“You’ll know. You’ll know what to do.”
“That’s vague, Bo,” I said. “We’re doing your work. The work you’ve forced us to agree to do. If you are going to own us, you damn well better guide us.”
Lu’s hand tightened on my wrist, which was the only thing that stopped me from going off on an angry rant. I hated that we’d given up making our own choices, hated that our destiny was out of our hands.
Bo leaned back and rubbed his fingers down his goatee. “Own? I see it as I employ you, Brogan. Do you want out of our agreement? You bargained for that option. It’s yours for the taking.”
Go back to being just a spirit? Go back to never being able to touch Lu or be touched by her except for when the magic pocket watch ticked down the seconds?
Give up having more of a body, more of a voice, more of a life than I’d had in almost a hundred years?
My hand under Lu’s fingers curled into a fist. “No,” I said. “I don’t want out of our agreement.”
Bo searched my face and probably my thoughts. My skin went hot.
“This is a complication in my plans,” he allowed. “You need to find the rabbit without me pointing to specifics. I think our needs still align.”
And for a moment, the lights, the shadows, aged him, older than the stones.
“But nothing for me,” Val grouched.
“Prove yourself useful.” Bo leaned forward, shrugging off shadows, looking like Bo again. “Words to a god mean nothing. Faith means nothing. Actions and heart. That is the scale upon which a man is measured.”
“What about a ghost?” Val asked.
Bo almost sighed, and I had to hide a smile. It was good to see I wasn’t the only one who thought ghosts were the most annoying creatures drifting the earth.
“Ghosts are men. They’re just dead men,” Bo said.
The waitress swung by with two baskets of fried pickles and plonked them down on the table. “Need anything else?” she asked.
“This should do it,” Bo said. “Thanks.”
She turned and sauntered to the bar, already arguing that the favored contestant: “…couldn’t survive a summer day in a mud puddle even if he were wearing water wings.”
Bo popped a pickle in his mouth and chewed. He nodded toward the other pile of pickles and pointed at us.
I dragged it our way and tried one. Heat, salt, crunch and the tang of dill filled my mouth.
“Finding the rabbit will only be the beginning,” he said. “Like I said, you’ll have to choose how to follow through. I’m expecting you to do the right thing, and I won’t tell you what that is. I’m not the god of destiny, not the god of fate. There are boundaries I’m already stepping on with this one.”
“That doesn’t sound ominous,” Val complained.
“Boundaries with other gods?” Lu asked.
Bo wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, then wadded it up and scrubbed it over his mouth, scratching the bristles of his mustache. “Other ancients. Old promises, older mistakes. Any sign of that book yet?”
He said it casually, like it was nothing more than a basket of pickle chips. But there was an intensity in him, an edge of interest that was sharper than I’d seen before. He wanted that book. Wanted it more than he’d let on.
A chill washed down my back even though the bar was damp and muggy.
“We’re still looking,” I said.
“Nothing yet,” Lu agreed.
He studied both of us, and I was reminded that making deals with gods was the folly of the desperate, the lost, and wayward fools like us.
“I told you I’d help you find it,” he said all friendly-like, as if the intensity had never been there. “I’ll do what I can. In the meantime, find the rabbit. Val will know it when he sees it, even if you don’t.
