The Demigod's Legacy Page 3

  They sped away before she could even think to look at a license plate or try to memorize the vehicle’s make and model. She’d watched enough crime dramas to guess that was what she was supposed to know, but real life seemed to move in fast-forward in comparison to those overwrought plots.

  “Like, you all right?” her savior asked.

  “I … ” Rubbing her chest over her pounding heart, she forced down a swallow and tried to take a few deep breaths. “Um. Yes. Yes, thank you.”

  “No worries. Listen, you gotta be careful around here. Crazy stuff happens like that all the time. Be safe.”

  She nodded and looked in the direction of the disappearing SUV. It was gone, and when she turned back to the man, she found that he’d disappeared just that quickly, too. She’d barely gotten a look at him beyond the shaggy blond mop on the head.

  “Okay. Well, then.” She took one more bolstering breath, swatted her hair away from her sweaty face, and turned right back in the direction she’d come. “Should have driven in the first place.” Keys at the ready, she jogged as fast as she could toward Tito’s house and her car.

  She could start moving on with her life and maybe, just maybe, she could extinguish the flame she’d kept stoked for Tito for too damned long.

  chapter TWO

  “Ma!” Tito shouted into the desert sky, and then he paced.

  He fucking paced, because that was all he could do until she showed up, except break things. That was why he’d left his house. If he’d stayed there, he would have broken shit, and he’d paid good money for his shit and wanted to keep most of it. In spite of what folks might have thought, the vast majority of demigods weren’t independently wealthy. For that matter, neither were most gods and goddesses, which was why Tito and his mother both worked for a living.

  “Maybe she should get another paying job so she’ll stop working my fucking nerves!” he shouted.

  Still, she didn’t show up.

  He knew she couldn’t have been too preoccupied, seeing as how she was just in Maria with the little girl she’d obviously known was her granddaughter.

  Ma wouldn’t have pulled the appearance switcharoo like that if she hadn’t known. Tito would have bet good money that the child had seen Ma in more than one of her forms in Tucson. Her Mrs. Estobal character was out of the bag, but Ma had other standbys—probably some Tito hadn’t even seen. What he wanted to know was how long Ma had known, because she sure as shit hadn’t said anything to him. She would have known. Unlike Tito, she could always recognize her kind. She’d created their race of were-cougars. Tito was half human, and his magic wasn’t worth shit compared to hers. And if she’d known about Cruz, she’d known about that little girl’s mother, too—a woman he’d tried to make a clean break from for her own good.

  “Ma!” he shouted again, and finally, she arrived just when he started eying a particular cactus to kick.

  She materialized out of thin air as she was prone to, wearing her true form for a change and not one of her many disguises. Short. Small-framed. Youthful—she looked younger than Tito, even. With her black hair simply plaited and her simple attire of a loose-fitting dress, no one ever gave her a second look, but she preferred for people not to see her at all.

  Few people in or around Maria would have recognized her as the were-cougar goddess. She didn’t like advertising her location, much less her existence, and usually moved through town looking like a scowling Mexican grandma. All the humans in town knew her as “Mrs. Perez.” The cougars knew her as “La Bella Dama” or “Lola,” if they were close like the Foyes.

  Tito drummed his fingers on the sides of his thighs for a few seconds and tapped his foot impatiently.

  She canted her head. Narrowed her eyes. Grunted.

  She frightened people. She was old as dirt and, like the rest of the gods of her era, had a deserved reputation for bloodthirst, but he was her son and he loved her … most of the time, even if she didn’t act like she loved him back.

  She was more puppet master than mother, and he wasn’t about to let her get away with manipulating his life behind the scenes again. She knew how he felt about that shit, and that she had no right to meddle. He hadn’t been a teenager for hundreds of years.

  “What are you doing, Ma?” he asked. “What in the actual fuck are you doing?”

  “What you couldn’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She lifted her chin and looked up at him in that demoralizing way she always did. She wasn’t even five feet tall, and yet she always managed to make him feel like an ant. If he, her son, felt that way, he couldn’t imagine the way the people in Mesoamerica had responded during their rare encounters with her.

  “You were very clear, Yaotl, that you didn’t want to be bothered with attachments anymore, so I did you the favor and didn’t tell you that you had one.”

  He forced a hiss through his clenched teeth.

  Whenever she started calling him by his birth name, he could guess that he was in for a heap of frustration.

  “Two attachments, you mean. So you knew?”

  She shrugged in her patented “duh” way.

  “You didn’t say shit.”

  “If I had, what would be different? I knew about December. You think I wouldn’t have known when my son found someone to connect with?”

  “I didn’t want her to connect. I didn’t want anyone to.” He’d known she’d been trying to get in touch. Sean had told him. She texted Sean sometimes and Sean made excuses for Tito.

  She didn’t know anything about their world—about magic and goddesses and shapeshifters. She was just human, and that made her prey. He’d learned that lesson the hard way with his late wife. There were rules amongst gods and demigods, and backstabbing family members were the most common enforcers.

  “And so, what?” Ma snapped. “You thought that walking away for her would change anything? All you did was deny her the protections she should have.”

  “She’s safer away from me and that’s why I left her alone. You know that. You know how petty creatures like us are. Don’t you remember what happened with Domingo? His own brother killed Domingo’s mate on their wedding day, and that story’s not unusual. That shit happens again and again because some old god decided that we’re not supposed to mix and nobody ever changed the rule. How can you look at me—your half-human son—and forget that? And after everything that happened with my father betraying you, and then my wife and my son getting murdered by my freakin’ cousin, you’re telling me I gotta live through that shit again?” He shook his head and scoffed. “Nah.”

  Human mates were cannon fodder for the gods and upstart demigods. As a young man, he’d thought he was human enough to be left alone. He didn’t bother anyone.

  He’d thought wrong.

  “You don’t have a choice.” Smoothing a wrinkle from her skirt, she looked toward the horizon. “I knew from the moment of Cruz’s conception what you’d done, and I’ve been watching over her because I knew you wouldn’t. I knew that even after all these years since your son died, that you wouldn’t be able. You are angry at me for doing what you couldn’t?”

  He opened his mouth to give her an answer—which one, he didn’t know, but he always had an answer, and he couldn’t just be silent when she’d gone and brought up the one thing that could really hurt him. She didn’t give him a chance to spit it out, though.

  “I’m going to tell you,” she said. “You’re angry because you think this should be your choice. You think I shouldn’t try to claim what’s mine if you object to the thing existing at all, and I’m not going stand for that.”

  “She’s not yours.”

  “I imagine she’s more mine than yours. I’ve been around her nearly every day, in the limited way I could be, without revealing too much about who or what I am. If I were as cruel as you make me out to be, I would have told that child long ago that I was her grandmother, because she’s not normal and she sees things others don’t. I would’ve told her to not c
oncern herself with you, and that she would be just fine because I would be there instead. I didn’t taunt you. I didn’t come to you and brag about her. I didn’t guilt you into doing anything at all, Yaotl.”

  “Listen to you, so neutral in tone and undisturbed, right, because nothing bothers you? You can’t see at all how this could be hurtful to me? I mean, shit. You made me look like a fucking fool in front of December.”

  She toyed with one cap sleeve of her dress and silently stared.

  “Here she is,” he continued. “Here they are. You’re going to really tell me you had nothing to do with them coming here? With finding me?”

  “I wouldn’t have told you a damned thing, child. You can run and hide all you want, but I will not. I chose to make my home here, and I will enjoy it in the manner in which I see fit. She will know that I am her grandmother, and I will groom her as I need.”

  “Groom her, Ma? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Is she not of my blood?”

  “That doesn’t make a damn difference. If you tell her, and I ain’t gonna let you, she’ll know that I’m her father and that I didn’t—fuck.” He sailed his fist through the air, feeling entirely unsatisfied when it found nothing to land on. He needed to hit the gym later and take out his frustration on the punching bag, or perhaps run hard until he disappeared for a while—just until he got his head straight and figured out what to do.

  Ma was right that he hadn’t wanted attachments. Eztli’s death, along with his mother Citlali’s, was still too raw a wound in Tito’s memory. They’d succumbed to his cousin’s viciously deployed plague six hundred years ago, and Eztli had only been alive for seven, but such traumas for beings like him lingered until some more powerful incident replaced them in the mind.

  “I could have sent you out on a mate quest,” Ma said, her voice softer, lower. “The other Cougars, your friends, they believe I wouldn’t do such a thing to my own son, but they’re wrong. I would have forced you out to search if it weren’t for December. You should know better than anyone that my grace has its limits.”

  “Nah.” Tito shook his head again. “Not doing that to her. I’m not dragging her into this shit.”

  “Too late. You did that when you slept with her.”

  “Just so you know, I’ve slept with a lot of women.”

  Ma gave him a slow blink.

  She didn’t have to say anything. He knew he was grasping at straws.

  Shit.

  He’d fucked up big time. He should have left December alone after the first time, but he couldn’t. He’d kept going back to Tucson because she’d been so sweet and pretty, and she’d imprinted on him in the way that was typical for creatures like him. He didn’t want anybody else, but there was always a chance that she wouldn’t get attached—that she wasn’t really the mate he suspected she was, and even if she were, she could still opt out of the relationship. If she didn’t get attached, she could fall for someone else.

  She would have been safer with someone else, but now there was a child, too.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “The best you can.”

  “But I did that the last time, didn’t I? I wasn’t enough. My son’s not alive because I wasn’t enough. What makes you think this one will be any different? I’m not putting myself through that again. I’m not gonna watch another kid waste away, if I have to live to do all the grieving alone.”

  Unflappable as always, Ma looked up at him. “You could have found a lover amongst your own kind, but you chose not to look. Fate thrust a suitable mate upon you in spite of the fact you weren’t looking. I understand that you worry about her being too human.”

  “And I worry about having another child who’s too human.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? What is she?”

  “She has magic that’s more like mine than yours.”

  That didn’t calm him any. The bit of magic he’d inherited gave him the ability to shapeshift into a Cougar. Ma’s ability to transfigure went far beyond that. She also had the ability to make things thrive or else wither.

  Cruz was a child.

  Ma cocked her chin again. “I’ve never heard of anyone walking away from a true mate.”

  “You know damn well that’s not the way these things work. I can’t control whom the magic binds me to. I tried to leave December alone.”

  “I believe the part of you that’s more magic than man wanted what she was offering. It knew, even if you didn’t. I can’t fault you for not recognizing what she was. You assumed that Citlali was your mate, even when I told you she wasn’t.”

  “I thought she was.”

  Ma twined her fingers and pressed her lips into a flat line. She’d always disliked Citlali. After they’d been married, Ma had all but disappeared from Tito’s life for years.

  “December is a good woman.”

  Tito scoffed and raked a hand through his short hair. “Never would have expected to hear that from you. No one’s ever good enough for you. Citlali wasn’t good enough, was she?”

  “She was weak. She was barely adult when you married.”

  “She was human, right. What’d you expect?”

  “Human or not didn’t matter. She wasn’t right for you, but you loved her, so I didn’t interfere.”

  “But you made both of us miserable before you went away. You thought that because of how my father turned on you the way he did, that no human would ever be good enough. That’s what you said.”

  “I may be old, but my memory works as it should. I know what I said.”

  “Now you’ve changed your mind?”

  “Time has a way of tempering the intensity of so much. I can admit when I’ve behaved badly. Can you?”

  “I’ve got nothing to confess to. What are you waiting for me to say? That I messed up with December? That I shouldn’t have trusted her birth control, but that I wanted her too much?”

  “You still want her.”

  Ma said the words like they were a true fact and not a question, and he didn’t bother quarreling with her about the point.

  Of course he wanted December. He would have even without the magic that made every other woman seem so gray and boring. She was pretty and bubbly. Conciliatory and generous. Graceful under fire, and so damned warm.

  He hadn’t really wanted anyone else in six years, that’s how bad she’d messed him up. Every act of intimacy had been a chore. The ladies he’d been with had been forgiving, but they hadn’t deserved that kind of disinterest.

  “She’s not just a mate,” Ma said. “She is the mate you were meant to have.”

  “The one who could spend the rest of her life having to watch her back against threats she can’t even see or conceive of.”

  And her life could either be short or very long. Being his mate meant immortality, and he wasn’t convinced long-livedness was all it was cracked up to be.

  “No,” he whispered. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes and rubbed.

  He didn’t know what to do with another mate who’d die on him because he wasn’t bold enough to do what was necessary to keep them alive. He refused to let the deaths of any more people he loved be his fault.

  “Yaotl—”

  “No. No, I don’t … don’t want to hear anything else.”

  “You need to tell December what sort of child she’s raising.”

  “No.” Tito wasn’t even sure that he wanted to know what kind of child he’d sired. The last had been too weak.

  “You don’t understand,” Ma said softly. “Cruz isn’t like her brother. She’s made … differently.” She said the word as if it were honey in her mouth, too sweet, too thick. Careful not to swallow all of it at once. “She’s not going to get sick and waste away. I believe we are well past the time that you should have grasped that Eztli’s death wasn’t your fault. He might even have survived if the sickness had been natural, but it was born of a curse, and there was no way for you to protect
him from that that. He was just human.”

  “No, there was a way.” Tito jammed his hands into his pockets and paced some more.

  There was something he could have done six hundred years ago to prevent all the hurt. Tito could have prevented the plague by killing the carrier.

  He could have killed his cousin on his wedding night when Necalli had laughed and whispered that Citlali could still make a fine virgin sacrifice.

  She’d stared mutely at him, obviously fascinated by his warrior’s regalia and his piercings, and Tito had forced him away.

  Necalli had fancied himself a god amongst the Aztecs, but he was like Tito—a half-breed trying to fit in, but with the other side. If he’d had his way, Necalli would have offered Citlali’s blood, and Tito’s grief along with it, as a gift to the gods to ingratiate himself with them. He wanted to make them forget about the human part of him.

  Tito wasn’t like his cousin. He wasn’t so cavalier about death, even for people who probably deserved the condition. He was always able to exercise restraint, but he should have killed Necalli.

  “All these years later,” Ma said, “you encounter your rightful mate and she scares you as if she were the one born of a god. Does that not seem odd to you?”

  “I—” Tito let the rebuttal fall off. He hadn’t been paying attention, but he finally realized where he was. When he’d run into the desert, he hadn’t taken note of whose property he was on, and a couple of the occupants were heading over on a four-wheeler.

  “Damn.” He jammed his hands into his pockets and paced.

  Ma just watched in silence.

  “Yo.” Sean hopped off of the vehicle, tipped his cowboy hat back, and propped his mirrored sunglasses up. “Saw some dust flying up out here. Figured that was you.” He strutted over with his wife Hannah on his heels and accepted the one-armed hug Ma gave him.

  Hannah looked squarely at Tito, brown eyes narrowed to slits and appearing far too prescient as always. She needed that prescience, though. She was the Cougar group’s—the glaring’s—Avenger. She balanced the scales and sought out justice for the group, and sometimes within it. She probably saw Ma more than Tito did, and that generally suited Tito just fine.