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Caligo turned his head and looked directly at me. “We should have sex before you go out to dinner.”
Some of the tension leached from my shoulders at his acknowledgment of my plans—and his apparent lack of objection to them. I checked my watch. “We’ve got time.”
Dinner was at MiMi Mei Fair. It wasn’t with Remy. It would be a long time before we reached the going-out-for-dinner stage of repairing our friendship. My current feelings toward Tyler might be less than friendly, but that didn’t change the fact that Remy had still slept with my boyfriend behind my back and lied to me. I could recognize that he’d also been a pawn in Tyler’s manipulations without automatically forgiving him for it.
Instead, I’d met Della. She’d never liked Tyler, so I got to spend a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours picking holes in everything from his bad habits to his work ethic. She hadn’t hidden her surprise when I turned down wine and, like a loyal friend, had finished the glass she’d already ordered before switching to soft drinks with me.
I left the restaurant with a cheerful buzz that for once had nothing to do with alcohol and waved her off in a cab. I could have shared it, but the walk home was only fifteen minutes, and as it wasn’t raining or freezing cold, it was pleasant enough.
My phone buzzed before I reached the corner of the street. My first thought was that it might be Caligo, until I remembered that, unless he’d learned how to fashion a phone out of shadow, that wasn’t possible. My second thought was Tyler.
Thankfully, it was Laura instead, her message brief and to the point: Are you still alive?
I rolled my eyes as I started typing a reply. Halfway through, I changed my mind and called her instead. “I’m calling you from the afterlife,” I said in lieu of a greeting.
I didn’t get the laugh I expected.
“How do I know he can’t imitate your voice? For all I know, I’m speaking to him?”
“I presume by him you mean Caligo?”
“Who else?”
“I suppose this would be the point in the film where you ask me a question that only I’d know the answer to. Unfortunately, you don’t know me well enough for that, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it.”
A beat of silence followed. “According to Edward, which is the oldest tree in the forest?”
Even with nobody around to witness it, I pulled a face. “How the hell am I supposed to know the answer to that? That would have required listening to him while he droned on. Besides, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t think Caligo was everywhere in that place. He could just as easily have heard Edward say it.”
“Maybe I should ask him.”
“Probably,” I admitted.
“So you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Is he there? You could be saying all of this under duress.”
“I’m not at home. I’ve just been out to dinner with a friend, actually.” I turned a corner. There were fewer people here now that I’d left the main road behind, but I was only a few streets from home. Seven or eight minutes at most.
“And he doesn’t mind you leaving him?”
“No, of course he doesn’t.”
“He said that?”
“He didn’t have to.”
“He didn’t try to stop you from going.”
“No, he said he might paint something else.”
The silence lasted so long that I looked at my phone to confirm whether the call had ended.
“I’m sorry,” Laura eventually said. “I thought for a moment you said that he’d been painting.”
“I did.”
