Page 19 of Midnight Auto Parts

I wasn’t a cop. I wasn’t a private eye. I wasn’t an investigator. But I was stubborn.

Thanks to a lifetime of mediating fights between my brother and sister, I was good at sticking things out until I got to the bottom of a problem, but Chief Leer had viewed me as an asset back when I was mostly a necromancer, making me an even more valuable commodity as a demigoddess.

Unless I severed ties with this side of the 514, I risked exposure on the job and presented myself as an ideal candidate for blackmail in exchange for my secret. I had to step back and let the professionals do their jobs. Or Leer, no doubt about it, would find a way to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

“I’m standing in quicksand.” I flexed my toes inside of my shoes. “The only way to quit sinking is if I stop struggling.”

“You’re returning home then.” He stroked a hand down my back. “I’ll let Carter know.”

From the hard set of his jaw, I could tell he wasn’t in any hurry to let Leer anywhere near me. “Thanks.”

Shame gnawed on me for abandoning Camaro, and Tameka, but Leer posed a substantial threat to my family if he got it in his head to make himself a nuisance in order to recruit me.

Scooting across the bench until I sat behind the wheel, I waited to see how Carter took the news. The earlier tension inher spine released as she turned and waved goodbye to me with a glint in her eye.

Carter wasnothappy. I read it on her face. Leer was either brave or stupid to ignore the signs.

A minute later, Kierce returned with Badb in tow. She glided in ahead of him, situating herself on the cat bed. He got in, shut the door, then fastened his seat belt with a frown of concentration.

Every time he performed tasks he intended to master, he ticked them off his mental checklist, which reminded me. “When do you want to start your driving lessons?”

Had we fallen into a student and teacher dynamic, I wasn’t sure my libido would have recovered until he graduated me from baby god school. This tit-for-tat exchange suited me better. Each of us lacking where the other was proficient meant we could exchange our knowledge freely without any debt or obligation.

“My schedule is clear.”

With a finger wave to Carter, I pulled onto the road and pointed us toward home. “Tomorrow?”

“Why not tonight? I can see in the dark.” Kierce traced the piping detail in my seat. “For that matter, so can you. Your vision should be much clearer.”

Curiosity would be the death of me. If I hadn’t already died. As if he had ripped the blind from my eyes, I quit throttling my senses and experienced them. Fully. I unclenched that mental muscle straining against any newfangled extrasensory feedback and relaxed into a full spectrum of colors and visual textures that defied description because no words existed to detail this filter placed over my new reality.

If the daylight contained this many secret facets, I couldn’t wait to explore the dark.

“This means I’ve been manipulating my powers this whole time,” I squeaked, drawing Badb’s interest.

“Yes.” Kierce chuckled at the hands I slapped over my mouth. “You have been.”

And the soft pride in his voice made me wonder what else I had unconsciously been doing to amuse him.

For eight excruciating minutes, I held out, but my mouth conspired against my brain, and words tumbled out faster than I could snap my jaw shut. “What else have I been unconsciously doing to amuse you?”

Kierce shook his head, his glamour flickering. “I’m not laughing at you, Frankie.”

The clench of his shoulders, as if expecting a verbal hit to land, left me wishing I could wipe the question out of the air like an eraser across a chalkboard. And it convinced me there was more to his reaction.

Had Dis Pater laughed at him? Mocked him? Had other god bloods like Ankou?

Had they hurt him? Jabbed him through the bars of his cage? Yanked his feathers?

Worse ideas kept intruding on my thoughts, leaving dark footprints through my mind.

The second I cut into the parking lot at the shop, I had to get out. I needed air. I needed to not be confined.Fuck.Where wasthis rage coming from? This fury on his behalf when I had no idea if I was right about his response unnerved me.

Matty was the imaginative one. It came from living half in dreams. I was too practical by nature. And if not by nature, then necessity. But dark images kept bombarding me like fact. Like truth. Like memory.

“I believe you,” I said when I sensed his presence behind me.

“You’re angry.”

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