The Book of Daniel Read Online Free PDF Page A

they need a ref.”
    “Are you serious? Aren’t you just finishing up a full day’s work?”
    “I ref a couple times a week. I like it. It feels good to run around a little.” He took the tray and started through the door to the kitchen in back.
    “It’s your legs.” I turned to Muse. “Can I get a coffee to go?”
    “I guess.” She eyed me archly. I resisted the urge to rub my nose or check my fly.
    Jake stopped. “Want me to make you a sandwich or something to go?”
    “No thanks.” I hadn’t eaten lunch, but truth be told, I wasn’t often hungry after therapy. It’s amazing what chronic pain will do to your appetite.
    “Therapy day, huh?”
    I nodded.
    “I’ve got a little something, and I’ll throw it in a bag. If you get hungry, it will be there.”
    I nodded.
    Muse gave me a coffee; she’d drawn something on one of the little sleeves. Since she didn’t like me much I imagined it probably wasn’t the ancient sigil for Have a nice day . If I were feeling more energetic, I would have gotten out my phone and looked it up on the Internet. Someone, somewhere probably had a list of “stuff to draw on the coffee sleeves of people you don’t like.”
    Muse went off to wait on a table full of trendy boys with laptops and long eyelashes that fluttered like laundry on a line as she refilled their coffee. Was I ever that young? I couldn’t help noticing they were beautiful, the lot of them. Lean and strong, with long, elegant hands and big feet they hadn’t quite grown into yet. Their leader, made obvious by the way he slouched in his chair with his arms spread over the backs of his friends’ chairs and his legs splayed wide in a perfectly primal display of his sex, jerked a chin in Muse’s direction.
    I wondered what she wrote on his coffee sleeve. If it wasn’t at least the ancient runic symbol for fucking horndog , I’d feel singled out. It wasn’t a secret that Muse spent most of her free time with Minerva, the owner of a little bookstore called Rune Nation and Izzie, who owned my gym. Whatever Muse was getting up to in her occult studies, I figured it was mostly benign. I’d been calling the three of them the Witches of Westwick since I’d moved to town.
    Sometimes the interconnected nature of the people who lived in St. Nacho’s made my skin actually itch , and it was usually then that I got in my car and left.
    “What are you looking at?” The curiosity of the alpha of Muse’s little pack of admirers had turned to me.
    Apparently I’d spaced out while watching Muse pour coffee, and his little tribe figured I was checking her out or something.
    I couldn’t help but laugh. Jake originally described Muse to me as a “feisty marmoset” and we both felt absurdly protective of her. Maybe I was bristling because all that lean young flesh was sizing her up. One of them knocked a fork off the table, and when she bent to pick it up, they leered at her ass and nudged one another.
    I actually sputtered like some enraged father. “Knock that off, you—”
    “Back down. I can handle these monkeys.” Muse nudged me with her shoulder as she passed me. “I put something in their coffee. They won’t be able to get it up for a week.”
    This was met by a classic spit take by a boy in a white T-shirt with some bloodied video game zombie on it. While he was gathering napkins to wipe himself down, she grinned back over her shoulder at me.
    “Or I would if I only knew of such a thing.”
    Jake witnessed the last bit of that exchange and growled a warning. “ Muse .”
    “All right, all right. I promise I won’t render the customers impotent.”
    “That’s all we ask.” He handed me a huge, doubled shopping bag that felt awfully heavy for a quick sandwich.
    “What have you got in here?”
    “Just some sandwiches and salads I made up earlier. Some bread and pastries. A piece of dulce de leche cheesecake and some bottles of iced tea.”
    “Enough for an army. I can’t possibly eat this