Chapter 56: Temptation
Mike noticed, now that she was sitting close, the thing he'd been tracking from a distance all afternoon.
The hat hadn't come off once. Not at the meal, not during the prayer, not while walking across the open meadow in full afternoon sun. Every other woman at the picnic had either gone without a hat or removed it at the table. Serena had kept hers — the wide brim angled to keep her face in consistent shadow regardless of where the sun was.
She was sitting on the grass beside him in a fitted red dress at a church picnic on a farm in Texas, and she had not once been in direct sunlight.
He filed this alongside the smell and the stillness and the not eating, and the filing produced a conclusion he wasn't ready to say out loud yet.
She was watching him think. He could tell she was watching him think because she had the patient, interested quality of someone who had seen this process happen before in other people and was curious about where it went.
"My name is Serena," she said. "Serena Volturi." She said the last name with the specific weight of someone who expected it to mean something to the person they were telling it to.
It meant something to Mike.
Not because he'd heard it before — he hadn't, not that name specifically. But because of Jennifer, and because of what he'd learned from Jennifer's situation, and because of the research he'd done in the months between St. Paul and Deford on the specific category of thing Jennifer had been.
The Volturi were, in the world Mike had been quietly learning to navigate, the closest thing his particular situation had to royalty. Old. Organized. Operating under a specific arrangement with the human world that kept them contained — geographically, legally, by the terms of a treaty that had been in place long enough that most of the people bound by it had stopped thinking of it as a constraint and started thinking of it as simply the way things were.
Washington State. The Pacific Northwest. That was where they stayed.
Deford, Texas was not Washington State.
"Mike Quinn," he said, evenly. "I know who you are."
Something moved in her expression — not surprise exactly, more the recalibration of someone whose opening move had landed differently than expected.
"Then you know what I'm offering," she said.
"I know what you're implying," Mike said. "I'd like to hear you say it directly."
She looked at him for a moment with the specific attention of someone deciding how to proceed.
"A stronger body," she said. "A longer life. Considerably longer." She held his gaze. "Permanent, if you want it. You're already exceptional — I watched your game on Monday. You move differently than humans move. You think faster than they think." A slight tilt of the head. "Whatever you are, it's interesting. What I'm offering would make it more."
Mike listened to all of this.
He thought about the Demon Body. About the immortality trait that was already running clean, already extending his baseline in every direction. About the fact that whatever Serena was offering, he already had a version of it — and the version he had didn't come with whatever she was going to ask for in return.
He also thought about Pastor Jeff, who had been moving differently since his marriage. Who talked differently. Who had, according to Connie, seemed like something was sitting on him.
He thought about what it meant that she was here, in Deford, in a small Texas town that was very far from where she was supposed to be.
"Why are you this far east?" he said.
The recalibration again. Faster this time.
"Travel," she said.
"Through Texas," Mike said.
"It's a large country."
"Washington to Texas is not a route," Mike said. "It's a detour. A significant one." He looked at her steadily. "What happened in New York?"
The stillness that came over her was different from her usual stillness — sharper, more specific, the stillness of someone who had been read more accurately than they'd expected.
"You're very well-informed," she said, "for a fifteen-year-old in a small town."
"I read a lot," Mike said.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she smiled — the precise smile, the one that was technically correct — and said: "Think about what I've offered. There's no urgency. I'm not leaving immediately." She tilted her head slightly. "But I am leaving. And the offer doesn't travel."
Across the meadow, in the shade of the oaks, George Cooper and Pastor Jeff had reached the comfortable middle phase of an afternoon beer conversation — the phase where the initial topics had been covered and what remained was the real stuff, the things people said when they'd relaxed enough to say them.
George had his Lone Star. Jeff had a glass of sweet tea, which George had noticed but not commented on.
"This had to run a good amount of money," George said, gesturing vaguely at the picnic setup — the tables, the food, the activities being organized at the far end of the meadow. "For a congregation the size of yours."
"The church has a fund for community events," Jeff said. He said it carefully, with the quality of someone giving a technically accurate answer. "It covers most of it."
George nodded. He looked at the meadow. Looked back at Jeff.
Jeff was, by any measure, a good man. George had known him for years — had never had a bad word to say about him, had sent his own kids to the church programs even without being a member himself, had the kind of comfortable arm's-length respect for the man that George had for most people who showed up consistently and did what they said they'd do.
He also looked, this afternoon, tired in a way that went past the normal tired of a busy pastor.
"You doing okay, Jeff?" George said.
Jeff looked at him with the slight surprise of someone who hadn't expected the question to be direct.
"Fine," he said. Then, after a pause: "Mostly fine."
George waited.
Jeff looked at the sweet tea in his hand. He turned the glass slowly. "Can I ask you something? Husband to husband."
"Go ahead," George said.
Jeff was quiet for a moment, assembling the question. "When you and Mary were first together — early on — did you ever feel like you'd gotten yourself into something you didn't entirely understand? Like the situation had moved faster than you'd had time to think it through?"
George thought about this honestly.
"Yeah," he said. "More than once."
Jeff nodded slowly.
"What did you do?" he said.
"Mostly I kept showing up," George said. "And eventually I understood it better." He paused. "Some of it I'm still working on."
Jeff smiled — a real one, tired underneath it. "That's either reassuring or not reassuring. I can't decide."
"It's honest," George said. "That's the best I can do."
Jeff looked across the meadow to where Serena was sitting on the hill. From this distance she was composed and still against the grass, the red dress visible, the hat keeping her face in shadow.
"She's not what I expected," Jeff said, quietly. Not complaint, not regret — just the specific statement of a man saying something true. "When we met, I thought I understood what I was looking at."
"What changed?" George said.
Jeff looked at his sweet tea. "I'm not sure I can explain it."
George looked at him. Looked across at Serena on the hill.
He looked back at his Lone Star and drank from it and didn't say anything else, because there were some things a man couldn't help another man with, and knowing which things those were was its own kind of wisdom.
On the hill, Georgie came over the rise with the loose, slightly defeated energy of someone whose afternoon social mission had produced mixed results.
He spotted Mike first, then Serena, and his stride broke for approximately half a second.
He recovered.
"Hey — Mike." He kept his voice at the register of someone delivering a normal message, though his eyes were doing considerably more work than his voice. "Three-legged race is starting down there. Missy's been looking for you for twenty minutes."
"Right." Mike stood up, picked up his jacket. He looked at Serena with the polite, neutral expression of someone concluding a conversation. "I have somewhere to be."
"Of course," Serena said. The precise smile. "Think about what I said. There's no rush."
"I'll give it the consideration it deserves," Mike said.
Which was, technically, an answer.
He and Georgie walked down the hill toward the meadow, and Mike waited until they were far enough away before saying, quietly: "How long were you standing up there before you came over?"
"Long enough to know that conversation looked weird," Georgie said. "She was sitting really close to you."
"I noticed," Mike said.
"Who is she?"
"Pastor Jeff's wife."
Georgie processed this. "She was sitting on the hill alone with you and she's Pastor Jeff's wife."
"That's correct."
Georgie looked back up the hill. Looked at Mike. "Is everything okay?"
Mike looked at him. He thought about what he actually knew versus what he was working with, and about the difference between those two things.
"I'm going to need you to do me a favor," he said. "Keep an eye on Sheldon this afternoon. Don't let him wander off by himself."
Georgie blinked. "Why?"
"Just do it," Mike said. "Please."
Georgie looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone who had decided not to ask a follow-up question.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
They reached the meadow.
Missy was waiting at the three-legged race starting line with two strips of cloth and the expression of someone who had been promised a partner and had been patient about it for approximately as long as she intended to be patient.
"You're late," she said.
"I'm here now," Mike said.
She handed him one end of the cloth. "We're going to win," she said, with complete certainty. "I've already planned the strategy."
"Tell me the strategy," Mike said.
She told him the strategy.
It was, genuinely, a reasonable strategy.
He tied his ankle to hers and looked back up the hill.
Serena was still there. Sitting perfectly still. The shadow of the hat brim keeping her face in shade.
Watching.
He turned back to the race.
"Ready?" Missy said.
"Ready," Mike said.
(End of Chapter 56)
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