“Don’t go to sleep on me,” he said. “I have to get back to work.”
Payne, whose father, String Bean Colson, was the guitarist of the Velvet Lemons, balanced the beer bottle on his chest. With a finger, he tilted up is Wayfarers to look at Reed. “It’s three in the afternoon. You don’t work during the day.”
“I do now.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “You know. Trying to be more…normal.”
Payne snorted. “Good luck with that.”
Reed narrowed his eyes. “Thank you so fucking much.”
“I’m just being honest. First off, you’re one of the Rock Royalty.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Reed dismissed that with a wave of his hand, because it was years since
Rolling Stone
magazine had coined that term for the nine children of the Velvet Lemons in a comprehensive article on the band and the Laurel Canyon compound where they’d grown up. It was true, though, that being raised in decadent neglect by their fathers—their most stable mother figure an infamous groupie by the name of Guinevere Moon—had certainly given them unique and largely unwholesome beginnings.
“Then there’s this place you call home.”
Reed glanced around. “What’s wrong with it?” The house was Surburbia-on-Steroids. Not a majestic McMansion, but one of a development of sprawling ranches with lots of trees and green spaces. His house was six bedrooms, five bathrooms, and out back, along with his office, was a pool and tennis court to which he’d added a couple of hoops for round ball. “They could film a feel-good family sitcom right here.”
“Yeah, which makes it even creepier that the author of the world’s scariest stories for kids lives in it…unless that’s the whole point?”
Payne had always been smarter than his beach boy good looks first let on. Reed figured living here put him in a better frame of mind from which to write his books. After all, his hero, Jesse, had been plucked from just such conventional environs before being put down in the chilling world of The School.
“Enough about me,” Reed said. “How’s my car?”
Payne grinned. “Purring like a kitten. Now.”
Reed forced himself not to wince. The other man owned several auto salvage yards. He raced cars. Working on automobiles was his passion. When Reed’s BMW needed some TLC, he always handed the keys to Payne. But as a connoisseur of everything beautiful, he loved to push the limits of anything lovely he got between his bare hands. “How fast did you get her to?”
“It’s better I don’t tell you.”
Reed groaned.
Payne laughed. “It wasn’t so bad. Cilla was in the car with me, so I kept it just this side of top-cruising speed.”
“What did Cilla get you to agree to?” The youngest of the Velvet Lemons kids, Cilla Maddox was now engaged to Ren Colson, Payne’s older brother. Cilla and Ren’s romance had been the catalyst for the Rock Royalty to begin meeting up again after years of near-estrangement. Though the rest had been ambivalent about reuniting at first, Cilla’s enthusiasm and energy had been impossible to resist.
Ren had fallen like a redwood at her feet, shaking up their entire world.
“Oh, the usual stuff,” Payne said now. “I’m supposed to pump Cami for the latest about that mystery boyfriend we believe she has. Beck’s continued disappearance is worrying her—”
“Walsh and I keep telling Cilla he’s fine…just being Beck.” An adventure writer, the oldest Hopkins brother had been out of touch for several months. “He’s on a remote section of the Nile River, for God’s sake. There are water snakes, not Wi-Fi.”
“There’s also the small matter of your scruffy hair and dreary wardrobe.”
Running his hands through his over-long locks, Reed glanced down at clothing. Black jeans. A light gray T-shirt that someone handed him at Comic-Con. “Cilla’s complaining about my looks?”
“No.” Payne grinned. “That’s just me, poking at you.”
Reed scowled. “Like you’re a fashion-plate.” He indicated the other man’s battered denim pants, white T-shirt, and black high-top sneakers. “The ghost of James Dean called and wants his gear back.”
“Gets me laid,” Payne said, with unconcern. “But I worry about you, Reed. Working when everyone but the supernatural are sleeping off a vigorous bout of sex.”
For a second, Reed’s mind flashed back to his rear neighbor. Blonde, brown eyes, big chest. But that was all bullshit…and a complication he didn’t need anyway. “I told you I’m changing that…but anyway, I have a deadline coming up.”
“Yeah, but
you’re
not dead.”
Reed sighed. Experience with women had been easy to come by in his adolescent years at the Velvet Lemons compound. The male members of the Rock Royalty had been baptized in the swimming pool and the hot tub with the help of lingerie models, porn stars, and up-and-coming actresses. While he’d been aware of the tawdriness—he’d also been a teen. In his twenties, after moving out, female companionship hadn’t been any harder to secure when he was paying for the drinks and drove a decent ride.
He also thought, thanks to those early mentors, that by then he’d been pretty darn good with a woman’s body. What a twenty-something might hesitate to request of a man of her own age, a beautiful female felt free to demand of the sixteen-year-old she was diddling in his dad’s pool.
Yeah, tawdry. But educational.
Now that he’d hit thirty, though, he hesitated over casual hook-ups. People could get hurt. He didn’t want some woman to land in his bed and expect he could offer more than a guy who could hold off her orgasms until she was ready to scream. Despite the fact that Ren and Cilla, as well as another member of the Rock Royalty, Cilla’s brother Bing Maddox, had decided their laissez-faire—at best—and licentious—at worst—childhoods didn’t preclude them from fulfilling pair-bonding, Reed remained unconvinced.
In regards to himself, he knew there was an entire other layer of dark stuff that stained his soul.
“Reed?” Payne prodded. “Look, I know this pair of twins…”
Reed shook his head. “It’s always a pair of twins with you.”
“Not true.” Payne’s mouth widened in a grin, his teeth wolf-white against the golden whiskers of his short beard. “Remember the Berry triplets? We could give them a call.”
Suppressing a shudder, he tried not to think of their vice-like thighs and unceasing prattle about their favorite reality TV shows. They wouldn’t know an eggcorn if one bit them on their buns of steel. “A mature recluse like me can’t keep up with the Berry triplets.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Reed. You’re getting old and odd.”
“I ran into Lily the other day.”
Payne’s smile died as if it he’d been shot with a cyanide-soaked arrow and Reed instantly regretted his remark. “Old and odd” might have stung, but that pain was clearly nothing compared to what Payne felt about the girl who’d gotten away. They’d all gone to high school together and Reed didn’t know what had broken up the two, but Payne still carried some kind of residual wound, obviously.
“I’m going to dump this beer in the house,” Payne said, rising so abruptly from his chair that it rocked on the grass.
Watching him go, Reed addressed his back, trying to make up for being an asshole. “Maybe you’re right. I need to go out if I want to get my normal on. Next week?”
The other man didn’t answer.
Reed took another swallow of his juice, then contemplated the half-glass of red liquid as he suppressed a yawn. It looked more alive than he did. This change in schedule was killing him, though he’d not been bothered by neighbor Cleo during his new hours. He was working mostly in his house, but when he went to his office he wore headphones now and burned this weird-scented candle that one of his readers had sent him.
It was black, which went with his mood.
Lulled by the warm sun filtering through the large sycamore tree, he closed his eyes. His mind returned to Jesse, who had been left in the play yard of the military school, during the forty minutes of “free” exercise the students were allowed a day. In actuality, that period allowed for the kind of petty bullying that occurred in any gathering of children, but that had more ominous overtones at The School.
The young male voices that he heard could have come from that world. “Do you have them?” one boy asked.
A zipping sound, like a backpack was being opened. A second voice. “It was gross, but I went through the garbage and found every slimy apple core and old banana peel I could. The lunch duty even gave me a grocery bag when I told her I was bringing them home for the compost pile.”
“Good. Dump ’em here and when they near the corner we’ll pelt ’em.”
“What if they throw them back?”
“Those two babies? Bet they throw like pussies. They’ll never hit us.”
Reed’s eyes opened. That wasn’t his imagination. There was a pair of kids on the sidewalk just on the other side of his hedge.
“Yeah. Bet they go home crying to their mommy.”
“Bet that really weird one, Obie, pees his pants.”
Their laughter held the universal edge of bullies everywhere.
Pussies. Mommy. Pees his pants.
Reed’s teeth gritted and he mentally dug in his heels so he wouldn’t be sucked into memories of Oceanview Army-Navy, that den of vipers where he’d endured a year of his life…and that had given him a lifetime of nightmares.
“Do you see them? Keep your eyes open.”
Reed debated what he should do. He remembered trying to tell his grandfather about the hazing and worse that was happening at Oceanview during the first Parents’ Weekend. Of course his father had been on tour—and would have given a shit anyway—but retired navy captain Vernon Martin had been there, with his military bearing and his unsympathetic ear.
Boys will be boys. It bonds you together. A little pain, a little humiliation never hurt anybody.
Reed knew that was fucking wrong, but he also didn’t know shit about this neighborhood’s childhood politics—he was usually sleeping when the kids were about. Maybe today it was a food fight. Tomorrow, a gleeful, two-way water-balloon battle, fast friends forever.
Even the Rock Royalty, with their unorthodox upbringings that hadn’t fostered closeness, were now becoming as thick as thieves.
The conspirators were whispering to each other, their words too low for him to catch, their sniggers revealing the plan was still on. Wavering about what—if any—action to take, Reed swung his feet to the ground. Maybe if he showed up on the sidewalk they’d move along and take their battle someplace else.
But for all he knew, the kids they were hoping to ambush deserved their comeuppance. He couldn’t discern the real villains of the piece since he hadn’t written it himself, after all.
“Here they come!” The words slithered through the hedge. “Go for Obie first!”
“Yeah, he’ll cry for sure.”
“Or pee!”
More sniggering.
Reed stood, still holding his glass of juice. Maybe he could peer through the shrubbery leaves and get the lay of the land. But the greenery was too dense. In the distance, he heard new voices. A little kid, chattering loudly about the class hamster as he passed the long front line of Reed’s property. Around the corner were the boys in wait. “He stuffs his cheeks, Eli! He shoves the Cheerios inside!”
“I’ve seen a hamster,” Eli said, in a long-suffering tone.
“Do you think Mom will let us get a hamster? Roy, he’s this boy in my class, he has a pet rat
and
a pet spider.”
“Get real,” Eli said.
Reed found himself grinning at the world weary voice of experience. “Mom would
never
let us have a rodent or an insect.”
“A spider is not an insect,” Obie said, superior. “It’s an arachnid.”
“Fine, Mr. Know Everything. You’re not getting one of those either.”
“I don’t know why—” His sentence cut off with a squeal. “Eww!”
What followed was the sound of a flurry of projectiles hitting bodies, sidewalk, street.
“Knock it off,” Eli yelled. “You leave my brother alone.”
“They hit you, too, Eli,” his brother pointed out. “You have a smear of apple on your face.”
“Obie Dopie,” one of the first voices taunted. “I got a banana peel for the little monkey.”
“Run, Opie,” Eli said, his tone harsh.
“But I have to go past them to get home.” The niggle of fear in the child’s voice galvanized Reed. He knew that sound. Had heard it in muffled tears against a pillow at Oceanview. Nearly every night in his ugly dreams.
Rushing forward, toward the front gate, he forgot about his tomato juice. The stuff splashed all over his hand and arm and he dropped the glass to the lawn then wiped the red liquid against the front of his chest.
The one-sided fight was still going on as he thrust open the sturdy gate. The hinges shrieked like a carnivorous bat on the hunt. In his hurry, he almost tripped over his own feet and to regain his balance, he lurched onto the sidewalk, taking in the situation at a glance. On his left, the throwers, blocking the corner turn. To his right, Eli and Obie, red-faced and tense, smeared and stained with lunch garbage.
The littlest boy’s big blue eyes pierced Reed to the bone. “What’s going on?” he bellowed, turning to bear down on the little shits with the fruit with a long stride and a burning gaze. The duo gaped at him for one frozen second, then on matching screams of pure terror, took off down the street.
Eli, with Obie in hand, was also on the run. He made a silent, wide skirt around Reed and towed his brother around the corner as fast as their kid-legs could carry them.
A hard palm clapped him on the shoulder. “So this is how you’re entertaining yourself these days? Scaring the bejesus out of small children?”
Reed looked over at Payne, then followed the other man’s gaze. The tomato juice he’d wiped on his shirt looked for all the world like spilled blood. He thought of his too-long hair, the way he’d staggered onto the sidewalk, the raw note in his voice as he’d yelled.
“Shit,” he said.
Payne gave him another of his it’s-a-beautiful-day-at-the-beach smiles. “How’s that normal working out for ya?”
Chapter Two
Cleo Anderson marched along the sidewalk, Obie’s hand firmly in hers. Eli trailed behind, like he was embarrassed to be seen with his mother. Since he was only eight, this made her surmise the teenage years were going to be hell.