“Just another warning about your safety and the future of Supernatural relations in Chicago.”
“So no pressure.”
“None,” he said with a grin. “Let’s get moving.”
Connor stowed my backpack with his duffel in the small cargo box. I resheathed my sword so it hung at my back, then pulled on the helmet and fastened it, adjusted my braid.
Once helmeted, Connor threw a leg over the bike, pushed up the kickstand with a heel, took his seat. “Your turn.”
I moved behind him, put a hand on his shoulder, and tossed my leg over, grateful for yoga flexibility. The thickly padded seat was perfectly comfortable, as was the nearness to Connor.
“You good?”
“Yeah.” But I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with my hands.
He turned back and looked at me, his smile cocky and classic Connor. “I like seeing you back there.”
“So far, I like being here,” I said, giving him back the same smile. “We’ll see how it goes.”
He chuckled. “There’s a bar behind you if you want to hold on to that. Or”—he reached behind him, took my hands, and pulled them around his waist—“this is an option.”
When I gripped him, body warm beneath my hands, he shifted his body and mashed the starter with a booted foot. Thelma roared to life—a deep, low rumble that pulsed through bone and muscle like a second heartbeat.
And so we rode into the night.
* * *
* * *
It being Chicago, traffic was thick as molasses even in the dark. We battled cars and trucks and a few other bikes on 90 as we drove toward the meeting place, and the stop-and-go didn’t exactly give me a good sense of what it was like to ride the open road. Connor could have bobbed and weaved on the bike—I’d seen him do that as a teenager—but he rode relatively sedately, staying with the flow of traffic as long as we were making forward progress.
Alexei—or the man I assumed was Alexei, given the shielded helmet—pulled behind us on a cherry red bike just past Schaumburg. He followed us, staying a few yards behind, until traffic cleared. Then Connor opened up the motor, and we absolutely flew. Thelma cornered like she was part of the road, a slot car tied to asphalt.
My heart raced every time he accelerated or took a curve at speed . . . which was often, and I had to stop myself from giggling maniacally. Connor might have grown from the cocky teenager he’d been, but there was still a shimmer of the wild about him. I gripped his hips tighter every time he did it, which probably just encouraged him.
We passed fields and farms and fast food and very occasional wildlife. A pair of deer frozen and staring in the middle of a cornfield. A raccoon, eyes flashing in our headlight as it scampered along the side of the road. And the approximately one million bugs that struck our helmets.
We’d ridden for a couple of hours when Connor pulled into a gas station with a diner along a dark stretch of road. The building gleamed in the darkness, and semis idled in the parking lot’s dark corners. We parked, removed our helmets. Alexei pulled up beside us, took off his helmet, pushed a hand through his hair.
“Coffee,” he said.
“Seconded,” I said, then climbed off the bike, still feeling phantom vibrations from the bike’s motor, and rolled my neck.
“You okay?” Connor asked.
“I’m great,” I said, not bothering to check my crazed smile. “That was amazing.”
“I’m glad you liked it, ’cause we’ve got several hours to go.” He smiled, ran a hand through his hair. “It’s the scenic tour of Wisconsin tonight. Albeit in the dark.”
“My favorite time of day,” I said, and tucked in locks of hair that had escaped from my braid. “It’s nice to get outside the city. We weren’t really a road-trip family. Much less a motoring one.”
“I’m shocked to hear that,” Connor said as we walked toward the door, his voice dry as toast. “When I think vampire, I think camping and muddy hikes.”
“My father was a soldier—four hundred years ago. He’s gotten used to high thread counts and temp control.”
“And what about you?” Connor asked, with what sounded like challenge in his voice. He held open the door as a man reached it, then walked through, sleeping child limp in his arms. “Thank you,” the guy mouthed silently, carried the kid to a minivan.
I glanced back at him. “Are you asking me if I can hold my own?”
“Yeah, I am.”
We walked into the small alcove between exterior and interior doors. There was tile on the floor, paneling on the walls, and an old-fashioned gumball machine in a corner, topped with a pile of real estate brochures.
I arched an eyebrow. “Not that I need to prove anything, given we fought the fairies together—and won—but I’ve walked forty miles of Hadrian’s Wall, hiked Lac Blanc in the dark, spent three nights in a tent in the snow in the Pyrenees. That acceptable?”
His mouth twitched. “Yeah. That should do it.”
“Yeah,” I said, pushing through the interior door. “I thought it might.”
* * *
* * *
We sat down at a booth along the diner’s front glass wall and ordered black coffee, which the pinafored waitress delivered in plain stoneware mugs.
I took a sip, grimaced at the harsh bite of what tasted like liquid creosote.
“Coffee’s shit,” Alexei said, staring down into it.
“It’s pretty bad.” I looked at Connor. “I don’t suppose there’s a Leo’s in Grand Bay?” Leo’s was my favorite coffee shop in Chicago.
“Leo’s is good coffee,” Alexei said. The most words he’d said directly to me so far, and since we agreed, I considered it a good step forward.
“No Leo’s,” Connor said. “But there will almost certainly be coffee, and it will probably have ‘north’ or ‘moose’ or ‘lake’ in the name.”
Alexei grabbed a half dozen sugar packets from the condiment holder, ripped off the tops, and emptied them into his mug. He piled the leftover paper into a neat little mountain, then took a sip of the coffee-flavored sugar, swirled it around his mouth.
“Did that help?” I asked.
“No,” he said, putting down the mug and wrapping his hands around the ceramic to warm them. “Just makes it sweet.”
“Alexei has a bit of a sugar problem,” Connor said.
“Sugar isn’t a problem,” Alexei said. “It’s a solution.”