Excerpt: Locks of Clay

I found Tex off by the bluff in the opposite direction of the golem's remains, his legs hanging over the edge of the precipice. He had his harmonica in his one good hand and whistled a mournful little tune into it. I stepped on a branch at the edge of the tree line so he would hear me coming, and he turned around.

“Hey.”

“Did you want to talk about something?”

He patted the ground next to him. A few pebbles fell over the edge the thirty or forty feet down to the crashing surf. I shook my head.

“Are you nuts? It's too cold to go for a swim. I'm only just now starting to dry out.”

Tex shrugged and turned around on his but, so that his back was facing the dizzying drop. I'll never understand how he could be so indifferent to heights, or to danger in general. In his place I would have been sweating bullets.

I sat down on the dirt a much more sensible distance from the edge, at a point where there was actual dirt under my butt all the way down and not a few feet of solid ground and then nothing but air.

“What's the story on the little girl, anyway?”

“I killed her dad last fall.”

Tex nodded like that was the most natural thing in the world. “Oh.”

“He was mixed up with demons and trying to bring Arkturazi back.”

Tex's next, “Oh,” was elongated and knowing. Followed up by a, “Gotcha.”

“Yeah, he stole Christian's boon and then tried to kill me and use my blood to resurrect the necromancer.”

“So he left you the kid in his will or something?”

“Tabitha is a special kid. I promised Harm I'd take care of her, not let her get lost in the foster system.”

Tex would understand that—he was one of the few people who had known Harm nearly as well as me. He knew the whole story behind Harm's lost childhood, where every adult in her life had just wanted to strip her powers, or turn them to their own ends. Harm hadn't wanted the same thing to happen to Tabitha.

I had wanted to die after failing to protect Harm. I still did. But there was that pesky little promise to consider.

“So when you say special, are we talking short bus, or little pointy horns and bat wings?” Tex curled his index fingers in front of his forehead just in case I didn't get what he was driving at.

“She's a nexus.”

“Oh. Like Anica.”

I closed my eyes. I didn't want talk about this. I didn't want to think about this, about my dead sister, or my dead friend. I listened to the booming surf for a while and remembered better times.

Once as a kid Harm had come along with my family on a long weekend trip to Kalaloch. That was a better time, and I imagined I was ten years old and sitting there in the dark, waiting for Harm to start hitting me over the head with a thick rope of kelp she had found on the beach and snapped like a whip for the rest of the weekend.

I think Tex was apologizing somewhere in the real world, but in my head Harm and I rode our bikes around the loops of the campground, up the highway to the general store, and we chewed on green apple jolly ranchers down by the river. She dared me to kiss her, I did, she punched me in the nose.

I had never bled so much so quickly—she probably thought I was dying. And that was the first time I had ever seen her show real concern for another human person.

“Dole, are you okay?”

I opened my eyes.

“Did you say something?”

“I said I was sorry. Jeez man, I'm trying to cheer you up here, not drag you down. Maybe we should save the gritty details for later.”

“No, you've got me out here. A captive audience. Why don't you tell me why I shouldn't be depressed Harm is dead?”

“You know nobody's saying that, D.”

“Then what are you saying? It was important enough to drag me all the way out here, right? So say it already.”

Tex stood up, obviously angry. “Stop being such a sad sack, D. We're all depressed Harm is gone. Neither of us would be here today if it wasn't for her, you know? You're not the only one who lost a friend. Do you know awful it was to hear she was gone, when I got home? It was like something was ripped straight out of my stomach.”

“Yeah, good job being gone last fall.”

He kicked me in the knee on his way past. Hard enough that when I tried to get up my leg collapsed under me and I spilled face first into th dirt. “What the hell?”

“Maybe you should stop being such a dick to people who just want to help.”
I stood back up, careful to put most of my weight on the left Tex hadn't kicked. Even still my kneecap stung like hell.

“Maybe you shouldn't kick people, jerk. I never asked anyone for help.”

“It's not just for your own sake. You know kids pick up on this stuff, right? You've got someone else to think about other than yourself.”

“Tabitha's fine. She's a strong kid. You've got no idea what she went through before she came to me.”

“And that's an excuse to put her through more? Come on, D. I know you better than that. You want to give that poor kid the best life possible, don't you?”

That stung more than a little. Of course I wanted to give Tabitha a better life than her father had, let her be free to be a kid in the shelter of my long shadow. Demons and worse would be after her for her whole life, I owed it to her and Anica both to protect her the best I could.

I stubbornly admitted Tex was probably right, even while I hung on tight to my depression. As stupid as it sounded, it was the least of the burdens I could bear as penance for failing Harm. How could I let myself be happy with Harm dead? I had let her go, how could I enjoy anything in this life when she was dead and it was my fault?

I just wanted to go to sleep and leave this mess of a night behind me.

Back at the campsite I went to climb into the tent Elise had put Tabitha down in, but Tex grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

“What're you doing? That's the girl's tent.”

“Girl's tent?”

“Yeah, that one's ours.” He pointed to the much smaller of the two tents.

I frowned. “What about your girlfriend?”

“Girlfriend?” Tex snorted. “Aiyana's not my anything, D. No way she's letting me share that little tent with her.”

“Well, sorry. I guess. Just you come home with a girl, I just figure...”

Tex folded his good arm over his sling. “You're not the only one with a damsel in distress complex, D. I don't know the first thing about that girl—I don't even know if Aiyana's her real name. All I know is she was in trouble and I took her away from it. Anything else is just bonus.”

“Doesn't sound like you're getting much 'bonus,' if you ask me. I mean not if I'm the one you're sharing a tent with.”

Tex waggled his eyebrows. “So back to back, or you wanna spoon?”