Page 80 of Midnight Auto Parts

To hide my snooping, I faked a loud yawn and wobbled to my feet. “Hey, you two.”

“I knew I could count on the scent of bacon to wake you.” Josie grinned. “I told Kierce he should have put an extra crispy slice in your hand as an anchor. There’s no way you wouldn’t come back for it.”

Bacon was expensive. A luxury item. And, yeah, okay. I might have gone through a phase where I ate it by the pound for the simple reason I could afford it. It tasted better paid for with cash I had earned the right way.

Sadly, I had eaten so much of it that I wentyearsunable to stomach the smell. Which explained why she always cooked it in her apartment and not mine. The scent lingered, and… Ugh. Just thinking about it made my stomach wobbly.

“I’m not a baconoholic.” The meal they had prepared together made my mouth water. “Ignore her.”

Josie bit into a carrot then jabbed Kierce with the tip. “Have you ever known me to lie?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

A low groan tore out of her, and she clucked her tongue. “We’ve got to work on that.”

“Josie says I’m a bad liar,” he informed me. “We’re going to work on it.”

“Kierce. No.” The groan tapered into more of a moan as she thumped her head on the counter. “We don’t tell those we’re plotting against that we’re plotting against them. It spoils the fun.”

“I appreciate the heads-up.” I joined them in the kitchen. “Kierce, I have intel but…”

“You’ve got time to eat.” Josie nodded to him, and they carried the food to my table. “Then I’ll leave and you two can get back to whatever has Carter’s tail in a twist.”

Josie and I ate BLTs with side salads while Kierce opened a plastic container filled with sushi that had come unrolled, likelyfrom impact with the ground after Badb dropped them in a bag from overhead.

Since the crow herself was absent, which meant Josie had already known Kierce had his own meal ready to eat, I figured she had made the extra food for Pedro. She was sweet like that. Sometimes.

Topics of conversation included plants, music, and poison gardens. About what you would expect from a death god’s assistant and a dryad. The fact Josie acted and spoke like a grownup made it difficult for me to quit staring at her. Carter’s influence, if I had to guess, was to blame. Or maybe to thank. But it was weird.Veryweird. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

The only thing missing from our impromptu lunch was Matty, but I would fill him in later.

“I’ll do the dishes.” I pushed back from the table. “It’s the least I can do to thank you guys.”

“I’m going to run a plate down to Pedro. I crossed an heirloom with a purple tomatillo. I’m going to ask his opinion since my sister didn’t notice she was scarfing down a Josie Talbot original.”

“I ate it too fast to notice.” I patted my belly. “That ought to tell you how much I enjoyed it.”

“We used to eat too fast to taste it too,” she told Kierce. “We had to, or we couldn’t swallow it.”

Done with his meal, he cleaned up his area. “Why not?”

“The taste. The texture. The smell.” She chuckled. “We ate anything we could fool ourselves into believing was edible.”

“Kierce doesn’t want to hear about our adventures in eating expired food.” I patted my stomach again. “Neither do I when I’m this full.” I slid my gaze to him. “We spent a lot of time in grocery store trash bins and sifting through fast food restaurant garbage.”

The former was more questionable than the latter. Expired dairy and meat left out in the sun had gotten us sick more than once. But it was a special kind of hunger that allowed you to convince yourself to put a half-eaten hamburger or chicken nugget in your mouth and pretend the preexisting bite marks were your own.

With a wiggle of her fingers, she made her exit. “See you lovebirdslater.”

The bird jokes, I had come to accept, would be a part of my life as long as Kierce was.

As I set to work cleaning up after lunch, I updated him on Vi and my visit behind the ward.

No sooner had I wrapped up than my phone rang with a video call from Vi I answered on my TV.

“This is a fresh perspective.” She peered around inside the frame. “Where am I?”

“The new TV can receive phone calls.” I dried my hands and dragged Kierce to the couch with me. “Neat, huh? Now I’ll be able to see your beautiful face even better when we have our monthly chats.”

---