To Dance with the Devil

2

“All right, spill it.” Emma plopped down into the armchair, mock-glaring at me. “You’re upset about something. I can tell.” Emma is petite and pretty, with naturally blonde hair and blue eyes. A former gymnast, she’s built rock solid. Today she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but even dressed for sorting through boxes, she looked pressed and neat. I wonder sometimes how she does it.

I sighed in response to her question. She knows me so well. Being with Matty has relaxed her a little, but only a little. Ah, Matteo DeLuca, he is the love of her life and the brother of my current love, Bruno DeLuca. Matty is currently working on getting a transfer out of one of the militant orders of the priesthood to the regular branch, so that he and Emma can get married. It’s funny, I would never have thought to put the two of them together romantically, but it works.

I was glad I’d invited Emma over to help. Being around happy people always cheers me up. Emma was radiantly happy, and it showed. Of course, she’s in love, and Matty loves her just as deeply. I took a second to be thankful that the two of them found each other. Life is crazy at the best of times. Love should never be taken for granted.

I forced my mind back to the topic at hand. “It’s Dawna. She bailed on a meeting with a client. A female client.”

“Seriously?” Emma shook her head. “Crap.”

“She said she had to take Chris’s mom to the airport,” I explained.

“Isn’t that what cabs are for?”

“Thank you,” I said with vigor. “That’s exactly what I said.”

“And?”

I shook my head. Dawna hadn’t given me a further explanation, so I had nothing to share. “She hadn’t even done the preliminary paperwork. If she had, we would never have made the appointment. It was a complete waste of time. The woman was lying through her teeth and it would have been evident with even a simple examination.”

“Ouch.”

I took a deep breath. “It’ll be fine.”

“Uh-huh.” Emma packed a lot of skepticism into two little sounds.

I sighed. “I’m scared. I think…” I paused, trying to find the right words. “Okay, maybe I’m nuts, and I don’t have any proof, but ever since our office building was blown up, Chris has been pushing Dawna to quit. She told him no before, but I think she may give in to him after all.”

Emma’s expression grew pained enough that I had the sinking feeling I’d hit the nail on the head … hard. Crap. I must have looked curious, because she blushed and frowned.

“I can’t talk about it,” she said. I wondered if Dawna had said something to her or if Emma’s clairvoyance had picked something up. In either case, she wouldn’t tell me what she knew. If it was Dawna, Emma wouldn’t break a confidence, and if it was her magic, well, Emma and I both knew that sometimes talking about a vision of the future could make it come to pass. Or not. Either way, it was usually a good idea to say nothing.

I gave Emma a look that spoke volumes, then went into the kitchen to get us some drinks.

I poured Emma a glass of the wine she had brought, but I was in the mood for something different. Let it go, I told myself as I rummaged in the freezer for one of those pouches of premixed frozen cocktails. Available at the grocery store, you just stick ’em in the freezer for a half hour and they’re ready to go. Tasty, too. I found what I was looking for, salted the rim of a glass, and poured myself a margarita before heading back into the living room. I passed Emma her glass and raised mine.

“L’chaim!”

“To life!” Emma agreed, clinking her glass with mine before taking a long pull. “So, I understand you’ve put some ads out and are hiring. Are you looking for anything specific? Maybe someone male, and a mage?” She put a teasing note in her voice, but she was at least partly serious.

I shook my head. “No. Bruno made it very clear. He wants to work at the university. Besides, I couldn’t afford him.”

Bruno DeLuca: my fiancé in college, now my lover, my friend, and one of my favorite human beings on earth. He’s got power—he’d made those amazing knives of mine—plus brains and money. He’s sexy as hell. He can raise my pulse rate just walking into a room, even after all these years. You’d think I’d jump at the chance of bringing him into the company. Other people certainly do. I’ve seen some of the offers that have come his way from really major players.

It was her turn to give me a narrow-eyed look. “Uh-huh, like he wouldn’t change his mind if you asked him. That’s not why you’re not doing it.”

Ouch, that stung—probably because it was the truth. Bruno did want to work as a professor, to get out of the rat race in the private sector. I respected that. He’d made a ton of money making artifacts, but he’d wound up having no control over who used them or for what purposes. He didn’t like the idea of something he made being used for evil, but more than that, my honey is all about control.

That’s one of the main reasons I didn’t want him as a business partner. He’s a take-charge kind of guy, and I wanted to be the one in charge of the company. I’d already dealt once with a man who wasn’t able to follow my lead in a crisis. The results had been spectacularly ugly. I wasn’t going through that again. No way.

“Fine,” I admitted. “You win. I want to run the company and I don’t think he’d follow orders any better than John did. Been there. Done that. Wasn’t fun.”

Emma didn’t even try to argue. Instead, she stared across the room, her eyes growing just a little vacant. She could have been looking at the future—she’s a clairvoyant, after all. Or it could have been just a reaction to the alcohol.

I didn’t ask. If she wanted me to know something, she’d tell me. Instead, I put my empty glass down on top of a magazine on the coffee table and reached for a box.

There were a lot of boxes. I’ve been living in the same place for several years now, and for a while I’d cleaned up once or twice a year by throwing anything I wasn’t immediately using into a carton. Add that to Vicki’s boxes, and Gran’s, and the ones from my office—before and after the bombing—and there were plenty of boxes to go through. I didn’t expect we’d crack more than a few today.

The box I grabbed wasn’t a packing carton. It was smaller and flatter and clearly marked with the logo and image of the VCR it had once held. It was also labeled, in my gran’s neat block handwriting, FAMILY PHOTOS.

“Aha!” I settled back into my seat and opened it. Lifting the lid revealed a messy stack of photographs, some having aged badly, the colors faded; others stuck to the thick backing paper used for shots taken by my gran’s old instant camera.

“Ooh, I love pictures. Let me see.” Emma all but leapt out of her seat. Moving aside a stack of boxes, she plopped down on the couch beside me.

Smiling, I started passing photos to her, explaining each one as I did. “This is my grandpa Peahi on his boat. He called it The Dreamcatcher. He always said he named it that because it’s how he caught my grandma’s attention, and it was where he proposed to her. He was out at sea on it, all alone, when he had the heart attack that killed him. Gran couldn’t bear to look at the boat after that, so she sold it.”

“So, is he the ancestor with the siren blood?”

“None other. I think it’s why he loved the water so much.” I set the picture aside. I’d see if my great-aunt Lopaka wanted a copy. She’d told me before that she and Grandpa were close before he left the siren islands.

The next shot was of Ivy, blowing out the candles on her fourth birthday cake. It was one of those cakes that had a doll in the middle so that the cake looked like the doll’s poufy dress. It had been iced so that it looked quite a lot like Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind—a dark-haired woman in a big hoop-skirt. Ivy had been so delighted. She’d played with that doll all day, every day after that, swiping clothes from my Barbie to dress her. Looking deeper in the box, I saw that same battered doll, dressed in a faded orange swimsuit and buried in photos. I shuffled through more pictures and spotted several of me in my ballet clothes. There were even a couple of shots of me on stage at one of my performances.

Every photo held a memory, most of them good. There were few images of my father. My mother had thrown most of them out in the great purge after he left. I had grabbed a few and hidden them under my mattress, unable to bear losing that last bit of the past. I still had them; they were in the drawer of my nightstand. I never looked at them anymore, but they were still there.

Em and I flipped through the box of memories, chatting happily. My psychiatrist had tasked me with finding pictures of myself and my baby sister from shortly before Ivy died. I picked out a few, but discovering that box put an end to the cleaning for the day. Emma and I just sat, drinking and talking, until it was time for her to leave and meet Matty for dinner.

I was sorry to see her go.

I returned most of the photos to the box and closed it reluctantly, leaving only a pair of photos out on the coffee table to take to my appointment tomorrow.

I wasn’t hungry, but I fixed myself some food anyway. I have more control over my vampire nature than I used to, in part because I’ve learned not to go too long between meals. Tonight’s menu was from the assortment of baby food I had stocked up on: squash, plus pureed chicken and noodles, warmed in the microwave, with a bit of organic applesauce for dessert. Not exactly haute cuisine, but so much better than the full liquid diet I’d started out on after the bite that I wasn’t about to complain.

I ate at the kitchen counter, then rinsed the dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher. It was nearly full, so I went ahead and started the cycle. On impulse, I fixed myself another drink before heading back into the living room.

The place was a wreck. Just looking at it was depressing. I knew I should finish going through the boxes, but I so wasn’t in the mood. Nor was I willing to put them back as is. After some internal debate I decided that I would deal with them tomorrow, and on impulse I sat down in front of the computer.

I scolded myself for being stupid and indulging my idle curiosity. I had plenty of real work to do. Abigail Andrews had very definitely not hired me. Nobody was going to pay me for what I was about to do. But something about our meeting just kept bugging me. I couldn’t seem to let it go. So to satisfy my very unprofitable and probably unhealthy curiosity, I brought up my favorite search engine and began doing a little research. I felt a momentary flash of annoyance with Dawna again—this was work she should have done.

There was nothing on Harry Jacobs. Well, not quite nothing. There was a Harry Jacobs who owned a used-car lot in Tulsa; I found links to videos of a couple of seriously bad commercials he’d made. But they were recent, and he was not in prison, so I was willing to bet that he wasn’t the right Harry. There were other Harry Jacobses, but nowhere near Santa Maria.

So I tried Abigail Andrews. Again, nothing useful.

Now, I know not everybody lives a newsworthy life. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have no identity online at all. But Abby had some seriously interesting scars. There would normally be some record of anyone or anything that had caused them—even a simple car wreck. But I was getting nada. In my head I heard that ancient childhood taunt: Liar, liar, pants on fire, your nose is as long as a telephone wire.

As an experiment, I typed in Emma’s name. In seconds I was looking at a whole history of her achievements, including all her gymnastics titles and her second-place finish in the tristate spelling bee back in grade school.

Similarly helpful results popped up when I searched Dawna’s name.

But nothing on Harry, and nothing on Abby.

I wasn’t even a little bit surprised. Feeling distinctly grateful that I hadn’t been hired, I shut down the computer. Taking my drink with me into the bathroom, I ran a hot bubble bath. The combination of alcohol and hot water might just relax me enough to get to sleep.

Friday morning came too soon to suit me. I know a lot of “morning people.” I am not one of them. Still, I managed to haul my sorry butt out of bed and stumble into the kitchen, where I proceeded to pour myself a cup of coffee and took up a position by the French doors to see what the weather had to offer. It was beautiful. The sun was shining, not a cloud marred the perfect blue of the summer sky. Later in the day I expected it would be miserably hot, but now it was perfect. Setting down my coffee, I reached for the bottle of sunscreen I keep by the door. I slathered high-SPF lotion over every inch of skin not covered by the sweatpants and T-shirt that were my usual nightwear and pulled on my favorite picture hat. On impulse I detoured into the living room to snag the pair of photographs from the coffee table. I stuffed them into my pants pocket on the way out the door.

A strip of private beach came with the guesthouse. It’s a little rocky, and the currents are tricky, but I swim there anyway when the water isn’t too cold. When it is, I just sit on the rocks or under a beach umbrella and watch the gulls and the waves. I’m part siren—the ocean soothes me. But I’ve seen plenty of humans who do the same exact thing when they can. There’s just something about the sea.

Today I needed some soothing. This afternoon I was due at the therapist for a preteleconference therapy session. I needed it. I so didn’t want to have to deal with my mother and her issues. I’d rather be doing anything else. Seriously, anything. Demons, vampires, zombies—I’ve faced them all. And I’d rather do any of that again than deal with my family history. But there you go. You do what you have to do.

I clambered up on the rough surface of my favorite rock and stared out to sea. When I thought I was calm enough to handle it, I pulled the first photo from my pocket. Old and faded, it had been taken with a technology that no longer even existed. I remembered that day so clearly. It had been my birthday. My father had grabbed the Polaroid and snapped a shot of me right out of bed, blonde hair tangled and sticking up as I stood there in my Barbie pj’s. Ivy was in the background, looking small and adorable, her wide blue eyes staring at the cartoons playing on the television, completely oblivious of everything else going on in the house.

I’d also brought the shot of Ivy with her cake. I hadn’t said anything to Emma, but this was the last picture of my sister. Gran had taken it just about a week before three of my mother’s male “friends” had kidnapped my sister and me. They’d hoped to get Ivy to use her gift of speaking with the dead to find treasure—they’d seen something in the news about a kid in Florida who had done that. They tortured me to get her to cooperate. Instead, she’d called up zombies from a nearby cemetery. She was powerful enough to call them but didn’t have the knowledge or experience to control them. The thugs died a gruesome death. My sister did, too. The only reason I lived was that I’d been tied to a table and couldn’t move. Movement draws zombies like honey draws flies.

I sat on the rock, tears flowing so hard I couldn’t see the picture in my hand.

For years, my memories of those horrible events had been magically suppressed, my emotions blunted so that I could function, if not heal. Unfortunately, the magic that had suppressed them had been negated by something that had happened to me a few months ago. And I got to experience my feelings for the first time in years. So though these wounds were old, they were still raw.

I blame myself. I always have. They call it survivor’s guilt. Why did I survive when she didn’t? She was my baby sister. I was supposed to protect her.

An icy breeze blew against my face, freezing the tears on my cheeks.

“Ivy.”

My sister’s ghost was here. She comes to me often. Well, less often lately. In the eighteen months or so since my mother went to prison, Ivy’s spent a lot of time there instead. But she seems to sense when I’m most upset, and then I can count on seeing her.

Ghosts are the spirits of the dead who remain tied to something or someone until they can achieve some specific purpose and move on to their eternal reward. It’s pretty typical, for example, for ghosts of murder victims to stick around until the murderer is caught and convicted.

I don’t know why Ivy’s ghost is tied to me. I suspect that she’s waiting for me to forgive my mother. If that’s the case, she may be with me until I die. Because try as I might, I can’t seem to let go of the past. I love my mom. But the guys who took us were her friends. They wouldn’t have known about Ivy and me if she hadn’t blabbed about us at the bar; wouldn’t have been able to kidnap us if she hadn’t been fucking passed out from booze and drugs in some dive somewhere, leaving us home alone. They’d even used her keys to get into our apartment.

No, I was not ready to forgive my mother. Not now, maybe not ever. I just don’t want that to cost me my relationship with my grandmother. Gran has always been there for me. But she refuses to see or hear anything negative about my mother. She’s a classic enabler. Our conflicting attitudes about my mom have come way too close to destroying our relationship. The only reason I agreed to family therapy was to try to save my relationship with Gran.

The cold wind that marked my sister’s presence blew my hair back from my face and made the fabric of the beach umbrella flap loudly. I held out the photograph. “Do you remember this? It was your birthday.”

The wind stilled, the air around me growing so cold that goose bumps covered my flesh and my breath misted the air. A hint of frost appeared on one corner of the photo. A moment later the cold vanished. Ivy was gone. Where to or why, I had no idea. She’d be back eventually. We were tied to each other until I could figure out a way to free her. In the meantime, I needed to get inside and get cleaned up. Sitting here brooding was not going to make things any better and would only make my mood worse.