stole another fry. “Maybe I’ll give him a little treat. To buy my way into his good graces since I’ll be taking up some of the room.”

  “He doesn’t need any gifts. Just you, Delaney. You being alive. Here. That’s gift enough.”

  I knew we were no longer talking about the dog.

  I crooked a finger at him. He raised one eyebrow, then leaned across the table. He was tall, Ryder Bailey, which was a good thing since bending forward wasn’t anywhere near a comfortable position for me yet.

  And he could read my mind a little, or maybe just my heart. Because he kissed me, and I kissed him back.

  ~~~

  Ryder drove me home and helped me pack a bag, and boxed up the perishable groceries with the ice from my freezer so we could put them in his refrigerator. He even remembered to grab my pillow and my favorite Grateful Dead T-shirt of Dad’s that I liked to sleep in, and my Chewbacca cup.

  Then he drove me to Jame and Ben’s house because I asked him to.

  “I’ll come in with you.” He wasn’t offering. He was stating.

  “I can do this on my own. We don’t have to be joined at the hip.” I said this as he stepped out of the driver’s side of his truck and came around to open my door.

  “I know you can do it on your own, but I think I’ve earned a little attached-at-the hip time, don’t you?” And that wasn’t really a question either.

  “I’m not going to do stupid things anymore,” I repeated for maybe the hundredth time. “I promised Myra.”

  “I know.”

  “You made me sign a no-stupid contract.”

  He grinned. “I did.”

  We were walking to the door. “You don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you, it’s just this town has a funny way of changing a person’s mind under the right circumstances.”

  He knocked on Jame’s door. There was a long, long pause, and I wondered if Jame and Ben weren’t home. That they’d gone back to the hospital to make sure Ben’s remarkably quick recovery was still going well.

  And then the latches shifted, the locks turned and the door slowly opened.

  “Hello, De-la-ney.” Ben’s voice was a total wreck, a mix of ragged and whispers. I didn’t know if that was going to heal fully or not—none of us knew—but he was standing.

  He was pale, brutally thin, with lines of red as if he’d been burned by hot lashes across the skin I could see on his face hands and wrist, but there was a wild living heat in his eyes.

  The smile he gave me was victorious.

  “Come in.” He shuffled back two steps, and Jame was there in the shadows, so close Ben couldn’t have taken another step if he wanted to. Jame’s hands found their familiar place on Ben’s hip, his back, as he gently steered his boyfriend, who made a half-hearted protest, into the living room.

  I followed along, my own boyfriend in a very similar support position with me. When Ryder had me settled in a soft chair across from Ben, who was on the couch and tucked between a pile of pillows and the fluffiest pinkest blanket I had ever seen in my life, I rolled my eyes at Ben and he rolled his back at me.

  “Hush now,” Ryder said.

  Jame growled.

  Ben and I grinned at each other.

  And that’s how I knew Ben was going to be okay, and really, so was I.

  ~~~

  I think almost every person in town made time to come by and see me, either at Ryder’s cabin where I rested in a chair out by the lake reveling in the last gasps of sunshine days as the cool of autumn crept into the night, or at the station where I snuck in with Jean to get some work done while Myra told both Jean and I that we shouldn’t be there until we were healed.

  I was practically buried in a landslide of casseroles, cakes, cookies, fruit baskets, coffee cards, get well cards and various bubble baths and weirdly colored stuffed animals.

  It was nice. More than nice, it was really, really sweet, even if I would be eating casseroles until the end of time.

  Shoe and Hatter had done more than stick around while we were short-handed. They’d asked to be transferred.

  We were still waiting for all the approvals and paperwork to clear, but Tillamook was looking to reduce the force due to budget cuts, and Ordinary had enough room to take on two officers, especially once Bertie heard about it and got a bond passed through so quickly, there wasn’t even time for the volunteers who had gone door-to-door to get signatures, then manned the phones for vote reminders, to organize a victory party.

  Chris Lagon had thrown an impromptu bonfire on the beach and supplied the beer, so it all worked out.

  The budget budged, thanks to the willing taxpayers of the town, and we were all set for an increased police presence.

  With the decrease of deities, I didn’t really think we needed the extra help. Then Roy reminded me that he was going to be retiring soon, and that even with my sisters and I working full-time, there still was too much work to do.

  He’d also reminded me that it was only the gods who had been vacationing in Ordinary who couldn’t come back for a year. Any other deity out there could at any time decide to take a vacation.

  And then he’d told me to take my antibiotics and threatened to make me watch the two-hour video of his golf swing practice he was supposed to review before his next class if I stayed at work with him.

  So, yeah. We were going to get new people on the force.

  Yay, us.

  But in the constant stream of well-wishers, I had not once seen Rossi. I asked Myra about it, and she told me he’d gone back to his house after the fight and she hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

  He was probably licking his wounds. Dealing with the knowledge that Lavius was gone now. The brother he had once been, the enemy he had be
come. Gone.

  The loss of a contemporary when one was many hundred years old, must be an odd thing. I’m sure I couldn’t comprehend the vastness or complexity of it.

  But turning away from the world wasn’t going to make anything better.

  On a morning that finally felt crisp around the edges with the promise of fall, I had one of my well-wishers drop me off at Rossi’s house. Ryder was already on duty and had been called out to deal with Mrs. Yates’s penguin. Someone had not only knitted, or maybe crocheted, it a full ballerina fairy ensemble, they’d also strung it with lights and suspended it over one of the intersections with a traffic light.

  The incoming high school tricksters were thinking outside the box with that one, and I made a note to have Ryder shake down the younger members of the K.I.N.K.s and C.O.C.K.s to get a couple names, confessions, and if possible, a couple fines.

  I mean, yes, it was funny and also adorable because those kids could knit and crochet. But that penguin was concrete. If it had fallen on a car or worse, pedestrian, someone could have really gotten hurt.

  So Ryder didn’t know about my visit to Rossi, but it wasn’t like I was going to see Rossi just to stir up trouble. This visit fell squarely beneath the don’t-do-anything-stupid-without-telling-me-first deal I had going with Ryder and Myra and Jean.

  That deal came with a clause that somehow dealt with actual police-business type dangers. Ryder had explained it to me, at length in bed, and I think he just did it so he could bore me to sleep.

  Mission accomplished.

  I shifted the gift under my arm–never say I was an inconsiderate caller—and rang the doorbell.

  Leon answered the door, looked me over from toe to face, his eyes only catching briefly on the thing beneath my arm, and gave me a short nod. “He’s in his office. He knows you’re here.”

  Vampires. They could spot the uniqueness of a beating heart within a mile radius.

  “Thanks.” I took my time walking back to the room where I’d last talked to Rossi about the threat of Lavius over the murdered Sven’s body.

  Even though I knew there was a high chance there were no dead bodies behind the door, I hesitated on the outside and got my emotions in order. I was still jumping at shadows. Ryder held me tight and woke me gently each night (room of my own did not mean I wanted a bed of my own) and still the nightmares were inescapable.

  This, though. This was daylight, a friend of mine. Someone who might be hurting in ways I couldn’t understand.

  I knocked softly on the door.

  “It’s open, Delaney.”

  I pushed the door and stepped inside.

  The room hadn’t changed much. There was no dead body on the coffee table (thank goodness) and the furnishings were clean line modern from a few decades ago, the walls a soft pastel and all of them lined with glass lighted shelves.

  On those shelves were carved eggs, all of them powerful in their intricacies, commanding the gaze even though they were the most fragile of prisons.

  Rossi sat on the couch, very still. There was something about the way he was just suspended in that position that made me think he had been sitting there, exactly like that, for a long time.

  His hands were flat on his thighs, head level, and eyes…oh, his eyes.

  “What happened?” The words were out of my mouth before I could think them through. Because I knew what had happened. He’d been shot too. In the face. With a bullet meant to kill a vampire just like him.

  He’d been shot other places too. His chest, I thought. My eyes ticked down and I stared at his very crisp, very clean white shirt that was just loose enough it could be covering bandages, wraps.

  “Death,” he said, his voice rusty and deep. “Death happened.”

  A hundred years of sorrow rode those words. A hundred more of longing.

  “Death might have happened, but life won. We won.”

  “I am not a living thing, Delaney.”

  “Well, not right now, apparently. You should go to the hospital and have your face looked at.”

  He turned his head just slightly, as if it weren’t used to moving anymore. He stared at me balefully out of one eye. The other was covered in a black satin patch, the bands of which disappeared beneath his long salt and pepper hair. The wound on his cheek that rode at the bottom edge of the patch looked too raw, as if fresh skin could not find purchase there.

  “There is nothing they can do for my face.”

  “Will you heal?”

  I could tell he didn’t want to answer me, but he did anyway. “In time.”

  The silence between us stretched out. The coast guard chopper rattled its way down the shoreline, enough I could hear it, not enough to disturb the precariously balanced eggs on glass shelves.

  I wondered if this was what grief, what mourning looked like on him.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  His eyebrow rose. “My loss.”

  “I know he was important—”

  “He was a blight that should have been burned out of the world years ago. A tumor I should have removed.”

  Ah. So it wasn’t sorrow, it was guilt.

  “Yeah, that would have been nice of you. But it’s not what happened. Still. We’re alive. He’s not.” I shrugged. “We win.”

  Again with the uncomfortable silence.

  “I looked for a card that said, sorry your brother was such a psychopathic dick but they were all out. So, here.” I held out the thing from under my arm.

  It took him some time before he looked away from my face and down at my hands. Like I was suddenly speaking a language he had never heard before and he needed some time to process that.

  “Why are you pointing a sheep at me?”

  “It’s not a sheep. It’s a llama.”

  “It’s blue.”

  “It’s a sad llama.”

  “Why are you pointing a sad llama at me?”

  “I’m not pointing, I’m offering.” His lips twisted in doubt. “Fine. I’m giving. I’m giving it to you as a gift and you can’t refuse because that’s rude.”

  “Delaney, I shoved you into the bullets of a killer. I broke my vow to your father. I killed my brother without an ounce of regret. Being rude isn’t much of a stretch for me.”

  “Take the llama.” I jiggled it and it made this soft little snore-gurgle. We both stilled and stared at it. He looked panicked. Maybe a little disturbed. Like he really, really didn’t want to touch it.

  Oh, he was so going to touch the heck out of it now that I knew it made noise.

  “You got me shot.” I shook the llama and it gargled at him. “Which, really, was what I’d agreed to since I was the one going in there to die so we could kill Lavius. Yes, you made a promise to my dad.”

  Shake, shake. Garbly-squeal. The look of horror on his face was priceless.

  “I made promises too,” I said. “Promises to living people in this town. And I have gone against my better judgment—you might perhaps remember I gave my soul to a demon—to find a way to keep the people I care about safe.

  “That’s all you did, Travail. You went against your better judgment and knew I was willing to take a hit so you could kill Lavius. There wasn’t any other way, I don’t think.”

  My thoughts wandered over the tarot reading Jules had given me. Nine of Swords for worry, Death for change, and the Devil for chains that needed breaking.

  “Wow,” I said, realizing how it all fit together and how right she was. “Jules should really be charging more money for her readings.”

  Rossi made a sound that was a little like a sigh and a lot like frustration. Right. We were talking llama.

  “Take the llama. This is the price I demand you pay for getting me shot. You must accept the blue llama of penance.”

  And that, that, got a small smile out of him. He was stiff, unbending as if the things inside of him were all edges rubbing together in the wrong ways, but he stretched out his hand and took the llama. He held it on just his fingertips
, as if he were afraid to let too much skin touch it.

  “You are a willful woman, Delaney. You always have been.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This toy is atrocious.” He stroked it unconsciously with his other hand. It really was remarkably soft.

  “You like it.”

  “I do not.” It was out of his fingertips now and cradled in his hands. Both his thumbs were petting the long neck and flat back. Something in the way he held himself softened. He wasn’t the easy-going love and peace and hippie-groovy Rossi that I knew so well, but he was on his way.

  “He likes you.”

  “It’s a toy, Delaney. It’s not alive.”

  “Some of my favorite people aren’t quite alive.”

  He huffed a laugh then and I grinned at him.

  “Sit down,” he said. “And let me pour you some tea.”

  MORE ORDINARY MAGIC? YOU BET!

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  Acknowledgment

  This, I thought, would be the end of our adventures in Ordinary, Oregon. Three books seemed like just the right amount to tell Delaney’s story. But then a demon happened and messed up my plans. So, I am happy to say there will be at least three more short stories set in this world, and very possibly two more books. Two short stories will come out late 2017 and then one in 2018. The two books will hopefully be out in 2018.

  I’d like to think my family for putting up with me while I pulled this book together. You are all amazing, supportive, wonderful people. Thank you to Dejsha Knight for beta reading this under ridiculous circumstances, and Sharon Elaine Thompson for doing the same. I’m not sure I can express how much your insights helped make this book better. Big shout out and heartfelt gratitude to Skyla Dawn Cameron, copy editor and formatting genius extrodinare, who came to my rescue with flying colors. Thank you to the talented Lou Harper, for once again giving this world such a fantastic cover.