Invision (10 page)

Nick held his hands up. “Dude, it's a look of awe.”

“Sure it is. And before my social anxiety kicks in, I'm heading back. Hope you get to feeling better. You need me to sacrifice a goat or anything for you?”

Nick feigned a round of really fake laughter at something neither of them found particularly amusing since Madaug was the one Nick had turned into a goat with his powers when Nick had rescued him from the Zombie Hunter demons. “Uh, no. No goats. No more game programming ever, partner.”

“Yeah, lesson learned.” He bro-hugged him, then headed back to class.

Nick shook his head. That boy was going to end up as a leading doctor somewhere.

Or as an evil villain mastermind, leading a horde of henchmen.

Thank goodness he was on their side for the moment.

Suddenly, a huge, dark shadow fell over Nick. He started to scramble away out of reflex until he looked up and realized it was the mountainous muscled mass also known as Big Bubba Burdette.

“Sheez, Bubba! You scared the crap out of me.”

“Boy, you need to lay off the caffeine. You got the reflexes there of a scared Chihuahua.”

Yeah, well, given the fact that all manner of deadly things tended to pop out of the shadows intending to eat him or enslave him, it was little wonder. But he couldn't tell that to Bubba.

“How you feeling?” Bubba put his hand on Nick's forehead.

“Pretty awful.”

“You look pale.” Bubba grabbed his backpack. “C'mon, I already signed you out.”

“Thank you, by the way. I really appreciate it.” Nick scowled as he caught a whiff of aftershave and realized that Bubba's scraggly beard wasn't so scraggly. He'd trimmed it down to one of those shadowy things that Kody and Brynna giggled about on actors. “Did you shave?”

“Shut up.”

And now that Nick was paying attention, he realized that Bubba wasn't wearing his usual uniform of bad horror movie T-shirt and ratted-up flannel shirt over it. Instead, he had on a nice button-down and new jeans. The only thing that remained of “old” Bubba was the heavy, steel-toed work boots. “Gah! Bubba! That's my mama, you know?”

He arched one jet eyebrow at Nick as he gave him a scathing glare that backed him down a notch. While Nick might be the Malachai, Bubba had been a semipro linebacker and was the size of a brick house with the muscle mass of a world-champion weightlifter who could put him through a wall with a single sneeze. Not to mention, he was a raw, bad-ass survivalist who went zombie hunting for fun in gator and demon-infested swamps. “Don't you even, boy. I asked you before I started going out with her and you said it was all right.”

“I know what I said, but…” Nick shivered. “Can't I be grossed out?”

Bubba snorted. “Grow up, snot-nose.”

Nick was trying, but it was hard. While he wanted his mom to be happy, he didn't want to think of her actually
dating
someone, especially not his best friend and mentor. And the fact that Bubba let his mom call him Michael really screwed with Nick's head.

Only Bubba's mama got away with that.

And Cherise Gautier.

As they left the school building and Nick headed home, Bubba stopped him. “I told Cherise I'd take you back to the shop with me so that I could keep an eye on you 'til she gets off work.”

“Oh my God, Bubba! I'm about to turn seventeen. Really?”

Bubba's blue eyes darkened with tragedy.

Nick mentally kicked himself as he remembered that Bubba's wife and son had been murdered because she'd gone home from work due to illness and had been there alone when an intruder had broken in on her.

“You don't need to be by yourself while you're illing. You need someone to watch over you so you can sleep.” Bubba's voice was emotionless, but his eyes weren't. They carried the full weight of grief and self-recrimination that Bubba crucified himself with. He held himself fully responsible for not going home early to be with his wife. It was why he took his zombie slaying to such extremes.

Why he was overprotective of everyone. And that was why Nick had allowed him to date his mom. So long as Bubba was with her, he knew no one would ever harm a single hair on his mother's head. Bubba would break them in half first.

“Okay. Sorry. You're right.” He didn't bother to tell Bubba that he wouldn't have been alone at his condo. Xev was there. Or should be.

But then only he and his crew of friends knew that Xev was Mr. Fuzzy Boots.

As they reached Bubba's computer and gun store that was just over a block from the school, Bubba opened the door for him. “Do I need to send Mark out for soup or something?”

“No, I'm good for the moment. But pizza in an hour would be good.”

“Pizza? Oh my God, Mikey. No wonder you like the boy. Sounds just like
you
!”

Nick hesitated just inside the shop at the sound of an unfamiliar male voice that was thick with a middle Tennessee drawl.

Reserved around strangers, he turned to see an average height, heavyset man at the counter who was probably in his late fifties. Even though they'd never met before, Nick knew him instantly. “Hey! It's Bubba from the commercials!” The only difference was that he didn't have on the flannel shirt or zombie tee either, but rather wore a red polo shirt and jeans, and his black hair and beard were laced with gray.

Bubba stepped around him to put his backpack down behind the counter. “Nick, meet my father, Dr. Burdette. Dad, this is Nick.”

Nick moved forward to shake his hand. “Real pleasure to meet you, Dr. Burdette.”

“And you, though to hear my son and wife talk about you, I was expecting an ankle-biting rug rat. Not a half-grown man who stands eye to eye with my giant beast of a son.” He glanced at Bubba and shook his head with a sigh. “I swear to God, that boy's mama must have been feeding him fertilizer when I wasn't looking. Ain't nobody in my family ever been that tall … hers, either, for that matter. If he didn't look just like me, I'd be wondering, and eyeballing the mailman.”

“Daddy!” Bubba barked in a chiding tone.

“What?” he asked, blinking innocently. “It's God's truth, and you know it.”

Laughing, Mark stepped out from between the black curtains that separated the front of the store from the back room. Only a few years older than Nick, he was Bubba's sidekick and best friend, and fellow zombie-hunting lunatic. The two of them got into all manner of madness whenever Nick turned his back on them.

The ying to Bubba's yang, Mark was as fair as Bubba was dark, with shaggy light brown hair, and bright green eyes that seldom stopped laughing. Like Bubba, he'd gone to college on a full football scholarship and they'd grown up together in Tennessee before moving to New Orleans.

“Ah now, don't let Nick's height fool you, Dr. Burdette. He's still an ankle-biter.” Mark smirked at Nick. “How you feeling, kiddo?”

“Sick.”

“Well, don't give it to me or I'll make you wash Bubba's underwear for the next month.”

Bubba snorted as he started opening the day's shipment and checking it in. “Don't I pay you to work?”

“Nah. You pretend to pay me and I pretend to work.”

Ignoring them, Bubba's father came around the counter to examine Nick. “So what are your symptoms? Sore throat?”

Eyes wide, Nick glanced at Bubba.

“He's a GP … general practitioner. Worse than my mama, any day, and twice on Sunday. Surrender, kid. It's just easier that way. He ain't going to let you alone until you do.”

Oh great. If the doctor pulled him in for tests … he was still the Malachai with some unusual traits, and if they uncovered the fact that he wasn't human this could turn ugly fast.

Clearing his throat, Nick sought to avert disaster. “Not too bad. Mostly headache and tired and achy.”

“Hmm, might just be a cold. Let me take you in back and get your vitals. Check you out.… You're the one with the preexisting heart condition, right?”

“He is.”

“Bubba!” Nick snapped.

“Don't Bubba me, boy. Your mama
and
mine would skin me alive if anything happened to you on my watch. Personally, I think my mama likes you better, anyway.”

His dad laughed. “Completely not true. I was once mopping the kitchen floor when Mikey came running through the house for no good reason—like someone was trying to kill him—and fell. Now a normal woman would be mad at the kid for tracking mud on my freshly mopped floor. Let me reiterate
normal
woman … I didn't marry normal. I married Bobbi Jean Clinton-Burdette. Ain't no normal in that family tree, I'm telling you. So faster than I could blink, his mama took that mop handle to me 'cause that boy done skinned his knee on my fresh clean floor. I'm telling you, she got ahold of me so viciously over it that I thought one of them Greek furies had done descended on me from Mount Olympus. You'd have thought that boy lost his leg the way she carried on. But he barely bruised it. Didn't even bleed, but boy howdy,
I
surely did.”

“You did not.” Bubba snorted. “And I was four when it happened.”

“Four, nothing, it was last year!”

Bubba laughed and shook his head. “It was not.” Sighing, he met Nick's gaze. “One thing to know about my daddy, he don't always tell the truth.”

“Now that ain't so. I always tell the truth. I just do so creatively. Makes it more entertaining for folks that way.” He draped his arm over Nick's shoulders and led him to the back where Bubba and Mark worked on computers while Bubba called Nick's mom to let her know that he'd picked him up and had him “in custody.”

Dr. Burdette had him sit on a stool next to Bubba's linked computer monitors that had an interesting array of food lined up across them. He smiled as he saw Nick frowning at it. “Excuse my food porn. Bobbi Jean keeps me on so many diets, that's my sin right there. Anytime I get out of her sight, I start looking up desserts I can't eat and salivating like Pavlov's dog. You wouldn't want to smuggle me one of them beignets later, would you?”

“Don't you dare, Nick!” Bubba called from the other side of the curtains. “He's diabetic and he ain't to have none of that while he's here.”

His father growled at him. “You and your mama, boy! What good is a conference in the Big Easy when I can't have none of that food here? You might as well shoot me and put me out of my misery!”

Bubba carried a box of parts to the back to put them on the shelf. “I don't want to shoot you, Daddy. But I would like to keep you around for a little while longer. So would Mama. Don't break her heart. You done promised her you'd behave and stay on your diet.”

Nick patted him on the shoulder. “I feel your pain, Dr. Burdette. You should meet my mama. She forces me to eat vegetables.” He shuddered. “And other girl foods. It's terrible.”

Bubba laughed. “He's right about that, but Cherise is a great cook. I swear that woman could turn ketchup packets into a gourmet meal.”

His dad got a strange expression on his face at that. “I think he has a fever. You mind if I take him up and get my kit?”

“Sure. I was going to let him rest in my bed anyway 'til his mama gets off work.” Bubba narrowed his gaze on Nick. “I mean that, too. Don't let me catch you surfing porn on my PC up there, or playing no games. You can watch TV, but I want you resting.”

“Yes, sir. Bubba, sir.” Nick scooted off the stool and headed for the stairs that led up to Bubba's two-floor condo above his store.

As he walked up, it struck him just how familiar he'd become with Bubba over the last few years. In weird ways, he was like his father.

For that matter, he was the only father Nick had ever really known. Even though his birth father had lived with them for a time, Adarian had never felt fatherly. Never felt like he belonged as part of their family. To the day he died, he'd been a surreal stranger.

From the moment Nick had wandered into Bubba's store to rent time on a computer for a school project, Bubba had been different.

Like Kyrian and Acheron.

Nick felt as if he'd always known them. As if they were family from aeons ago, and they had spent lifetimes of history together. Acheron would say it was because lives were a tangled tapestry of overlapping threads that spanned centuries. Souls born and reborn, always reconnecting when they were supposed to and that Nick had met them before.

Madaug would call it inherited memory. He'd written an entire paper on it for class. In his mind, the DNA of previous generations left a permanent imprint on each person when they were born, and that when two people whose DNA had interacted in another lifetime came together in their current one, some primal part of their anatomy sparked like dormant neurons in the brain firing awake. That was why Madaug thought humans had that feeling of having met someone before or having known them “forever.”

Nick wasn't sure what he thought. He only knew what he felt. His father had left him cold. The saddest part about losing his father was that he didn't grieve over Adarian's passing. And that made him feel defective. Broken.

Vacant.

Yet he knew if he lost Bubba or Kyrian, it would be different. Their loss would devastate him. As would Mark's. Or one of his friends.

Even Zavid and he barely knew him. The thought of his friend being held and tortured …

He had to get his powers back and find him. In the back of his mind, he could still see the condition Zavid had been in when they met. Held without comfort or dignity. Treated more like an animal than a sentient being. It was how his father had dealt with people.

And it was something Nick couldn't stomach.

Dr. Burdette led him into Bubba's condo and went to the guest room to get his doctor's bag. Nick made a beeline into Bubba's room and grabbed a pillow from the bed and the blanket he kept folded on the chair, then headed for the couch.