To Dance with the Devil (The Blood Singer Novels) (3 page)

BOOK: To Dance with the Devil (The Blood Singer Novels)
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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.

 

3

“So, how
have you been sleeping?” Gwen asked.

Gwen Talbot is my psychiatrist. She’s a trauma specialist. I first worked with her when I was a kid, after the kidnapping. I’ve gone back to seeing her because my life has overflowed with trauma in the last few years. Gwen’s the administrator of Birchwoods, a very high-end mental health and addiction treatment facility, so she has limited time available to see patients, but she always manages to fit me in.

We were seated in her office, a large, beautiful space decorated in colors that matched the beach that could be seen through the wide bank of windows: sand browns and the blue-greens of the ocean. As I took in the view, I realized that there were storm clouds gathering on the far horizon. Gwen’s suit was the same gray as the clouds, a color that looked good with her silvering hair and olive complexion.

“Better, but not great,” I admitted. I have recurring nightmares, in part from what happened when I was a kid, in part from my up-close-and-personal meeting with a bat, and more recently from an encounter with a demon who told me he’d see me in my dreams. All of this makes sleep a very tricky proposition.

“Did you have a priest come bless the house as I suggested?”

“Yep.” Matty had been happy to do it. In fact, he did such a good job that it stung
me
every time I crossed the threshold of my bedroom. I’d also hung dream catchers that had been decorated with crosses and sprayed with holy water: one in the bedroom doorway, in every window, even on the mirror of my dresser. It looked more than a little odd, but the demon hadn’t actually manifested in my dreams in the week since I’d installed them.

“And has it helped?”

“It has,” I answered. “But I’ve been a little stressed out about the whole family therapy thing.”

“Ah. I see. It’s reasonable to feel apprehensive under the circumstances. But our goal is for you to be ready. Is there something in particular that’s bothering you?”

I looked from the windows back to Gwen and seriously considered her question before answering. “Not really.”

“We could reschedule,” she offered.

“No point.” I sighed. “I’m never going to be ready. I’ll just have to do it anyway.”

Never one to let me wallow in self-pity, Gwen grew stern. “That’s not quite true. You don’t
have
to. You have a choice, Celia. You need to recognize that fact. It is your decision to make. Your mother’s therapist thinks this would be useful for her. But I’m your doctor, my concern is
you.

I smiled at her. “Thanks. I appreciate that.” I did. But it didn’t change anything. No matter what I thought about my mother and whether or not I believed she could get well, I needed to do this if I had any hope of salvaging my relationship with my gran. And I wanted that, badly. Not long ago, the terrorists had tried to kidnap her to use against me. They’d failed, but it was a close enough call to make me realize that we really needed to work on the issues standing between us before it was too late.

I reached into my purse and took out the pair of pictures I’d been carrying around all day, setting them gently onto the desk where Gwen could see them.

Gwen looked at the pictures carefully. She seemed more interested in the one from Ivy’s birthday, so I said, “That was taken about a week before Ivy died.”

She nodded. I watched as she gathered herself, preparing for something. But when she spoke, it was to ask a surprisingly innocuous question. “Is that you in the background?” She pointed a manicured finger at a figure in the background, leaning forward so that I could get a clear view of the image.

I found myself giving her an odd look. Gwen had to know that was me—she’d treated me when I was that age. She knew what I’d looked like. So she must be trying to make a point—leading the horse to water, as it were.

I looked from the picture to her face. Her expression gave nothing away.

“Yes.”

“How much do you think you weighed, looking at this picture?”

I’d been young enough not to have reached my full height and was still pretty skinny. “Probably ninety pounds, less than a hundred, anyway. Why?”

“You’ve recovered all your memories of the kidnapping, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“So tell me, how much do you suppose your attackers weighed?”

I closed my eyes and actually thought about it for a moment. The biggest of the guys had probably been six two, and he’d been heavy, with a beer gut, and muscular, with the kind of calluses you get working construction. If I was describing him to the police, I’d put him at around 250. The others were both smaller, say, five ten and 180 pounds.

“Celia, I want you to look at this picture again. Do you really think that any girl that size, no matter how tough, could fight off three full-grown men?”

I opened my eyes and really looked at the girl in the picture. I knew it was me, but for the first time I looked at the girl in the image as if she were a separate person. Damn, she was tiny. She probably weighed half of the smallest of the three guys who had attacked her and her sister. She was a tough little thing, a fighter—you could see that in her eyes and the slant of her jaw. But there was no way she’d be able to fight off even one of those men, let alone three.

BOOK: To Dance with the Devil (The Blood Singer Novels)
12.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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