Vicki Pettersson - Cheat the Grave

And inaccessible to mortals, I thought, sighing. I couldn’t enter even if he did relent.

Which was what Warren would argue without even trying to find another way. I sighed. He’d then probe me for everything I knew about Mackie and Tripp, but what then? Would he have a sudden change of heart? Offer the troop’s protection if I agreed to work as a mortal beard or spy for the troop? Or would he kill me, as Tripp suggested?

“Sleepy Mac killed my warden,” I told Tripp, tilting my head, watching carefully for his response. “He killed a Seer too, a man as powerful as any I’d ever seen.”

Tripp only removed that strange cigarette again and slowly licked his lips. “Do you want to live?”

Was it wrong that I had to think about that for so long? Fletcher grumbled as he plucked leaves from a topiary, but Tripp shot him a silencing look over his shoulder.

If I wanted to live.

I glanced again at the phone Warren had given me, remembering how afraid I’d been before of losing it. Of losing, I now knew, anything else.

Losses aren’t bad things in themselves. Not as long as you remain open to new sensation.

Irritated, I huffed. Like working with Shadows?

Then again, Caine had been of the Shadows. Maybe he’d been born “free,” as he put it, but his lineage was stamped on his disposition as clearly as postage. And yet he’d sacrificed himself to Sleepy Mac’s blade for my sake.

Maybe, while I wasn’t looking-while I was getting reaccustomed to my mortal skin-my old defenses had become my prison. With the agents of Light turning their backs, and the sanctuary closed to me, the city I’d always found refuge in did suddenly resemble more of a tomb. But what had me pushing upright and turning to the mulch machine was that unanswered question, and the full comprehension of a niggling I’d already sensed. My T-Rex brain, I thought with a small laugh. Sparking to life.

Because though I didn’t know what Warren would do to me, I knew I didn’t trust him to protect me, not as I once had. Mortal or not, I no longer counted in his world-view, and he’d like nothing more than for me to disappear, become part of the woodwork…at most a bit of scaffolding on which to build his own idea of the way the world should be. To him, I was just someone to run down with his ambition.

Once you decide a person has no control over you…they no longer do.

And Warren’s mind didn’t create my reality. I would not be overrun because, all-powerful leader of Light or not, I mattered. I counted. And would as long as I lived.

“Your days are numbered, old man.” It was my T-Rex brain talking, pitching my voice low, my lips barely moving. No matter that he wasn’t there to hear it. Tripp heard, and one corner of his mouth lifted as I tossed the phone over the side of the mulcher, waited to hear it clank on the steel bottom, then laid my palm against the red button on the panel to my right. “You’ll go down so hard the earth will quake.”

The mulcher started up with a screeching roar, blades battering my only remaining connection to those I’d once counted as allies in the paranormal realm. Now, like Olivia said, I could live my dreams-or at least what remained of my life-my way. So I left the mulcher running, ensuring that if found, Warren would know exactly what I thought of his treatment of me. Then I nodded and left the nursery the way I came, through the back gate, under the cover of night.

But flanked by Shadows.

The supernatural community at large could move around in ways mortals couldn’t, but we just took a cab. Yet when Tripp directed the driver to an address on Main, I couldn’t hide my surprise.

“El Sombrero? Seriously?”

He shrugged, indicating it wasn’t his first choice. Of course, he’d spent the last eighteen years living in an environment about as comfortable as a deep fryer. A momand-pop shop with tonsil-dissolving salsa was probably well behind his vote for Ben & Jerry’s. However, Milo and Fletcher were already debating the merits of a verde relleno versus a red enchilada, while the cab driver-also a fan-put in his vote for the menudo. I just wondered what a handful of rogue agents were doing at the oldest Mexican restaurant in town.

We hopped out on Main Street, and I stared at the neon green and red sign. El Sombrero Café was a hole-in-thewall if ever there was one, in the best possible sense of the word. It’d been in the same location since the fifties, and the interior was as dated as the exterior, both adding to its charm.

“You sure it’s open?”

“Well there’s open,” Tripp replied, as I gave the door a fruitless tug, “and then there’s open.” He pulled on the steel handle, and the entrance swung fluid and wide.

“Show-off.”

“You should see me two-step.”

The Big Hat was definitely closed. Every surface wiped down and reset for the next day’s crowd, the kitchen quiet and dark, the scent of rice and beans faint as a memory. Yet a sole man sat in the room’s center, as if stranded there. Posters of matadors and raging bulls surrounded him, and giant hats were pegged indiscriminately to each of the four walls. Tripp motioned me forward with a jerk of his head, though he remained behind with Fletcher and Milo, making like the mafia of old. It helped me feel at home as I wove my way to the center table.

“José. Mescal por mi amiga. ” The man lifted only his voice, the rest of him utterly still and fixed on me, as if he was a lizard I’d surprised in Red Rock Canyon. Or, I thought as I sat, a rattler. “Unless you’re a margarita girl?”

I was. Rocks and salt, but when in little Baja…“Tequila is fine.”

José, obviously the owner, brought the bottle. I studied his fingertips as he filled my shot glass, and he smiled- either missing the direction of my gaze or pretending to-and replied in soft Spanish at my nod of thanks. I waited until he’d disappeared to wince at the fat pink worm floating along the bottle’s bottom.

Glancing back at Carlos, I lifted my brow, an invitation to explain why a mortal would be serving a rogue. His lips were a soft heart beneath a thin, Errol Flynn mustache, and he licked them before giving me another answer entirely.

“My name is Carlos Fernandez. I became a rogue at age fifteen by entering the city of neon with my mother, an agent of Light in La Ciudad de Mexico until the Shadows overtook it in the nineties.”

I remembered, though obviously not in the same way Carlos did. World events and paranormal activity were invariably intertwined. Victory by the agents of Light or Shadow made its mark on the mortal population, though all the humans knew was that in ’ninety-four the peso had plummeted, sending the country into despair. The chasm between the haves and have-nots widened like the grandest of canyons, and things had only worsened since then. I’d be surprised to hear if there was even one agent of Light left in any major Mexican city.

Carlos spun his shot glass in his hand, making no move to drink as he watched me from across the table. His dark hair was cropped close, but you could still see a bit of a Caesarean curl. His eyes were light brown, the simple tabletop tea light catching deeper flecks of color like grains trapped in amber. Though darker, with long sable lashes, his gaze put me in mind of Hunter. The same patience lurked there.

Or maybe it was the same calculating spark.

“My father, determined to fight the enemies of Light to the last, sent us ahead without him. He was forced out a year later, finally leaving that dangerous place to travel to us, and this safe one.” Another slow slide of his tongue over his bottom lip, like he was trying to seduce me, before he blinked. “He lost his life in the weedy meadows after which this city is named. Almost immediately.”