Page 54 of Booked for Murder

My father grinned at my mother. “That talk really didn’t go as we’d hoped, did it?”

“Well, fortunately for you, I’d also impressed upon her boys who brought babies along with them wanted little ladies who didn’t have babies with other boys. I got it partially right.”

I thanked my lucky stars my parents had waited for everyone else to leave before starting in on me. “My for life contract was to be a bodyguard, Mom.”

“Is. You’re still breathing. You can guard Bradley’s body in his bed while having plenty of little babies with him. It’s a very nice arrangement. Nobody is going to touch him when his wife is one of the world’s best exsanguinators. I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

I froze, and my cat took offense to my hand not doing what she wanted, which involved petting her as the brushing had stopped. After several nips from my fluffy but demonic goddess, I resumed stroking my hand along her back. “Some things a daughter never wants to hear her mother say, and you said it all with zero shame.”

“What’s wrong with him? He’s handsome in his own way, although that boy won’t ever be a model on a billboard. He won’t send you running and screaming from the bedroom at least.”

Like hell he wasn’t handsome enough to be a model on a billboard. In good news, I had somehow managed to hide that I had an unhealthy interest in Bradley. No matter what, I couldn’t let my mother find that out.

She’d never let me live it down; she’d go find Bradley, she’d expose my interest, and ruin me for life.

My father sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t exactly the best way to broach the subject with her, babe.”

“Why not? She had him eating orange chicken practically out of her hand. The boy tangoed with milk because he wants to match her. It’s perfect. Well, except for that whole problem with lactose. That’s an issue, but I suppose it’s a tolerable one. We’ll just have to be careful what we feed the grandbabies.”

Why me? “Mom!”

“What? That boy’s been running up the miles on that old car of his because every time he’d catch even a hint of a rumor about someone who might be you, he’d go look into it personally. And don’t get me started on that car. He’s over at our place once a week looking for scraps, even if it meant he came all that way to peek into your childhood room. We always put him to work because it helps. It gives him something to do that’s not driving all across the country and handling his business affairs.”

I could see him doing that, as he took his agreements and debts seriously, and I’d gone beyond what he viewed as the call of duty.

While he was an adept, he’d never liked the idea that his life had more value than another’s solely due to his aptitude rating. In all my planning, I hadn’t considered that part of his personality. It filtered into my thoughts my mother had been using Bradley as free labor. “You’ve been putting Bradley to work at the house?”

“He likes it,” my mother replied with a delicate sniff.

“Bradley? Bradley Hampton? He works at the house and likes it?” I tried to match my memories of him with my mother’s reality and drew nothing but a blank. “Are you sure? Are you sure you’ve been luring the right man over to your house? Do you know how his mother punishes him? She makes him work in the garden.”

“His mother’s sweet, but she’s not all that bright sometimes. It’s not much of a punishment if he likes it. That boy is a master deceiver. He loves working in the garden the best. The way I figure it, there isn’t much history in the soil, so he can work with his hands without his magic making a mess of things. Bless his heart, he tries so hard, but he has to work to keep his abilities from haunting him. For someone who likes working with his hands so much, his abilities seem more like a curse than anything else.”

While my parents didn’t have nearly as much magic as I did, and theirs was far saner and safer than mine, they tended to see through to the heart of most matters with enviable ease. My mother could make any garden grow faster and better, and my father could illuminate even the darkest of spaces. Together, they’d somehow produced me, someone who scared most people half to death just by existing. “How’d you find that out?”

“His mother sent him over after the accident to get some fresh country air and to keep him out of the media. Heartbreak doesn’t heal overnight, and he had more than his fair share of it. He’d tried to get you out of the car, but you were trapped in the wreckage, so all he could do was staunch the bleeding he could reach and wait. His magic told him the whole story.”

“I don’t remember much about the crash,” I admitted.

“Of course not. You took a pretty hard hit to the head, and that scrambles a brain,” my mother replied. “It’s surprising you remember anything at all, if you do.”

“Right up until I turned the wheel and positioned the car for the crash I couldn’t avoid. There wasn’t anywhere else to go, and I had a choice. It was me or him, and that was that.” Rock cuts and shit terrain gave limited options, and with an idiot behind the wheel of the other car, I’d done the only thing I could. “He’d said he didn’t want to see me until I was back in my prime.”

“He wanted to challenge you to get you back on your feet faster. That’s all. He’s a dumb boy sometimes.” My mother stood and strolled into my kitchen. “Now, what does my little lady want for dinner tonight? I feel like cooking.”

“And this is when I get scolded for not having proper ingredients kicking around in my home. I’m ready. Begin your scolding.”

“I’ll improvise. I appreciate a challenge. So, tell me your thoughts about this senator.”

“An exsanguinator could do the job, but help would be needed. I couldn’t do the type of damage inflicted to the skull. I simply can’t make blood do that. I can bust through soft tissue, but the skull is way too dense and strong of a material for me to break in that fashion. Telekinesis might be able to pull it off, but I figure it’s a team of some sort. Three or four people working together—and have been practicing together, probably on livestock, specifically pigs. Pigs make excellent analogs for humans. I’ve practiced on cows, but pigs are better to experiment on if you want to work on humans later. And no, the animals were humanely killed prior to any experimentation. I’d usually handle that, as I could kill them painlessly. I was picky about that, and I could kill them a lot cleaner and faster than the butchers.”

“So, we’d look for where someone might get a hold of pigs to practice on?” my father asked.

“That might be a good start, assuming they’re practicing. With how closely the killings match, I can only assume they’ve been practicing somewhere. The precision of the damage to the brain tells me they’ve been practicing with cadavers of some sort—or live bodies.”

“We could check the missing persons registries, too.” With a grimace, my father got up and joined my mother in the kitchen, rummaging through my refrigerator. “Janette, do you even eat food? All that’s in here is leftover Chinese.”

“I usually get something cheap and easy. It’s hard being on my feet after work, so I tend to get the cheapest takeout I can or something that needs minimal attention from me. It’s hard to cook when your foot is throbbing after a long day.”