“Or someone lied.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“I can’t believe Luxton fired us, Otis.” Lucy edged through the fissure in the Storm Zone Wall. “He was really, really pissed. Gabriel was right about how he would react to me giving notice. So much for trying to be professional.”
Otis was several feet ahead of her, investigating the wreckage of a fallen tower. He did not appear to be concerned about having been fired on the spot. He chortled, waved his sequined dust bunny, and scampered through the ancient quartz ruins that littered the interior of the Dead City.
It was fifteen minutes after nine. At nine o’clock she had informed Luxton that she was giving two weeks’ notice and offered to come in for occasional weekend tours until he could line up another weather channeler. He had yelled at her for ten minutes, calling her ungrateful and accusing her of a lack of loyalty, before firing her. Now she and Otis were walking home through the ruins.
“He even wanted the stupid hat back,” she said to Otis. “For a minute there I thought he would demand your dust bunny, as well. Guess he figured out it looks a little too used. He wouldn’t have been able to resell it.”
Or maybe Luxton had been smart enough to realize it would be a very bad idea to try to confiscate Otis’s toy. She was pretty sure Otis would have been annoyed. An annoyed dust bunny was a scary sight.
“Too early for a pizza,” she told Otis. “Let’s go home so I can change out of this dumb uniform. I’ll pick up some of my old business cards and drop them off at a few of the smaller companies that work the Underworld. Remind them that I’m available in between Guild jobs and that, unlike Weather Wizards, I’m affordable and happy to take on the small projects. They’ll love the fact that the Guild has me on retainer. Makes me look top-of-the-line.”
Professionally, she was in a good position to rebuild her business, thanks to Gabriel. Her personal life, however, was looking extremely vague. Gabriel showed no signs of moving back to his own apartment, but that was not reassuring.
“I am not running a bed-and-breakfast for a Guild boss who can’t be bothered to get his own apartment properly furnished,” she announced to Otis.
His furry head popped up over the top of a broken pillar. He chortled agreement and disappeared.
She continued walking, dodging the ruins of the quartz towers that long ago had risen gracefully into the skies.
She was buffeted by small rivulets and occasional waves of energy as she made her way toward the crack in the Wall that opened into the Dark Zone. Some of the paranormal vibes tickled her senses; others felt like invisible shadows or the remnants of dreams and nightmares she could not quite recall.
She dodged the worst of the energy and went back to the question of Gabriel. What was she going to do about him? The time had come to take bold action. She would not let him drift into the relationship just because it was convenient. He needed to recognize that what they had between them was special and important.
There was no doubt that the attraction between them was real. She had always known that she could trust him with her life. Literally. She wasn’t so sure about trusting him with her heart, however. He appeared to be slowly but surely adjusting to the notion that he was in a position to settle down, but he would always be the mission-driven Guild man.
He had closed one very big case, and now his focus would shift back to the job of establishing the new Illusion Town Guild. He had a vision of restoring the honor and dignity of the organization he loved. He was going to be a busy man for a long time to come.
She respected his ambition and his fierce determination to rebrand the Guild image, but she was not about to become the Guild boss’s lady. He might be interested in continuing the affair or even in a Marriage of Convenience, but she was not.
She wanted nothing less than a full commitment from him. If he could not give her that, she would have to end things—the sooner, the better. The longer she let the current situation continue, the harder it would be to protect herself from serious heartbreak when the end finally came.
And the end would come, because Guild bosses were expected to enter into a formal Covenant Marriage. It was tradition, even though the men at the top of the organization were notorious womanizers and rarely gave up the habit after entering a CM. Sooner or later, they got married. The two-hundred-year-old laws and conventions established by the First Generation still had enormous power throughout society. Tradition was important to Gabriel, and long-established Guild tradition held that Guild married Guild.