“House is straight ahead. Two stories.” He spoke without thinking, filling Mary in on her surroundings. “It used to be robin’s egg blue, my mother’s favorite color, but now it looks like someone dipped a paintbrush in water and swirled the blue with white. A color…kind of what the wind sounds like. Does that make sense?”
Her smile was soft. “Yes.”
Reassured, he looked down at their feet. “The path we’re on used to be stone pavers. Never kept it manicured once my mother left, but it’s definitely cracked and overgrown now.”
They’d almost reached the front porch when Tucker heard the distinct sound of a tool dropping into a chest of more tools. Male mutterings that brought the past ripping back at him through the night air and seizing him around the throat.
“He’s awake. He’s working in the barn,” Tucker managed. “I should have known.”
Mary squeezed his arm. “Take me there.”
He took a moment to brace himself and changed direction, guiding Mary around the back of the house and across the dirt yard, strewn with electronics in various states of repair or assembly, his eyes fixed ahead on the open barn door where a thin line of light speared out like a blade, the fact that nothing had changed imbuing him with a sense of comfort he never expected. All this time, while Tucker had been fighting slayers and learning how to navigate an often unscrupulous underworld, his father had been right here in the barn, still searching for a way to prove his wife had been taken.
Tucker never would have been able to understand that dedication until now.
If Mary were his and she vanished in the middle of the night, he would be searching for her decades later—take that to the bank. He’d search until he found her, no matter how long it took. Centuries, if necessary.
They were fifteen feet from the barn door when the muttering stopped.
“Who’s there?” called Carl. “If it’s you kids again, I won’t give out any more warnings. I will call the police!”
“Go,” whispered Mary, pulling her arm away from Tucker. “I’m fine.”
“I’ll be a millisecond away.”
“I know.”
Tucker whipped around the corner of the barn, into the darkness cast by the overhang, his mate’s reflex blaring orders in his mind to return to Mary. To touch her and guard her. But mentally, he knew two things to be true and he reminded himself of them now. One, his father wouldn’t do anyone harm, let alone a fragile girl with a walking stick. And two, he could move like lightning to stand between Mary and harm.
Perhaps because he was home and this place reminded him of being human more than anywhere else, Tucker took a deep—albeit unnecessary—breath. And watched the barn door roll open, his father stepping out into the light cast from inside.
Carl drew up short upon spying Mary in the darkness and Tucker’s insides did the same at the sight of his father, thirteen years older. He’d always been a wiry man, the opposite of Tucker, but he was even thinner now, his hair verging on full gray, instead of the burnished coppery red Tucker remembered. Glasses perched on the edge of his nose and he looked through them now, his mouth poised to ask a question, but nothing coming out.
Mary smiled broadly and held out her pillow case. “Trick or treat!”
Chapter 14
Mary calmed completely as soon as Tucker’s father’s footsteps thudded to a stop some distance in front of her. Not in the same way a sense of rightness and safety had clutched her by the bones when she encountered Tucker for the first time. The nature of this was more…fond. Carl’s signature was slightly chaotic, yes, but there was love woven into the disorder. Pain, too.
Bracing herself, she tucked her walking stick under one arm and held out of her pillow case. “Trick or treat.”
Silence passed. “It isn’t Halloween,” Tucker’s father explained slowly, then she heard a muffled clapping sounds, as if he was patting his clothing or pockets. “Is it? I tend to lose track of time when I’m working on something and I’m always working on…well, that’s boring, isn’t it? Well, now. Look at that crown sparkle. You’re dressed as a…blind ghost princess?”
“Just a ghost princess. I’m always blind.”
“Oh, my dear,” he muttered sympathetically. “Then I fear that you’ve veered off course. And I don’t have any candy. Unless you count peppermints.”
“I’ve never had a peppermint.”
“Really?” She heard some rustling and the whine of a metal box opening. Footsteps coming closer. “Hand me the pillow case and hold out your hand.”
Mary liked this man.
This whole situation bordered on absurd—even to Mary—but he’d adapted immediately. He hadn’t even acted awkward when she told him she was blind. Just accepted it as a part of her, the way Tucker had done. It put her at immediate ease.