Chapter 12

Loki.

Billy didn’t get back until almost midnight. By that time the house had quieted down. All the children were in their beds, the parents were getting there, since they had to be at work in the morning. My Family had retired as well, Dovie disappearing with Reggie quite early.

Up in Asire’s room, I had just finished brushing my teeth when I heard them come in downstairs. There was some stumbling and shuffling and a man’s voice slurring out an apology. I pulled the tie from my hair and dumped it in my carrier that I bought for business trips. Asire didn’t seem to mind that I left it in her bathroom, but I worried about coming off rude, so I kept everything in it.

I followed the noise out into the hallway and saw Asire and Billy coming up the stairs with Henrik balanced between them. The fact that Billy was so much smaller than either of the other people didn’t seem like much of a hindrance. I still decided I should probably lend a hand.

Billy glanced up as I approached and her eyes practically glowed, they were so light. I could see some of her muscles twitching from the abundance of energy she had stored within her. Her skin, normally ashen, had darkened just a hint, making her pale instead of ghostly. Her freckles still stood out in a stark contrast. The energy just brought a little color to her.

She gladly handed over her side of Henrik to me. The man was broad and tall, so the fact that she managed to keep him going was pretty impressive.

“I’m heading to bed,” Billy declared, rushing off to her room.

As if she’d sleep tonight. And there was nothing else for her to waste the energy on, because she shared a room with Wynn. I wished luck to both men, because Billy is already a ball of hyper when she’s not full to bursting.

“Where’s his room?” I asked as we finished getting the sloshed man up the stairs.

He mumbled something that might have been directions to his room or might have been directions to a secret trove of gold.

Asire patted his head to get him to shut up. “This way,” she said gesturing in the opposite direction of her room.

We slowly dragged the man down the hallway and stopped at a door that didn’t look any different from the others.

She knocked on the door, even though Henrik seemed to be passing out. His muscles had gone lax and literally the only thing keeping him from falling over on the girl was me holding him up.

Whatever reason he decided to get drunk at this very bad time was beyond me. Hopefully he’d be able to function through a hangover, because I wasn’t going to let him sit it out if he was needed.

The door swung open and the tiny girl with blue hair stood on the other side. There was fresh dye sticking to her hair and she didn’t look happy about being interrupted. Until she saw Henrik. Then her eyes widened in surprise and she bustled out of the way. “Is he drunk, again?” she asked.

“Yup,” Asire said. “No worries, I’m sure he’ll recover quickly.” Then we dumped him on the larger of the two beds. The springs squeaked and the headboard banged against the wall.

He had landed on his back and immediately passed out. I raised my eyebrows, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to offend them by being rude about their friend.

Asire and the tiny girl wrestled him up to the pillows and flipped him over onto his stomach. It doesn’t matter how strong you are when you’re dealing with a limp body that’s bigger than you. Finally, when he was settled, the tiny blue haired girl said, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t die on his own vomit. You can head back to bed now.”

Asire nodded and we left.

Back in her room, she plopped down on her bed and sighed. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Happens sometimes.”

“No worries.”

Now that the overwhelming scent of whiskey and vodka was gone, I realized that Asire had brought the scent of rain and snow into the room. As well as the scent of cardboard— having moved fourteen people into and then out of a house at least once you get very familiar with the scent of cardboard.

“Did you get everything done?” I asked, remembering that she was moving everything from her work into storage.

“Yep,” she said. “So I’ll be free for the rest of the week, and hopefully that’ll be enough to find Millie.”

It better be. The idea of that child in the hands of the enemy bothered me and I didn’t even know her. After seeing the mother practically catatonic after getting back with Reggie, I could only imagine the destruction that her disappearance would wreak… I already knew the pain that they had to be experiencing.

Without saying another word, Asire got up, yanked her shoes off, dumped them in the closet and disappeared into the bathroom. When the shower came on, I decided it was safe to change without her walking back out. I pulled on an undershirt and pajama bottoms and got into her bed. It was strange, sleeping in another woman’s bed, even though she was across the room. Still, somehow it felt like I was doing something wrong.

I ignored it and tried to relax. We were starting early again in the morning. Where, in my city, it’d be smarter to do this kind of hunting at night, apparently Seattle was different. Not a single person brought up the possibility of getting caught in this hunt and/or while fighting the Annihilists to get the child back.

After about twenty minutes, the shower turned off. I listened as Asire got ready for bed. She cracked the door, barely enough to let fresh air in, after she was dressed, and I listened to her brush her hair out impatiently. Then I listened to her brush her teeth, much calmer than she had treated her hair.

I hadn’t shut off the light by the time she stepped out of the bathroom. She smelled like her soap and shampoo and toothpaste now, instead of the rain. She wore another oversized men’s shirt that came down nearly to her thighs and shorts, leaving those long legs of hers bare. My eyes immediately went to all that skin, because I simply couldn’t help it.

She turned sideways to hit the bathroom light. On her left leg, just above the knee, there was a scar. It was mottled and darker than the rest of her skin and had a very distinctive shape. The letter T inside a circle. It caught my eye because legions do not scar from anything but fire. It was one of the few traits that was characteristic only of our kind, instead of borrowed from another race when we were created.

The deliberate shape was what kept me from asking about it. I knew enough about how Billy and Regory grew up not to ask Asire how she got it. There was little doubt in my mind that it had been done on purpose, that it would bring up bad memories and that I would learn something else about the Thomas Family that would never leave my mind.

Asire shuffled under the covers of the rollaway bed. The comforter on it was utterly ridiculous, but she didn’t have to worry about running out of covers. She lay down and wiggled about for several minutes before sighing.

“Are you sure you don’t want your bed back?” I asked.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I can fit on this bed. You’d be hanging off both ends and that’s before it’d snap like a dry twig and dump you on the floor.”

I laughed.

“Goodnight, Loki,” Asire said, firmly enough that I knew the conversation was over.

“Goodnight, Asire,” I said back to her. Sometimes you have to accept when you’ve been beat.

I checked my phone and it told me that it was almost two in the morning. I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep yet. No matter how calm my mind was or how heavy my eyes were, I couldn’t drift off. I had grown used to this in the last four years, but it was still frustrating.

More so, since I was pretty sure Asire was asleep in her rollaway bed. She hadn’t made a sound since she’d wished me a good night. And although my night vision was good, all I could see of her was a lump under the covers. I didn’t want to wake her up by making noise, which was the only reason I bothered.

However, lying in the dark for two hours with just your thoughts gets boring after a while. It makes two hours seem like a lifetime. So I finally sat up and grabbed the remote that she had on the nightstand. I hit the power button and then immediately hit mute, so that the noise wouldn’t wake her up.

The television came on to late night TV. They were selling some kind of miracle blender.

I leaned against the headboard and examined the remote to figure out how to find the guide setting. Thankfully, she had one of those TVs that immediately switched to subtitles when muted, so I didn’t have to figure that out as well.

“Can’t sleep?” Asire asked, surprising me.

Crap. “Did I wake you up?” I asked. My voice was immediately apologetic and I wanted to curse myself.

“Nah,” Asire said. “I was already awake. Insomnia.”

“Me too.”

She sat up, shoving the comforter off her torso, but not her legs.

I unmuted the television and finally found the guide button and hit it. There wasn’t much on at two in the morning, but I found one of the vampire channels and put that on.

“Sorry for the bad TV,” I said. “There’s never anything to do but read when the insomnia kicks in.”

“Then you clearly don’t know how to be an insomniac. Don’t worry,” she continued. “I’ll show you how.”

Asire hopped out of her bed and out the door before I could respond. I raised an eyebrow and turned on the light again. At least this way, I could see what her plan was when she returned.

She was gone for only five minutes before she returned and I had to laugh when she walked in. Her arms were full of junk food. She dumped it all on the bed and then climbed onto it so that she was sitting next to me. There was a small cheesecake with crust all the way up the sides, a pint of cookie dough ice cream, a box of white chocolate fudge Oreos, a box of sugar cookies with frosting and, to top it off, a jar of chocolate spread with nothing but a spoon next to it.

“That’s a lot of sweet stuff,” I said as she settled onto the bed.

“Gotta do something when you can’t sleep. Eating a shit load of desserts seems like as good an idea as any.”

She grabbed the cheesecake and cracked open the container before thrusting it into my hands with a fork. She went for the cookie dough ice cream, cracking it open and stabbing the top with her spoon until she broke a piece of dough free.

Well, who was I to say no?

I carefully peeled a piece of crust off the side and popped it into my mouth.

Asire, noticing this, raised an eyebrow. “What are you doing to that cheesecake?”

“I only like the crust,” I said with a shrug.

“Oh, well then it works out,” she said, snatching the cake from me, putting the ice cream into my empty hand. “I only like the middle.” And with that, she dug her spoon into the center of the cake and came up with absolutely no crust.

I laughed again. “I see.” Then I dug into the container and took a bite of her ice cream.

She continued to hollow out the cheesecake, eating from the center out, and I worked on her ice cream. We sat in companionable silence, watching an old sitcom. The only conversation we had was Asire’s commentary on the show, which nearly had me choking on the ice cream.

I finished off the ice cream just as she was getting the last of the cheesecake away from the crust. Then I handed her the empty container and took the crust from her. “Nothing that’s not a dessert?” I asked while taking a bite of crust. I looked at our depleted stash and waited for her reply.

“I prefer sweets,” she said. “I had to horde all my favorites when everyone came into the house, otherwise they’d all be gone.” Then a shrug. “But no worries, I’ll be right back.”

She snatched one of the fudge covered Oreos and was out the door. I had to laugh again. She and Billy didn’t share many personality traits, but I could discern a couple things. Like the way they moved. Both with the hard won grace of knowing precisely what your body is capable of. The tendency to mock the shows they were watching. Definitely the mouth.

I was just finishing off the crust when Asire came back into the room, again her arms were laden down with stuff that she dumped on the bed. There were three different kinds of chips, two slim jims, and pizza rolls on a plate, which she handed to me before getting back on the bed.

“I may not be able to start an oven without also starting a fire,” she said. “But the microwave is my bitch.”

A laugh burst out of me and I shook my head.

She also brought a second pint of ice cream, which she cracked open and then put on her nightstand before snagging the chocolate spread and opening it. Without hesitation, she stuck her spoon into the goo and then popped it into her mouth.

One plate of pizza rolls, two bags of chips, way too many cookies, a pint of ice cream and a container of chocolate spread later, we were finally to the point where we couldn’t eat another bite. Asire’s trashcan look ridiculous. Like someone had left a teenager alone for a week.

And she didn’t regret it at all.

She just took the last spoonful of chocolate spread and dumped the empty container into the bin with everything else. Then she put her spoon on the plate with all the other utensils and glanced at me. “Now. That is how you spend a sleepless night when nothing good is on TV.”

I smiled.