by S. W. Clarke
“I stabled him.”
“Stabled him? What does this mean?”
“Like in a stable. You know, with horses. Don’t worry—it’s like a dragon spa. The people who work there spend the whole time brushing him down and washing him off and cleaning his nails and bringing him steak.”
We came into the living room, where Frank was sitting at the table by the window, hunched over one of those enormous, 1,000-piece puzzles. He had it half-assembled.
I stepped up, angled my face around to see it properly. I’d been expecting something cutesy and floral, but what greeted me certainly wasn’t that. I cleared my throat. “Is this a battle scene?”
Frank glanced up, a puzzle piece between thumb and forefinger. “It’s the GrandExodus. Well, an interpretation of it.”
The GrandExodus—when the gods left.
I never allowed myself to think of that day. Not if I could help it.
I turned away from the puzzle, took another sip of the orange juice.
Seleema was sitting on the couch. “Frank likes to assemble puzzles when he is deep in thought. Today has given him much to think about.”
“You can say that again.” I sat down next to Seleema, slid off my jacket.
“Why should I say it again?”
“It’s an idiom, dear,” Frank said from the table.
“Ah. Idioms are my least favorite part of English. Most are incomprehensible.”
I couldn’t help my smile. “Sister, you and I are cut from very different cloth. But I suppose none of that matters to me when you can armbar an ogre to the ground and you’re loyal to a fault.”
Seleema just blinked at me. “You just used several idioms, did you not?”
I shrugged. “It’s kind of my way of being.”
Frank’s chair pushed out, and he came and sat in the armchair beside the couch so the three of us formed a sort of roundtable. “Tara appreciates your strength and loyalty in spite of you two being so different, my dear.”
Seleema’s eyes lit. “Ah! Thank you, Tara.” She leaned forward, taking one of my hands between both of hers without asking my consent. “I appreciate you as well. And I feel confident that you will tell us everything you know surrounding Annabelle’s disappearance.”
“You ought to work in sales,” I murmured, completely sucked in by Seleema’s soft approach. I took a deep, hitching breath, closed my eyes a moment. That phrase slipped into my head—the descendant—and my eyes popped open. “Say, have you heard the joke about the purple dragon?”
The houri stared at me. “Does this relate to Annabelle?”
“Well, sure, in a roundabout sort of way.”
She kept staring at me. “I have not heard the joke of the purple dragon. I would prefer to talk about Annabelle.”
I made a face. Why was this so hard? “I’m not sure where to start, really.”
“Can you start from the beginning?”
The beginning? I could hardly remember a time when the Scarred hadn’t been as much a part of my existence as my own body. I must have thought about them every day since …
I glanced down at Frank’s puzzle. “Five years.”
Seleema tilted her head. “The beginning is five years ago?”
I returned my eyes to hers. “It’s hard to say where it all starts.” I blinked, and saw a flash of black hair. My stomach turned over, and I knew where I had to go. “I can’t, Seleema. I’m real sorry, but—”
Seleema squeezed my hand, and I swear she must have injected some Other magic into me, because my frazzled brain stopped sparking long enough to hear her say, “Please, Tara.”
“Well”—I swallowed—“I suppose I could begin with the boy.”
I started to speak, and I found myself dissociating from the Tara seated in the New York apartment. It was as though I floated outside myself, watched my blonde hair glimmer in the afternoon sun as I talked about the boy.
He was sixteen or seventeen. Or at least, he appeared to be.
I saw him outside the entrance to the main circus tent. We had been encamped on the outskirts of Houston not even a day when he showed up, all thick black hair and green eyes. Those eyes were only for me; and yes, he watched me like a sixteen-year-old boy would watch a fourteen-year-old girl he found pretty.
But he also watched me like I carried the answer to an important secret.
What had drawn me to him? It was more than just his good looks. It was something else.
Why had I kissed him behind the tent? That wasn’t like me. I hadn’t kissed anyone before.
My mind raced ahead. And as it did, I found my voice growing thinner and sieving away into almost nothing.
My throat just about closed in the living room, and I took another long sip of orange juice. When I set it down, I refocused on Seleema. “I can’t do this.”
Her eyebrows had at some point pulled tightly together. “Tell us what you can, then.”
I swallowed, exhaled through my mouth. Still I floated outside myself. “That day I kissed a boy, and then my father attacked him and threw him outside the circus grounds. That night, we were attacked by a clan of vampires.”
For some reason, my memory always began with the boy, as though the two things—kissing the boy and the attack—were interlinked.
“What happened then?” Seleema asked.
“They killed my entire family.”
The living room went so silent I could hear the ticking of a clock I hadn’t known was on the wall. I could hear cars through the closed windows. I could hear my own heart in my ears.
But I didn’t hear the screams. Those, mercifully, remained at bay.
“Tara—” Seleema began.
“I should have died that day, five years ago,” I barreled on. “But I didn’t. He didn’t kill me, but he killed everyone else. Not just my mother and father, but my sister. He and his coven killed all sixty-eight members of my family that day. But I gave him a scar he’ll carry for the rest of his GoneGodDamn life.”
Seleema went silent again. But she kept holding my hand in both of her own, and something about the warmth of her touch gave me the will—the nerve, even—to go on.
“Now he and his group call themselves the Scarred. They’re mortal, just like the rest of us. But mortality didn’t lend them a conscience—that’s for certain.”
Frank spoke for the first time. “And you believe they took Annabelle?”
I turned to Frank. “I know they did.”
“How do you know?” Seleema asked.
That phrase flitted through my head again, along with the cold dread it brought. I still couldn’t place it, but I knew it was connected. It was all entwined. “The ogre called Annabelle ‘the descendant.’”
Once I’d said the phrase, my gut cinched. The descendant. Why did it make me feel ill? I touched one temple, shaking my head.
“What is it?” Seleema asked.
“Something about that phrase. It triggers a memory, but I can’t get hold of it. Or maybe I won’t allow myself to hold it. I don’t know.” Even talking about it frustrated me.
The houri sat up straighter. “You are blocked.”
I lifted my eyes to her. “I guess.”
“I know how to fix this.” She rose, my hand still in hers, so I ended up rising with her. “Frank, we must go to the bazaar at once.”
Chapter 9
Half an hour later, I leaned forward from the backseat of Frank and Seleema’s car and put both hands on the seatbacks. “This is the bazaar?”
Seleema turned toward me, affixing her nametag to her uniform. “Is it not a wonder?”
Frank and I met eyes in the rearview mirror, and then I looked back through the windshield at the sprawling mall before us. And when I say mall, I don’t mean anything like the green, manicured National Mall in DC. No, nothing that glorious.
I mean sticky tiled floors. I mean Dippin’ Dots stands. I mean the world’s worst music playing in every store.
“Seleema,” I began, “d
id you just bring us to a shopping mall because you had to go to work?”
She pulled her hair into a tight ponytail. “No. The fact that my shift will begin in an hour was just good fortune.”
Together, the three of us got out of the Beetle and crossed through the busy parking lot and into Macy’s. As we passed through the women’s shoes section, I glanced over at Seleema, who was making sure her shirt was properly tucked into her pants. “So you’re a mall cop.”
For the first time, something like indignation passed across the houri’s face. “I am the guardian of the bazaar.”
I exchanged another glance with Frank, who only shrugged.
“And why am I here?” I asked.
Seleema slung her arm through the crook of mine in an unexpectedly sisterly way. “To visit the realm of seeing. Frank will escort you there, and I shall find you afterward.”
“The realm of seeing?”
“It is a way of understanding yourself, Tara Drake,” Seleema said with a wave of the hand. “You see, what your subconscious remembers is far deeper than you are able to perceive, because for every interaction you have, your soul experiences an invisible interaction in the background.”
“And this is going to help us figure out how to find Annabelle?”
As we approached the Macy’s exit leading into the mall’s interior, Seleema stopped hard. She dropped my arm, and then she stalked forward with one finger out. “You!”
Some twenty feet ahead, a huddle of teenage boys in hoodies lifted wide eyes. When they spotted the houri, they froze.
Seleema stalked toward them. “You defile the bazaar.” Her finger lowered to point at several candy wrappers on the tiled floor. “Shame.”
I stepped forward. “Seleema, I thought your shift didn’t start for an hour.”
The houri ignored me, still staring the teenagers down.
As the boys went to pick up the wrappers, Frank nudged me. “She takes her job very seriously. I’ll show you the way to the parlor.” He called over to Seleema, “We’ll meet you there, dear.”
Seleema waved a distracted hand at Frank, her eyes never leaving the offenders.
I leaned toward Frank. “She’s not even on duty yet.”
He smiled with a certain aggrieved fondness. “When Seleema’s at the mall, she’s always on duty.”
Frank and I started through the mall’s interior walkway, but I kept glancing over my shoulder at Seleema, who at some point had gotten all three boys lined up and was scolding them one by one.
Finally, Frank’s words processed. “Parlor?” I echoed.
He nodded. “Yup. Some of her sisters work there.”
“Sisters?”
“Houris.”
“So houris like working at malls nowadays, eh?”
“A few of them. I don’t know about the other seventy-something.”
I eyed Frank. “What’s it like dating a gal who can see the beauty of your soul?”
Frank chuckled. He had kind of a dopey walk, his feet always dragging a little bit. He ran one hand through his thinning hair. “Well, she never doubts my intentions. That helps.”
I smiled. “I’d never thought of that. I’ll bet it does help.” I elbowed him a little. “And I bet what happens with a houri behind closed doors doesn’t hurt.”
Frank’s eyes widened as he looked at me. It was like I’d broken an unspoken rule by mentioning such things. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. I got the message: no teasing Frank about the definite naughtiness that went on in their apartment.
The guy really did have a pure soul. He was loyal, just like Seleema.
What he did say was, “Do you have someone, Tara?”
I shrugged, gazing into a clothing store without seeing any of the clothes. “I have Percy.”
“I mean someone who sees your beauty. Someone who holds your hand.”
“I’m kind of a solo flier.” I flashed him a grin, proud of my pun. “It’s just me and my dragon.”
“Ah.” He glanced down at his shuffling feet. “But would you like to have someone?”
“Not particularly. I find romance a bit too complicated for my tastes. One night under the moon with a little blanket and some wine, never to see the other again? That’ll do me.”
“Why?” Frank asked. It was so pointed a question I felt prodded with something sharp.
“You just like pinning folks right to the wall, don’t you?” I joshed him, flying in with my fingers like an arrow. “Thwip!”
Frank watched me as I talked, and I could see a certain sadness in his eyes. Maybe he felt sorry about something else, or maybe he felt bad for me. Something told me it was the latter. “I’m sorry. After what you told us in the apartment about your family, I know that was an unfair question. And you don’t have to answer it.”
My skin prickled with his sincerity. His niceness. I found myself falling right into the role I always played—that approximation of sweetness. “That’s all right, Frank. You know, the world’s just too big and wide a thing for me to get all hung up on one person, one place. Me and Perce have so very much yet to see.”
He nodded, stopping and turning toward me.
I stopped with him. “What is it?”
He pointed over my shoulder. “We’re here.”
I turned, and my eyes lifted to the sign over the store.
Mystic Journeys Massage Parlor.
Inside, a beautiful, olive-skinned woman sat at the front desk under a wan fluorescent light. Her dark eyes fondled me with perfect serenity, beckoning me in. In a strange clash of cultures, she wore a green kimono folded to a low V across her chest. Must be a houri.
In the corner, a little fake waterfall gurgled, and on her right, a cheap Japanese standing screen had been conveniently placed to cordon off curious eyes from whatever took place in the back.
And it all felt … filmy. Like if I set my fingers to anything inside there, they would come away with a certain grime. Despite the attempts at beauty and serenity, the whole place gave me the sense I would receive the most shameful happy ending of my life if I walked in.
I remained standing in place. “This is the ‘place of seeing?’ ”
“This is the place.”
I made a face. “That smell.”
Frank stepped up beside me. “I know. You get used to it.”
↔
Just as Frank and I were about to head inside the parlor, Seleema jogged up to us. She stopped before us, slightly breathless, and gave Frank a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, dear one, for bringing her here.”
“Of course, baby. Did everything turn out all right?”
Seleema fell into an animated discussion of “the defilers of the bazaar,” her hands rising into the air as she described escorting them out of the mall.
And for his part, Frank watched and listened with his full attention. As though she wasn’t just a mall cop dealing with some teenage boys. As though everything she said was crucially important.
I stood watching the two of them, feeling something between discomfort and charm at the obvious adoration between them.
And I decided this was all Frank’s fault for asking me about my love life.
Nothing good ever came of talking about my love life. As if there was one to speak of. It was more like lust-with-a-powerful-dash-of-inebriation. Which suited me just fine; you could trust in lust. It might be fleeting, but I liked fleeting. I was fleeting.
But while you had lust, you had it. It was yours completely, and you could hold it in both hands and feel your own power. For that night or week or month, you were a queen on a dais. You smelled of roses or daisies or chrysanthemums—whatever flower they preferred to smell.
And meanwhile, you never had to reveal what you actually smelled of. You could bask in the glory of your own floral scent for however long you wanted, and then, one day, you could disappear out of their life, and you’d never be less pretty in their memory than you were on the day you left.
Yeah, lust was where it was at.
When Seleema had finished her story, she turned to me. “I am glad to have made it in time.” She took my hand and whisked me inside the parlor, Frank following.
“In time?” I repeated.
Seleema leaned toward me as we walked inside. “If you request the wrong service, you will get very different needs attended to.”
Something told me I wouldn’t get any services here I actually needed—or desired. But Seleema seemed so sure about all of this that I found myself wanting—hoping, maybe—that this place was the answer to a larger question inside me.
I didn’t just need to know where Annabelle was.
I didn’t just need to understand what “the descendant” meant.
I needed to see.
What did I need to see? I wasn’t sure. And I would never admit as much to anyone; I wasn’t the type to go for woo-woo stuff like this. But then, life had a curious and sometimes miraculous way of surprising you.
I hadn’t been lying to Frank when I’d said I wanted to see the world. I wanted to see it all, and I knew there was a lot still out there for me and Percy. We had a story that had just begun to unravel.
And maybe Mystic Journeys Massage Parlor would become a part of that story.
“Hello sister,” Seleema said as we stepped up to the desk with the houri in the kimono. The two bowed to each other, the seated houri setting one hand over her chest and lowering her face. Seleema gestured toward me. “I require that this human receive a special treatment.”
Treatment. For some reason, that didn’t evoke any of the positive feelings it should have. Instead, the combination of Seleema’s wording and the severity of her tone made me feel a little like an electrotherapy patient.
Across the desk, the houri’s demure, sexy eyes didn’t flick over to me so much as they drifted upward, her long eyelashes fluttering so slightly I almost wanted to reach out and touch them. Then they drifted back over to Seleema. “Of course, sister.”
The other houri stood in an elegant motion. With one finger raised and a word spoken in a language I didn’t know, a young man appeared from behind one of the screens. And if this houri in a kimono was hot, the male—he was clearly a houri, too—was absolutely, mind-meltingly gorgeous.
