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“The fancy bruschetta place?”
“Yeah. Want me to bring you some?”
“Only if it’s convenient.”
Vic kissed Adam’s cheek and picked up his coffee to take a long sip.
Adam toyed with his own cup, wrapped his hands around it to feel its warmth seep into his palms.
“Are you ever going to tell them about what happened, what you saw in the Between?”
“That their son became a monster? That I had to kill him?”
Vic grimaced but said, “Yeah, basically.”
“I don’t know. The future is tricky. In trying to keep it from happening I might be steering us toward it. I’m worried that they’d be in the same boat if I told them.”
“‘Always in motion is the future,’” Vic quoted.
“Did you just Yoda me?”
“I did. I was trying to lighten the mood. Did it work?”
Adam smiled.
“Yeah,” he lied.
11
Adam dropped Vic at the ghost kitchen and went by the garden center to get some herbs for Bobby and Annie’s yard. He tried not to think of them as apologies or a means to make amends for what he was about to ask.
He’d use more than salt and water to strengthen these wards. Plants and spell cooking had never been a large part of his craft, but with recent events he wanted all the help he could get.
Adam didn’t live at Bobby’s anymore, which should reduce the number of threats and things that came calling, but he’d leave nothing to chance if he could help it.
Before, he would have asked Silver to strengthen the wards, and there weren’t many things that would challenge a boundary set by the King of Swords, but Silver did not know what Adam did. Asking for his help might draw his attention toward Ian.
He missed Silver in a complicated way that had to be a mix of being exes, while being friends, while Adam worked for the guy. The feeling was a messy tangle of different colored threads, some happy orange, some worried yellow, and some fainter, sad blue—what had been, or could have been.
Breathing in, he tasted the mix of flavors from the flat of plants on the seat beside him. It helped for a moment, but his problems would take more than aromatherapy to solve.
Parking on the street, he couldn’t help but compare the house of now to the one in his dream. The color was the same. Maybe he could suggest they change it. Maybe altering the future was as simple as that.
Annie opened the door for him as he came up the walk.
Strawberry blond and pale, she didn’t really look pregnant, except for the smile she regularly wore. She was still in sweater mode, wearing a long open cardigan woven from thick yarn in shades of brown over a loose pink T-shirt.
“Come in.” She held the storm door open for him.
“Thanks.” Adam carried the box to the kitchen table and set it down. “How’s it going?”
“The morning sickness is gone, and that’s the nicest thing ever.”
“Has little man started kicking yet?”
“No. I shouldn’t feel it for a while. It takes longer with your first one.” Annie stared down at her hidden bump. “I’m already warmer than I used to be. I am not looking forward to summer.”
Adam tried to make a sympathetic face. He didn’t know anything about pregnancy, aside from what he could barely remember from high school health class, which in Oklahoma hadn’t contained a ton of useful information. He hadn’t paid much attention anyway. He’d tuned out after one guy, Charles, had asked if they could use balloons as condoms.
