"What?" Carlos tried to stand, but had to sit back down.
"Damali is gonna have to fill you in, or Father Pat - somebody梑ecause right now, I lack the patience!"
Rider punched a porch post and walked back and forth. Carlos held both sides of his skull and tried to stop the reverberating gong Rider's bellows created.
"But, I'ma tell you this, captain. The girl was angry. Had a right to be. Don't take that shit out on Yonnie, you deal with it梑ecause Yonnie did what any male of any species would do, all right. He saw an opportunity. Damali was spittin' nails, she was so furious. There was something lurking out there - she got one of them - her dead foster father and - "
"What?" Carlos whispered, allowing his hands to drop away from his skull.
"I take it you know the import of that?"
Speechless, Carlos couldn't even nod.
"Yeah. That's why Yonnie offered her a master vamp transport lift home with the caveat that, if she wanted, he'd hang around till dawn as her personal bodyguard. He was gonna do the invitation by mind lock, seeing as how we were all on the porch, by the time she was ready to leave... and Tara was there. But, Damali said no, so he had to just put it out there and see if she'd take the bait. Now you can evaluate that however you'd like."
Rider stared at his hands, using them as invisible scales in the air. "One way, a man could say, my friend is honorable. I'd do no less. On the other hand, one could say, I played myself. Girlfriend is old enough to take a nick and still do daylight. She killed a predator, but her emotions were raw and vulnerable last night, and I was out cold."
Both men stared at each other hard.
"You better get real clear this morning," Rider said in a mercifully quiet voice. "You've got a family, a post to man, and responsibilities. There were kids in the house, what if one of them was yours?" He sighed wearily, but his tone held no apology in it. "Me, yeah, I'm probably an alcoholic, I'll accept the title. But I'm a very functional one. So, know this. I'm never away from my post when I'm supposed to be there. There is no old buddy from my old days in the streets that can come into this family unit and pull me outta here and get me to the point where I imperil my own."
Rider leaned against the post and looked at the mess on the porch floor. "Except Tara. Yeah, I screwed around and got more than nicked. But I even let her go, my heart, so I wouldn't come back in here one night and not be myself - you got that?"
"Rider, man, listen... I - "
"I don't want that sonofabitch on this property. Period. I do not ever want to have to babysit your ass for the bottle or any other vice, not if you're gonna take equal partnership to lead this household. Period. If one Neteru goes off shift, the other one goes on梐nd when y'all can find time to do what you've gotta do, somebody's f**king radar better be turned on, because, if you haven't noticed, the Levels are consolidating power, heat in the system is ramping up."
"I know, man, but - "
"No, you don't know jack! My old friends had bad habits, too, dude. Mike ain't on our shit list, because he informed us where he was going, when he was going, and when his flight touches down this afternoon, he'll be lucid. Your ass, most likely, ain't gonna dry out for another twenty-four hours. I've got a cell phone number to everybody else that rolled outta here this morning. Even if their cell phone vibrates so hard it gets up and walks across a hotel night-stand, I can raise a lucid Guardian within an hour, the moment they catch their breath and say their last 'I love you, baby' - you hear me? Your days of being absent without leave all night and coming back f**ked up and needing to regen for twelve hours of daylight are over."
Carlos let his breath out hard and leaned on his forearms.
Rider lit another cigarette. "Stupid as it sounds," he said, dragging hard on the butt and exhaling rage "with the smoke, "I almost kinda liked it better when you were all vamp. Was easier. We knew what to expect, and the one thing we could always count on was nothing would roll up on Damali and possibly take her out. You were on the case. Wouldn't even let us do anything that could put her in harm's way. You were the fortress, man."
"I liked it better that way, too, hombre," Carlos muttered. "You just don't know."
"Yeah, well, pull your shit together and stop bellyaching," Rider said, his glare focused on the walkway and he drew in another hard drag that hissed. "I liked it better when I was twenty-five years younger. Liked it better when I could take one of Tara's Fourth-gen nicks... Oh, yeah, there were things I liked so much better than this current state of affairs I find myself in - like babysitting a new male Neteru who has yet to get his head screwed on straight. I bet Shabazz liked it better, too, when Kamal was in Bahia, but he ain't. Guaranteed Berkfield liked it way better when he was just a cop, and wasn't policing demons away from his daughter or watching her about to get her bones jumped by our team's computer whiz kid. But shit happens. Things change. You find yourself in new circumstances, and gotta cope. Grow up and take a number. Everybody on this team has something they liked or wanted way better than this."
Rider flicked away the half-smoked butt and looked at Carlos without blinking. "By rights, I should be the one who was lying passed out on that swing. If you had any sense, you would have been the one over there at Damali's new place, no matter what she'd said, talked your way into her door - like the master you used to be, and made the best of the new circumstance. You've got opportunity and gifts you're not even using, brother. The thing that's kicking my ass is, of all the people on the team, if you would get the spirit of this change together, you could have it all like it used to be... You've got the money, the girl is still crazy about you梔on't ask me why. All the newbies hang on to your every word. Had Dan reaching for reasons why you were out cold." Rider pulled his fingers through his hair and hocked again.
"There's a lot of things that are real different, man, that are hard to explain." Carlos scanned the horizon. There was no way to capture it all on the porch.
"My simplistic trailer-park-roots advice is this. Don't allow time to pass and wind up living on that swing, because your boy bested you at your own game, or a Guardian brother just happened to be in the right place at the right time... or we go do a job in some foreign land and she rolls up on one of the one-hundred-and-forty-four-thousand Guardian options out there and makes a decision because they had their heads on straight and you were off the job. The quicker you let go of what was old and figure out how to work with what's new, the better.
"I'm going to go do some target practice, something useful and productive that'll keep my skills sharp and keep me out of the doghouse, to release some of my old tensions," Rider said with sarcasm. "I had your back, last night. Still got it, but the Yonnie thing worked my last nerve. I need to go shoot something."
Carlos looked up slowly. A combination of emotions tore through him. Rider was pissing him off, but truth resonated within every angry word. Guilt lacerated him. Rage shook him. Worry made him weary. Damali's state of mind and what he'd missed while out sent dread and a spike of adrenaline through his every cell. Then the layers and degrees of all of those things, plus so much more, began to peel and blister. Humiliation was in the mix; he just couldn't separate it out from the rest.
Rider nodded toward the mess on the porch and began walking down the steps. "You need to clean up your own shit before the young bucks and the women see it, dude. Stop wallowing in your own crap. Find out what the new mission is from somebody that has patience, I'm not the one today. Call the priest, whatever. Then go down the road and fall on your sword like every man has to do when he f**ks up real bad. It's simple."
Carlos stood watching Rider's back as he trudged down the path, kicking up dust before rounding the house. What was there to say? He sent his line of vision on the horizon and squinted and then stared in the direction of Damali's new house.
Was it any wonder that she was lukewarm about getting married and wasn't ready to tie the knot legally, on hallowed ground? He'd felt it before, but knew it now. Rider hadn't lied. Could he blame her? Damali had waited all her life for this?
Carlos glanced over his shoulder at the puke on the porch and frowned. For all he knew she, by rights, might be blaming him about her losing the baby. Or, maybe it was the way they just weren't the same when together... like that last time together in Philly could still be in her head - he was angry, she was angry, and he'd never touched her like that in his life... nothing had been right since that.
The insane part was, he didn't even know where to begin to make that up to her. Or maybe it was simply the Light being too done with him. After Lopez, he could understand why Heaven would be fed up enough to make Damali turn away from him for good.