moment, I was afraid she’d taken offense, or I had made her cry, but no. When she looked up at me again, her eyes were sparkling with amusement. “I have a feeling he was a lot like your father. It’s probably why your mother refused to marry him.”
I cocked my head and considered. “Cold, distant, constantly convinced he was right about everything, and not afraid to use his magic unethically in order to get what he thought he deserved?”
She gave an exaggerated full body shiver and nodded. “Sounds like they could have been father and son themselves. No wonder they didn’t approve of each other.”
I stabbed the meat with my fork and picked it up, pausing with it held in front of my lips. “But you know what, Iris? We outlived them. And now we get to live for ourselves. Maybe now is when we take a page from Mom’s book and make our own way.”
Her smile in return made her look decades younger.
Chapter Eight
It was strange to think I might have liked to stay longer, but after dinner, I had to get home to foxy. Also a hot dead gunslinger who thought I was the übermage, but I wasn’t going to mention him to my grandmother.
She told me I should bring my familiar next time. Looking at Rufus, who had been with her for over sixty years, it occurred to me that someday in the not so distant future, I was going to have to answer for lying about foxy being my familiar. If something had happened to his mage and that was why he was running around loose, he probably wasn’t going to live another sixty or seventy years the way a mediocre mage like me might. If he was a hyperintelligent regular fox, he wouldn’t live more than a handful of years.
Still, in the short term, Iris had invited me to bring foxy next time I came for dinner. Rufus loved company, she told me, and while he’d never met a fox that she knew of, he was particularly fond of cats.
Her driver, Wayne, dropped me off at the house with a wave and a friendly, “See you soon, Mr. McKinley.”
I wanted to tell him to call me Sage, but the man was just too damned efficient for me. He was already pulling away from the curb by the time I turned back to say it.
The house was dark, and I was annoyed with myself for not turning a light on for foxy and Gideon. I’d have to set something up for foxy, so he could turn on lights when I wasn’t home. Except I didn’t want to leave him at home alone at all, so maybe not.
The smell when I opened the front door was awful, and not the kind of awful I might have expected.
I’d worried he might pee in the house because, well, a guy’s gotta pee sometimes, and he didn’t exactly have a place for that or a way out. I’d accepted it as my punishment for leaving him alone for three hours like a jerk.
The smell in the entryway wasn’t that, though. It was dark and earthy with a hint of ashtray.
A long, low whine came from somewhere in the living room as I closed the front door and flipped on the entryway light.
“It was an accident,” Gideon told me from where he stood in the middle of the room, his tone worried. About me or foxy, I wasn’t sure.
Scattered across the entryway around the overturned table and empty box, were my father’s ashes. I started to take a deep, calming breath, and choked on . . . on Dad. Gross.
I looked up at him, hands spread wide. I don’t know what showed on my face, but it couldn’t have been good, since Gideon grimaced. “Blame it on me. He had to go. He figured he could open the door, and I was trying to get him to go in the bathroom instead. I distracted him. He knocked the table over.”
The whine came again, from under the couch. How the hell had he fit himself under there?
No, it didn’t matter. First things first, I had to clean up the mess. I sidestepped the worst of it and hoped I wasn’t tracking ash through the house, then hoped that if there was a bad place in the afterlife, I didn’t end up there for what I was about to do.