Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(108)

I’d gotten him back and I wasn’t likely to take him for granted anytime soon. The food tasted like sawdust as I waited for him to realize that he wouldn’t have zombies trying to kill him if I weren’t part of his life.

“Hey,” he said, his gaze suddenly sharpening on my face. “You okay?”

“Fine.” I smiled at him and tucked into supper with a little more effort. I wasn’t going to kill the chance I’d been given by brooding over losing him before it happened.

Of course, there was a note on the door to Kyle’s house when we drove into the driveway.

Kyle ripped it off and opened it. “He’s objecting to your truck,” he told me dryly as he read, giving me the abbreviated version. “He’s sent a duplicate letter to the city. With photos to illustrate his point.”

“Nothin’ wrong with my truck,” I said indignantly, and Kyle grinned. He lost his smile as soon as he looked back down at the note.

Three months ago, the nice family who lived next to Kyle’s house had moved to Phoenix and sold their place to a retired man. We hadn’t thought much about it at the time, not until the first note. Some children (three solemn-faced kids who, with their mother, were staying with us until their mother’s ex-husband quit threatening them) had made too much noise in Kyle’s pool after seven P.M., which was when Mr. Francis went to bed. We should make sure that all children were in their beds and silent so as not to disturb Mr. Francis if we didn’t want the police called.

We’d thought it was a joke, had laughed at the way he’d referred to himself as “Mr. Francis” in his own notes.

The grapes along the solid eight-foot-tall stone fence between the backyards were growing down over Mr. Francis’s side. We should trim them so he didn’t have to look at them. He saw a dog in the yard (me) and hoped that it was licensed, fixed, and vaccinated. A photo of the dog had been sent to the city to ensure that this was so. And so on. When the police and the city had afforded him no satisfaction, he’d taken action on his own. I’d found poisoned meat thrown inconspicuously into the bushes in Kyle’s backyard. Someone dumped a batch of red dye into the swimming pool that had stained the concrete. Fixing that had cost a mint, and we now had security cameras in the backyard. But we didn’t get them in fast enough to save the grapes.

He’d been some kind of high-level CEO forcibly retired when the stress gave him ulcers and other medical problems. He came here, to the Tri-Cities, because he was a boat-racing fan. Other cities had boat races, I’m sure of it. Maybe I could recommend some for him.

“This kind of thing is supposed to happen when you live in an apartment,” Kyle told me, crumpling the latest note in his hand. “Not in a four-thousand-square-foot house on three-quarters of an acre.”

“We need to have a paintball game in the backyard,” I told Kyle. “I could invite the pack.”

“Escalation is not a solution,” Kyle said, though he’d smiled at the thought. He’d seen some of our paintball games. “Right now the city is on our side. We want to keep it that way.” Since Mr. Francis moved in, the folks in city hall, the police department, the zoning commission, and the building code enforcement office had all grown to know us by name.

“I know,” I groused, unlocking the front door. “As long as we act like adults, there’s nothing he can do to us.”

Kyle followed me into the foyer. His house was the first place I’d ever lived that was big enough to have a foyer.

“I could move,” he said reluctantly.

“Nah,” I rubbed his head affectionately—Kyle loved his house. “You’d miss Dick and Jane.”

Dick and Jane were the life-sized na**d statues in the foyer. The woman was currently wearing a Little Bo Peep bonnet he’d found somewhere and a green silk sari that had belonged to his grandmother. Dick was still sporting the knitted winter hat with the long tail and a poof ball on his pride and joy because Kyle hadn’t found anything he thought was funnier yet.

“We could move back into your apartment.”

That apartment was a point of contention. He said I was keeping it because I didn’t believe that he really understood he was sleeping with a werewolf. He also said I was being stupid because he was mine as long as I never lied to him again, werewolf or not. Kyle was a smart man. He was right about why I kept it—but I wasn’t sure he was right about the rest. So I hadn’t given up the apartment yet.

Proposing a move back to it showed that Mr. Francis was getting to him. If so, the time might have come to quit playing nice.

My cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket and took a look. It wasn’t a number I knew, but that wasn’t unusual anymore—I was starting to get a little work from people unconnected to the law firm.

“Warren here,” I said.

“This is Nadia,” said the witch’s niece. “Listen, Aunt Elizaveta wants me to go talk to the dead woman’s husband tomorrow. I can do that, but I thought it might be useful if you came along. You can tell when someone’s lying, right?”

“I can,” I agreed. “But won’t that arouse the wrong people’s interest if you’re out questioning people?” Wrong people like the police. I’d thought she intended to do a little magical forensics and leave the questioning to me.