Today Tomorrow and Always (Phenomenal Fate 3)

“No.”

Jesus, why was he being such a downer? Might be the fact that he’d spent the whole day with an incurable erection, but that was only the half of it. There was something about this girl that made it feel natural to spill his guts. Maybe it was the way she seemed to read him that made it pointless to do anything but be forthright. Whatever the reason, was this really how he wanted Mary to remember him when he dropped her off and turned tail? All doom and gloom and woe is me? “But hell,” he chuckled, forcing some buoyancy into his tone. “I’m not complaining. If I have to keep moving around, at least the work is honest.”

Tucker’s sudden brightness didn’t appear to fool Mary, but she didn’t comment on it. “You mean driving the Uber?”

“Yes. And the work I do for Jonas.” She shook her head slightly to indicate she had no idea what he meant. “We counsel new vampires. Try and teach them how to live as normal a life as possible. Sometimes we have to give them a place to stay, train them in how to feed without murdering anyone in cold blood. That kind of thing.”

“That’s what you do for the new king?” she whispered, some of the color leaving her cheeks. “I had no idea. My mother said he had no use for the fae, but I never stopped to ask what he stood for beyond that. I really am joining the bad guys, aren’t I?”

“You’ll never be bad, Mary. Your intentions are pure.”

His words did nothing to ease her troubled expression. “When my father returned with the fae, she was never the same. I’ve been wanting to make this right my whole life.”

“You’re not the one who made it wrong in the first place, kid.” He paused to stop his voice from vibrating. “But if you’ve set your mind to changing the situation with your family, you’ll see it through.”

“What if I’ve just been waiting for any opportunity to fix the past for so long, I can’t see why this opportunity is the wrong one?”

“I can’t answer that for you, Mary, but I believe one thing.” With a swallow, he curled his hand around her wrist and listened to her heartbeat pick up. “In my experience, there’ll be a moment when you know exactly what to do. Okay?”

“Okay.” Her pulse thrummed beneath his fingertips. “I give you a five-star rating for advice.”

A laugh caught him off guard. “That’s being generous.”

“You never told me what happened when Jonas got into your car.”

“Oh.” He pried his hand away from her before he could do something stupid. Like try to scent her blood through the delicate skin of her wrist and horrify the poor girl. “He, uh…he said he’d been watching me for a while and needed someone with my restraint. So I could instill it in others.” He cleared his throat hard, trying to dispel the hunger that wouldn’t leave him alone. How ironic that he was having a conversation about willpower while battling the most insane thirst of his life. “I don’t just drive humans for the banter. It helps me build resistance to their scent.” He nudged her foot under the table. “And the tips don’t hurt.”

A smile bloomed across her face. “Good. You can pay for my milkshake.”

Tucker grinned back in her direction and just kind of got lost there, somewhere among her freckles and lips that were probably strawberry flavored. Soft. Had she kissed a member of the opposite sex before? His gut didn’t seem to like that possibility at all. It churned loud enough that Mary raised an eyebrow. But whatever she was going to say fell on deaf ears, because a prickle of awareness danced up Tucker’s spine.

Long before Tucker was Silenced, he’d had an odd knack for sensing when something was about to go wrong. It dated back all the way to childhood when he’d decided to walk to school one morning because his skin had prickled sharply when the bus turned the corner onto his road. Ten minutes later, he’d heard sirens in the distance. Once he arrived at school on foot, he was told the bus skidded on a patch of ice and slammed into a tree.

Around the time he went through the nasty business of puberty, he’d experienced a tremor in his fingertips and the full-body shakes while playing baseball after school. The tremor had moved down to the soles of his feet. Seconds before a water main broke, he swore he could see straight through the soil and grass to the rupturing pipe, witnessing it shake.

He’d been stunned by the incident and scores of less significant ones, but his mother always danced over his concerns, ruffling his hair and telling him not to worry. Eventually he’d listened, ignoring his heightened senses, desperate for normalcy. And they’d mostly gone away, except for his intuition for trouble.