“What’s he doing here?”
“He lives here.” I had my gun trained on Nolan, but my finger was nowhere near the trigger, and the muzzle was aimed at his collarbone rather than his heart. If I was forced to shoot him, I didn’t want to kill him.
“He can’t live here. This’s Brigit’s ’partment.”
So I wasn’t the only one letting a dead girl maintain ownership of things in the living world. Good to know.
Nolan, whose skin was normally a beautiful caramel color owing to his half-black, half-Hispanic parentage, looked downright peaked, his complexion turning an ugly, sallow green.
“Nolan, put my father down, please.”
And there, with that magic word, I managed to get through the fog of his grief and give him something he could understand. His attention shifted from Sutherland to me, and he must have done the same double take two or three times, trying to process the connection.
Yes, Sutherland looked younger, still as fresh-faced and innocent as the day he died. But there was no mistaking the family resemblance. Nolan had never met my mother, but I was as much Sutherland’s daughter as I was hers. And given that neither my father nor I could spend any time in the daylight, the similarities were magnified by our shared pale skin and light blond hair.
Nolan let go of Sutherland, and my father didn’t even bother touching his neck. He wandered past Nolan and sat back on the couch like nothing had ever happened.
It would be a gross understatement to say Sutherland wasn’t all there.
He was fucking nuts.
But not the kind of crazy that went out on killing sprees, which was why he was allowed to live on his own, outside the watchful eye of the Council. He talked to himself, and what he said generally didn’t make a lick of sense, but it was hard to expect more when his sire, Theo, had turned dear old dad against his will and then sent him off to murder his own family.
That sort of thing will mess a teenager up permanently.
“He’s your…” Nolan kept staring at the other man, who still maintained some baby fat in his cheeks. The only thing that gave Sutherland’s true age away were his eyes, which looked desperate and haunted when he focused long enough for me to see them. Normally he shuffled around staring at the floor.
I wondered sometimes if he’d been saner before The Doctor got hold of him. I was irreparably fucked up thanks to my ten days underground, but Sutherland had been there for weeks. Maybe he’d been able to hold a conversation before then. Now I was lucky to get complete, coherent sentences from him once or twice a week.
I clicked the gun’s safety back on and reholstered it, closing the door behind me now that the threat was over. No sense in making a public spectacle of our private matters.
Nolan picked up a lamp that had fallen to the floor, which was probably the source of the crash I’d heard. He ran a hand over the stubble on his shaved head and gave me a sheepish half-smile.
“I’m real sorry,” he said apologetically. I’d missed him and his goofy accent. For some reason when Nolan spoke he forgot to begin or end his words properly, leaving the letter A off words and dropping consonants willy-nilly. When he drank, I needed a translator to understand what he was saying.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“’Salong story, ya know?”
I was familiar with the concept of long stories. I had one or two of my own. “Can you try giving me the CliffsNotes? I’ve been worried about you.” Though I hadn’t done anything to track him down beyond calling him and leaving several texts, it didn’t mean he hadn’t been in my thoughts. I was all for needing time to heal after a tragic loss, but I had my fears that Brigit’s death might have been too much for Nolan to handle.
It relieved me to no end to see him standing five feet away from me, looking no worse for wear.
“I had ta get ’way. Get my shit t’gether.”
“And is your shit together now?”
“’S’muchas it’s gonna get.”
“Have you stopped to see Keaty yet?” Prior to Nolan bailing, he’d been working with Keaty at the PI firm that still had my name on the masthead. “I know he could use an extra set of hands around the office.”
“Not yet. Gonna go t’morrow. Stopped by Shane’s, but he’s got a girl now.”
Ah yes, Siobhan. The pint-sized Irish archer who was ninety percent attitude. I hadn’t seen Shane in a few weeks, but I was glad to know he was making things work with his ladylove. It wasn’t like he was going to find another girl who believed in vampires, could kill demons, and thought his faux-rock-star getup was sexy.
Okay, to be fair, any woman with eyes and a functioning sex drive would probably be attracted to Shane’s, er, packaging. But Siobhan was the perfect match for him.
“No crashing on his couch, then.”