Strength & Courage (The Night Horde SoCal Book 1) Read online

  “Waiting.”

  He stared steadily across the street. Muse followed his gaze to the little bungalow. Typical, Spanish-style stucco with a red-tile roof. Three arched casement windows in a row next to a small turret with an arched oak door. The porch light was on, showing a cute little flower garden in the yard along a low front porch with wicker furniture and colorful flowerpots. A chick definitely lived there.

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “Bitch to get home.”

  Not to encourage him on his fool mission but to keep him talking, Muse asked, “You sure she’s not? It’s three o’clock on a Friday morning.”

  “No car. I checked her garage. She’ll be home. I’ll wait till she is.”

  “And do what?”

  “Get my kid back.”

  “Pretty sure she doesn’t have him with her, Deme.”

  Now he stood up from the bike and turned to Muse. “Don’t be an asshole. I know Tucker’s not with her. But she’s the one with the fucking file. Nobody’ll give me a chance. Whatever happened with Kota, it’s their fucking fault. He should’ve been with me. She knows where he is. She can get him. I’m gonna make her bring him back. I’m gonna make her give me a chance.”

  “How, brother?”

  Demon’s emphatic resolve faltered a little and he looked back over at the pretty little house. “I…I’ll talk to her. Make her see.”

  “It’s a decent plan, Deme. But not outside her house in the middle of the night. We’ll go to her office when she’s working. You’re just gonna scare her standing out here like this. That’s not gonna help your cause.” He put his hand on Demon’s back. “C’mon, brother. Let’s head out. You can crash on my couch for a couple hours.”

  Demon didn’t respond, but Muse thought he was coming around. And then the front door of the house in question opened. Car or not, it looked like the little social worker was home, after all. Demon went stiff and took a couple of steps into the middle of the street. And then he stopped cold.

  So did Muse. Sidonie Tuladhar was storming off her porch and across her lawn.

  She was wearing nothing but a pair of flowered panties and a light-colored bra, maybe pink. And pointing a gun right at them, held in both hands. Looked like an old-school .38.

  “What the fuck’re y’doing here? Y’think you c’n scare me? Y’can’t scare me! Get the fuck OUT OF HERE!”

  She was drunk. Muse took a breath. There was a lot of bad going on right here. When Demon went forward, toward the drunk chick brandishing a handgun, the bad went to worse. The nearly-naked social worker stopped and locked her legs—looked like she’d taken a handgun class. He put his hands up, but she was staring at Demon. Muse wasn’t sure she’d even noticed him yet.

  “If y’think I won’t shoot you in the face, y’can try me!” She was on the sidewalk, in the overlapping circles of the streetlights. The gun shook in her hands, and Muse saw the muscles in her slim forearms bunch as she tightened her grip.

  The gun wasn’t manually cocked, though. That might give him some time.

  But Demon grinned and reached behind his back, and Muse knew exactly what the fucktard was thinking—he’d seen that the gun wasn’t cocked, too, and he was betting he could draw on her. He’d come carrying. Jesus. “Deme, ease off. We don’t need a shootout. Just put your hands up.”

  “You’re outta your mind,” he growled in response, but he held his hand at his hip.

  “You gonna shoot a naked girl in her front yard? Is that gonna get Tucker back?”

  That got him. Demon relaxed and turned away from the girl. “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.” He turned his attention to the girl. “Sidonie. Is that right?”

  Her eyes slid to him; she looked surprised to see him—and rightly so. They’d spent a surprising amount of time together in the past fifteen hours. “What?”

  “My buddy here is gonna get on his bike and go, okay?”

  She still had the gun on Demon, so Muse took a couple of steps toward her. She didn’t change her aim, but she watched him come. “And what are you gonna do?” Her speech was clearing up; adrenaline was probably kicking the booze out of her system.

  “I thought we could talk. Smooth this over.” A couple more steps, his hands still up. He was only maybe six feet or so from her now. Demon, finally being reasonable, had stood pat in the middle of the street.

  “Talk? Yeah, right. Fuck you. I won’t be bullied.”

  He took another step, a long stride, and she decided that he was the greater threat, arms up or not. She swung the pistol toward him, loosening her two-handed hold as she did so. He used the opportunity to lunge in and hit her trigger hand. He gave it a good pop, and the gun clattered to the sidewalk.

  But then she came in with her other hand and caught him under the chin—a direct hit to his button with the flat of her hand, sending his head flying sharply backward and dropping him to his ass. She’d rung his bell hard. What the fuck?

  Before he could get his wits or his feet back, she had the gun again, and this time, standing over him, she cocked it.

  “Mine’s bigger, bitch,” Demon snarled from behind Muse. He didn’t need to look over his shoulder to know that Demon had drawn his Glock. Muse sighed. So much for defusing the situation. He should have taken a couple more minutes to try to talk her out of that gun.

  From his new seat on the sidewalk, he said, “Okay. Seeing as I’m the only one on the street of sound mind just now, how about you both listen to me and put the fucking guns down.” Nobody moved. So he looked up at the pretty girl pointing a gun at his head and said, “Have you ever shot anybody, hon? Are you really prepared to take me out? Because if you are, and if you do, my friend will do you the same. But if you’re not, then let’s all calm down and talk instead.” He stood up, and she took two steps backward, letting the gun sag to her side.

  He took the gun out of her hand and emptied it.

  Now she only looked frightened. She took another step backward, and Muse reached out and grabbed her arm. He couldn’t let her go until he was sure this whole scene wasn’t going to explode in their faces later.

  She pulled, and he held, trying to be gentle. “Please, just let me go inside. Don’t hurt me.”

  “Just want to talk. Not gonna hurt you.”

  Her head pivoted to Demon, who was still drawn on her.

  “Deme—get the fuck outta here. Go back to Bibi. I got this.”

  “I want my boy, Muse. I’m not leaving without my boy.”

  Muse was tired, he was tense, and now his head hurt. He was fucking pissed. “Asshole, Tucker’s not here. You want a shot at even seeing him, then you let me clean up your mess. Get the fuck OUT.”

  Again, Demon faltered, sense obviously giving a mighty struggle to clear a path through a tangle of fury and desperation. “I gotta get him outta there, brother. He can’t grow up like that.”

  “So you want him to grow up sitting in his own filth, with his mother passed out in her oatmeal?”

  Muse groaned. The little chick was not making this easy. “Shut up, hon.”

  Demon, though, hadn’t ramped up at that. Instead, he just stared at her. For a moment, the scene was static. And then he said, “You people are the ones who said she was better than me. I wouldn’t let that shit happen to him. But you won’t believe me.”

  “Deme, go on. Get out. Let me make this right. C’mon, brother. People are gonna start waking up soon. We need to get off the street.”

  Finally, Demon nodded. He shoved his Glock into his waistband, under his kutte, mounted his bike, and strapped on his helmet, all the while staring at the social worker still in Muse’s grip. He fired it up and rode out, and Muse allowed himself to relax a fraction. Then he turned back to the girl and tried out a smile.

  “Okay—that’s better, right?”

  “Do you have a gun in your pants, too?”

  He grinned. “No, ma’am, I do not.” Lifting her now-empty .38, he added, “Just this one here, and it’s har
mless now. I don’t suppose you’d invite me in for a cup of coffee? Seems like we could both use one.”

  She blinked up at him, seeming to come back to her senses. “You’re asking me to let you into my house after all this? And serve you coffee?”

  Her arm was still in his hand, but she wasn’t fighting him to free herself anymore. He spoke calmly. “I was the only one not armed. I’m the one who settled everybody down. I’m the only one who didn’t point a gun at anybody’s head. If you think about it, I’m the one taking a risk, asking to go into your house unarmed. Who knows what kind of crazy shit you got in there. All I know, I could end up in a meat pie for your lunch.”

  She almost smiled.

  “I can’t go until we talk, hon. You made things hard enough on my friend yesterday. I need to make sure we’re okay, so things don’t get harder.”

  The almost-smile was gone. “See, though, that’s fucked up. I just did my job. You know how I found Tucker yesterday? Sitting naked in the middle of the filthy kitchen floor, smeared with his own poop and who knows what else, eating a Twinkie covered in ants. The whole place was overrun with filth and vermin. His mom answered the door and half her head was covered in oatmeal or puke or some kind of lumpy shit. I was supposed to leave that little boy there? So your friend wouldn’t get upset? Fuck you!”

  Muse was sickened. But they all knew Dakota was a junkie and a shit mom. “That’s not on my brother. That’s on the judge who gave a junkie custody. That’s on you people for not letting a father have his son.”

  Her righteous fury faded, and her eyes slid to the side. “It’s in the file. There’s nothing I can do about that.” She shivered, and Muse barely caught himself before he ran his hand up her arm to warm her.

  “How about that coffee…and maybe you want to put something warmer on?”

  She looked down at herself, and Muse understood that she’d had no idea how she’d come outside. “Oh, my fucking God. Oh God! Oh, shit!” She yanked her arm from him and ran to her porch. He followed, and when she threw open her door and ran in, leaving the door open, he took that as an invitation and went into her house.

  Her house was still dark, but there was enough light coming from the street through the uncurtained casement windows that Muse could make out a tidy, tasteful living room, small and cozy, leading off from the little round entryway. Leaving her gun on a small tiled table in the entry, he stepped into the living room and looked about for a light switch but didn’t find one. She—Sidonie—had run straight through and around a corner. So he just stood where he was and waited for her to remember he was here.

  With not much else to see in the dim space, his brain entertained itself with images of her leggy near-nakedness. Though he’d been too busy trying not to get shot, or get her shot, to have focused much on her lack of clothing at the time, his eyes had obviously been taking notes. She was slender and long-limbed, her hipbones and ribs showing just a little through smooth skin. Not much to speak of in the chest department.

  Just the way Muse liked his women. He liked to be able to take a girl’s full breast in his mouth. And small-chested women had such pretty little nipples, like little rosebuds at the tips of their tits. And she’d been cold—those little nips had been beaded right up, showing clearly through her bra.

  Fuck. Now he had a hard-on. Just as he grabbed himself in the dark and worked on putting his dick somewhere more comfortable in his jeans, the room flooded with light, and she was standing at the end of the hall with her hand on the switch, staring right at his hand, which was still grabbing his junk.

  For half a second, he stood there, frozen. Then he let his hand fall to his side. He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he didn’t. After a couple more beats’ worth of staring, her eyes came up to his.

  He gave her a sheepish smile and looked away.

  The room she’d illuminated was neat as a pin and decorated with a caring, feminine hand. The furniture was small and mismatched, like it had come from rummage sales or antique shops, are maybe were just hand-me-downs, but the room didn’t have a look like it had been carelessly thrown together. The walls were a warm crème, and brick fireplace had been painted pure, bright white with a glossy sheen—recently: he could still smell the paint. Travel photographs had been enlarged and framed in mixed black frames. Under his feet was a worn but pretty rug, of the kind his grandma had called a ‘turkey carpet,’ covering the oak parquet floors that these houses typically had.

  Muse almost laughed, thinking that there was probably more going on in this one room than in the entirety of his own, barely-furnished house.

  “Why are you here?” She’d changed into a pair of light-blue plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a short little green beater that left a couple of inches of her belly bare. Not really helping in the hard-on department, now that he had such a vivid image of her in his head.

  He cleared his throat. “We need to talk.”

  “Why?” She rubbed at her forehead, and he remembered that she’d been drunk when she’d come out with the gun. She seemed pretty clear-headed now.

  “I need to know you’re not gonna cause more trouble for Tucker’s dad.”

  “So if I say I won’t, you’ll leave?”

  Actually, no, he wouldn’t. He wanted to be able to help Demon understand what was going on, so that he didn’t have to keep chasing around San Bernardino County, getting between him and trouble. Dakota was probably up next. Muse was surprised he hadn’t started there.

  That reminded him...he pulled out his burner. “No. I still want to talk. But I don’t mean you harm. Would you give me a sec?” When she sent him an incredulous glare, but didn’t otherwise protest, he dialed Sherlock.

  “Yeah, Muse.”

  “I sent Demon back to Hoosier’s place. Can you check in on him?”

  “Fuck. It’s like having a renegade five-year-old in the family.” Sherlock sighed heavily into the phone. “Yeah, I got ‘im. All clear where you are?”

  “Think so, yeah. I’ll catch you up later.” He ended the call and put his phone in his pocket, using the chance to push his stupid fucking hard-on into a less obvious position. Then he smiled. “I don’t suppose that coffee’s gonna happen?”

  A dramatic sigh and a shake of her head, then: “I am obviously insane. Yeah, what the hell. Come on into the kitchen.” She turned into that doorway, then turned back, her finger pointed at his head. “But I teach self-defense at the women’s center. I also know where all the good knives are, and you don’t. So just sit down and behave yourself.”

  There was fight in this girl. It seemed she was smart enough to have fear, and strong enough to stand up despite it. He tipped his head in a courtly salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

  He followed her through the doorway to another small, pretty room with creatively mismatched furniture. One corner, with pale green walls, held a small, round table and three chairs, each different from the others. The rest of the kitchen was sunny yellow and white. He sat down on a yellow wicker chair, then, feeling unstable on it, shifted to a white wooden one instead. He felt overly large and beastly around her dainty things.

  She went to a cabinet and pulled down a glass canister. Her blonde hair was loose and hanging down her back. It was longer than he’d realized the day before; it brushed her waist when she looked up. Lifting her hands up into the cabinet had bared more of her belly—flat and smooth. Her skin had a golden tone to it, and he wondered again about her heritage. But that was a fleeting thought. Most of his attention was devoted to the image he had now of pushing his tongue into her perfect, oval belly button.

  Damn. He needed to grab the first girl who showed up at the clubhouse today and get this shit out of his system.

  As she scooped ground coffee from the canister into a coffeemaker, she asked, “What is it you so desperately have to say to me?”

  He blinked and refocused. “I want to make sure what happened tonight doesn’t end up in that file you got.”

  She switched the coffeem
aker on and turned to him, leaning her hip on the white-tile counter and crossing her arms under her pert little tits. “And why shouldn’t it? It seems like it’s relevant information, the father stalking the caseworker, pointing a gun at her.”

  If there had been any bite in her words, Muse might have reacted more forcefully to the threat implicit in them, but she’d spoken dispassionately, as if she were making a curious observation. So he nodded. “Yeah, that sounds bad. And he fucked up. No question. He went off the rails—the thought of Tucker in the system is making him nuts. He loves that little boy—and he’d never hurt him. Never has, never will.”

  “I can’t talk to you about Tucker’s file. I figure you know that. I shouldn’t have said what I’ve already said. All I can say is that yesterday was my first day on his case. I read the file and the recommendations in it from his previous caseworker, I went to the home on a scheduled visit, and I saw what I saw. I did what was right for a helpless little boy. The rest of it, all I know about his father besides what’s in the file is what you’ve seen him do around me. And you’re saying, what…that I should recommend a placement with him? Seriously?”