Page 23 of The Leaving Kind

“I beg your pardon?”

“On your chest. A cat.”

Victor smiled. “So you mentioned. White?” Cam nodded. “Dexter. He’ll take advantage when he can. Sleeps on my head every night. One of these mornings, I’ll wake up with a mouthful of fur. Or not wake up at all.”

Cam didn’t have to feign his shudder.

Victor laughed. “I take it you’re not fond of cats.”

“I’m not really an animal person.”

“I find that odd.”

What was odd was the fact they appeared to be having a perfectly reasonable conversation after Cam had broken into this man’s house and roused him from death.

Clearing his throat, Cam pushed to his feet and dusted his hands off on his knees. Victor stood in a single, fluid motion, rising from the ground without support. Cam swept his lithe form with an appraising glance. When he met Victor’s gaze, he found amusement there. He thought about returning a certain sort of smile before deciding now was so not the time.

“Are you looking for extra work?” Victor asked.

“Huh?”

“You seem to have a lot of time on your hands. Would you like to fill it?”

An odd energy passed between them. Was he being propositioned? Cam had just started to wonder whether he’d accept, when Victor broke the spell.

“You’re absolutely right about the trees. I had planned to spend last week weeding, spreading the mulch, and planting. Unfortunately, I found other, less constructive uses for my time, and I really must get back to work. Do you have a rate for landscaping? At the tree farm?”

Cam found words. “Ah, no. I mean, no. We don’t do that.”

“Oh.”

“But I could. It’s not busy at the moment. I’d, ah, I could do that for you.”

Victor’s smile had a weary edge to it. “Excellent. To be honest, I’m not sure giving you an excuse to check up on me is entirely sensible, but that mulch isn’t going to spread itself.”

“Be great if it could. Maybe with nanobots or something.”

Now, Victor laughed. “Yes.” He gestured toward the door. “Well, I have cats to feed. Wouldn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and find they’d taken a chunk out of my cooling corpse now, would I?”

Cam swallowed a horrified chuckle.

Victor smirked. “Can you start tomorrow?”

“Ah, sure. I mean, probably. I’ll confirm when I get back to the office.” He didn’t like to use his cellphone for Shepard’s business.

They had reached the front door. Victor opened it. Cam stepped through. He was halfway across the front lawn when Victor called after him.

“Thank you, by the way. For checking up on me. It’s weird, but had I actually been dead, I’m glad someone would have found me before I started to smell.”

Cam forced himself to smile and wave. But as he sat in the car, the remembered odor of dead and decaying bodies seemed to fill the air. For a minute, his lungs seized. Closing his eyes, he whispered, “In and out. In and out.”

He didn’t know why his head kept going back to places he’d rather it didn’t go. He’d been home for over a decade. Fourteen years. But some days, he only had to look and he’d see the desperate faces. Smell blood and ash. Hear the sound of war.

That was why he preferred to stay busy, so he’d forget to look.

Some days, though, he saw without trying.

“Mr. Ness?”