First things first, I told myself. I remembered that I’d left my backpack at Elly’s cabin; tucked inside it was a change of clothes and my wallet. “We will start with that.”
Elly’s cabin was locked, but that was no obstacle for me. I chuckled to myself. According to the old legends, you could not keep a vampire out of your house once you’d invited it in. Apparently that old legend was true. I broke the lock and entered, closing the door behind me.
I found my pack and put on my clothes: a pair of jeans, a tank top, a flannel shirt. Unfortunately, I’d lost my favorite pair of boots while phasing into the Cat. I walked up the stairs and into Elly’s bedroom. Her boots were a little too large for me, but I borrowed a couple of extra pairs of socks to pad them. The clothes, after all, were for disguise, not for my comfort. Naked or clad, it was all the same to me.
As I laced up the boots, I heard the sound of tires on Elly’s gravel driveway. Had they come looking for me this soon? Someone knocked on the front door. “Hello?”
The voice sounded familiar, but out of place.
The knock came gain, harder this time, and the door swung open. “Hello, is anybody home? I’m looking for the Greers.”
I almost laughed out loud with relief. This was the first lucky break I’d had in a while. “Sam?” I stepped out into the hallway.
“Deirdre?” He looked up at me, his handsome face creased into a smile. “Thank God you’re all right. I saw your cabin and I feared the worst.”
I moved down the stairs and gave him a small hug. “I am so very glad to see you, Sam, you have no idea.”
“What the hell happened? Your cabin is gone, burned to the ground.”
“Yes, I know. I torched it; it was a lovely fire.”
“Deirdre? Are you okay? Where’s Mitch?”
“Mitch is gone, Sam.”
“Gone?” His voice sounded slightly hysterical. “He was in the cabin?”
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t burn the cabin down around him, Sam. He is gone. That’s all. He packed up everything he had and everything I had and left town. No note, no warning, no reason. Just gone.”
“But why would he do that? Why would he leave you? That makes no sense.”
I shrugged. “Sense or no, Sam, that is what happened. And so I burned the cabin down. Hell hath no fury, you know.”
“Okay. That I can understand.” Sam was ever the psychiatrist, and a small smile crossed his face. “I’m glad to see you’re in touch with your anger. But, Mitch? Leaving? There must be some reason. Could he have been forced?”
“Forced? Mitch? Who in this world could force him to do anything he did not want to do?”
“You could. But other than you, no one, probably.”
I nodded.
“Maybe he felt there was some threat? Something that might harm you if he stayed around?”
I shook my head. “There is only one creature in the world who wants me dead, Sam, and that is Mitch himself.”
“And so he left to protect you. See, that’s the best reason in the world.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. He wanted to protect me enough that he packed up all of my clothing. He took the curtains from the windows, took all the furniture and everything else in the cabin and moved it all to God knows where. Then, to protect me again, I suppose, he stopped by the local police station, with another woman waiting for him in the cab, to tell them he would be leaving town for a while. Good protection, that.”
He started to speak and I laid a hand over his mouth. “No, Sam, I do not want to talk about it. Not now. Not ever. He is gone; let us leave it at that.”
“Fine, Deirdre. You’re the boss. But what now?”
“Now,” I said, taking the wallet from my backpack and tucking it into my back pocket, “you will take me out of here and back to New York with you. I am a member of the Cadre, if it still exists. They will take me in; they have to.” I laughed, a small bitter cackle. “They are family.”
“Vivienne will be thrilled to see you again, Deirdre, I’m sure of that. And she will help you.”
“I do not want help. I just want a safe place to stay. Preferably someplace where I am not wanted for arson.”
Sam laughed. “Never a dull moment with you, Deirdre Griffin.”
“On the contrary, Sam, most of my life has been comprised of nothing but dull moments.” I took his arm and headed him to the door. “But you are never around to witness them. I would have been perfectly content with another century or so of dullness, if Mitch had not . . .” I choked back a sob.
“You’ll find him again, Deirdre,” he reassured me as we got into the car and drove away. “I’m sure of it.”
“And when I do?”
“Then you’ll know.”
“I do not want to know. I do not want to find him.” I shook my head and stared out the window. Somewhere deep inside my mind the Cat rumbled. Yes, we will find him. We will know. And then we will kill.
Part 3
Chapter 13
I only lingered long enough in New Orleans to attend Moon’s funeral mass, held on the ninth day following her death. I’d closed our two bank accounts and converted everything to cash. It wasn’t much; even considering my limited experience with money, I knew that a little under two thousand dollars wouldn’t last long. Angelo had taken away my biggest worry, that of what to do with our small house, by offering to take over the mortgage payment for me in exchange for being able to live there, at least while I was “off gallivantin’ in the city.”
I’d gotten used to Angelo by this time; it seemed natural to me that he should pick up where Moon left off. His froggish walk and his squinting eyes became familiar, and before he moved in he brought me gifts and objects that might prove useful to me in my search. Some were vials of offensive-smelling liquid or lotions, all precisely labeled in his small square handwriting. I laughed at first when he started pulling them out of his black medicine bag, but he peered at me so intently that I sobered immediately and listened to what he had to say.
“Now this,” he’d say, holding up a particular bottle, “this one keep folks from takin’ your money. Put a dribble on your wallet or your bags; they avoid them like the plague.” Or: “This baby let you guide some poor man’s mind, just a drop in his drink and crash! You inside his head, pokin’ around just as if you was at home in there. Now I make some of these extra strong, on account of the power of the folk you be meeting, so be careful if you use them on regular folks.” There were oils to hide my natural scent and ointments to confuse the eyes, “like the grease on the lens of the camera that make them models look so good.” He chuckled to himself over that one. “I givin’ you the best I got, Lily girl. You have faith and believe and you do just fine.”
Odd that I couldn’t believe. Despite all the strangeness of my life so far, it still seemed unlikely that such power could reside in little jars. But I’d packed them just the same at his insistence, smiling to myself, thinking as I’d wrapped the last of them that at the very least, when I run out of money, I can set up a corner stand and sell them on the street.
Moon’s mass was held early that morning; when I arrived at the church, the sun was just rising and the streets still held a trace of predawn haze. I wore a black skirt and a black T-shirt with my heavy boots. The only flash of color was my hair, flaming above my pale skin, and the red bead necklace I’d received at the grave site.
Sitting in the back pew of the church, I rested my arm atop one of the two cases I’d packed. Inside were three pairs of jeans, three T-shirts, assorted socks and underwear and a black leather jacket. The other bag contained what few cosmetics I used, my wallet and money, and ’Lo’s “medicines.” My stomach was fluttering and twisting itself in knots at the thought of the journey that lay ahead. But I’d resolved to find my mother. And find her I would.
After the service ended and the congregation filed out, I lingered, wanting to postpone one of the last tasks I had to do. But I had bus tickets and very little time to w
aste. I sighed, picked up my bags and walked over to the small, dark alcove that held the statues of the saints. I knelt in front of the altar for St. Barbara, dropped a quarter into the box and lit a candle.
“This is for Moon, you understand,” I whispered to the statue as I blew out the match. “I don’t know you. I don’t love you and I don’t honor you. But she did. Hold her safe.”
Someone came and knelt beside me. “Well done, child,” Angelo said. “Now take them beads off and give them to the saint.”
I gave him a questioning look, but at his intense gaze, I pulled them off over my head and laid them at the feet of the statue. In the flicker of the candles, they looked like a pool of blood. I shivered slightly, then got up from the kneeler. Angelo remained behind for a minute. I watched him as he lit a candle, held his hands out over the beads and sprinkled them with liquid from a vial he pulled out of his pocket. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear the words. After a while he nodded, as if concluding a pleasant conversation, and lit another candle. Picking the beads back up, he turned and handed them to me.
“I bought you a little extra protection, Lily child. Just you make sure you wear these all the time. Don’t let nothin’ happen to them.”
I looked at them, balled up in my hand like little crystallized drops of blood.
“Go on, put them on, or at least put them in your pocket. He keep you safe.”
“If you say so, ’Lo.” I draped them around my neck again and tucked them under the neck of my shirt, and Angelo smiled.
“That’s right, Lily. No need to tell the world your secrets.”
The bus station was about a mile and a half away, so we walked. The morning haze had burned off while I was in church. Angelo and I moved in silence, passing the corner where Moon and Hyde had been killed. Now, in the bright sunshine, with the street vendors and their colorful wares, with the boys dancing for tourists’ money, with the music and the smell of flowers, it seemed like that terrible event had never happened. But underneath all the gaiety, I smelled the scent of death and it hardened my heart.
“Dirty trash town,” I muttered under my breath. “I’ll be glad to leave.”
Angelo grunted. “But you be back, Miss Lily. We all come back.”
We arrived at the bus station with about an hour to spare. I went into the ladies’ room and changed from my skirt into a pair of jeans. When I came out, Angelo waved me over and we sat for a while on the hard bench, sipping too-strong tea from white Styrofoam cups. Eventually the loudspeaker announced boarding for my bus and he reached into his pocket.
“I just got this this mornin’.” He handed me a small piece of laminated paper, a Louisiana driver’s license for one Lily Williams, aged twenty-two. “Figure you be needin’ some sort of identification, couldn’t send you out there without. No, no thanks for old Angelo. Moon fix this one up; give me the information and the picture months ago and asked me to hold on to it till the time was right.”
I thanked him anyway, gave him a small hug and walked out of the station to board the bus.
The trip took over thirty hours, too long a time to be cooped up in an enclosed space, even when those hours meant less than seconds to someone like me. I spent a lot of those hours studying my fellow passengers, wondering about their lives. There wasn’t much else to do.
As the miles accumulated and the scenery changed, the window on which I lay my head grew cooler. I tried to sleep, but the woman in the seat next to me was restless and anxious and the all-too-familiar emotions were contagious. By the time we arrived at our first scheduled stop, I was jumpy and nervous, but I filed into the restaurant with the rest of them, sat down and ordered coffee and food.
“Can I join you?”
I looked up to see my seatmate smiling at me. She was, I guessed, in her late thirties or earlier forties, sort of pudgy, dressed flamboyantly and with no regard for color matching. But she had a nice smile. And I was stuck with her for the next twenty-some hours, so I smiled and said, “Sure, why not?”
She sat down and settled in on the stool next to me. “This ride seems like it will never end and we’ve just started. Are you going all the way?”
“Just to New York.”
“I’m going all the way up to Rhode Island. My sister lives there. Taking the bus seemed like a good idea, to save on airfare, you know. But now I think I should have saved up a bit more money and taken the plane. You have relatives in New York?”
“Yeah, I hope so.”
She gave me a questioning look, but didn’t comment, absorbed as she was in her own problems. “My sister’s married, three kids, a perfect house, a perfect husband, a perfect life. Me”—and she laughed—“I’m a bit of a gypsy. Never put down roots, never had a relationship with a man that lasted more than a year. They think I’m abnormal and they’ll parade all of the available bachelors past me for approval. It makes me want to scream just thinking about it.”
“Yeah.”
“They don’t seem to understand that I’m fine just the way I am. And can’t comprehend that I’m perfectly content to live alone for the rest of my life. The me my sister thinks I am is a different person. That me is young and in love and happy. But it’s not me.” She laughed. “You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I was in love once.” Her face softened and relaxed as she thought; I could feel the tenseness drain out of her as if she were reliving the best day of her life. “But that was a long time ago and he’s gone. And I’m happy just the way I am.”
“Yeah.”
She got up from the stool. “Excuse me a second, I need to go to the ladies’ room. I absolutely hate the lavatories on the bus, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
While she was gone, I pulled out one of Angelo’s little vials. Control, it was, and I dropped a bit in her coffee. I’d had enough of a glimpse of her mind to know what to do.
Back on the bus, I sat next to her again and pushed my arm up against hers. Then I closed my eyes and tried to get into her thoughts.
It was easy. She’d opened up in the restaurant and I knew where to look. Buried deep within was the memory of that one day and the man she loved. I sorted through and found it. Oddly enough, it was a gray day, rainy and cold. But there he was and there she was, sitting on a bench, his sweater wrapped around her against the cold. The wind whipped through her hair; she pushed it out of her eyes and looked up at him and smiled.
“Stay there,” I whispered to her. “Stay there with him.”
Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked over at her. She was sleeping soundly, her mouth slightly open, but smiling. The tight lines on her face had loosened and she looked young and pretty again.
I was tempted to go back into her mind to see what had gone wrong, but I resisted, leaned my head against the window again and slept.
My dreams were not as good as the one I sent her. Instead, I was back in my grave, digging to the surface to find, not Philomena waiting, but the dead bodies of Moon and Hyde. The dream played in my mind all night, over and over, endless variations on the theme of loss and sadness. I woke with a start and realized it was morning.
The rest of the ride was boring and uneventful. My seatmate had calmed down and seemed content to just sit and stare dreamily out of the window. We spoke about trivial things, but I said nothing to upset the equilibrium she’d achieved. I was nervous and edgy enough all on my own to make up for it.
The weather had changed drastically the next time we stopped. Gone was the bright sunshine of early fall in the South. Now it was cloudy and chilly and unpleasant. I pulled my bag down from the overhead rack, unpacked my black leather jacket and put it on, huddling into it for the rest of the trip.
Chapter 14
It was close to midnight when the bus finally arrived in Manhattan. The terminal was a snarl of people and escalators. I followed the arrows on the signs, swallowed up and carried along by jostling crowds. Eventually I reached the exit, stepped out of the bus terminal an
d onto the streets for my first glimpse of the city in which my mother lived. My initial impression was of the vastness of this place; my second was of its sterility and coldness. It had an odd sort of smell, metal and stone and glass, artificial smells that hung in the air as thickly as the exhaust of the cars. I slung my bags over my shoulder and hugged my arms to myself, glad that I’d unpacked my jacket and put it on at that last truck stop.
I had no idea at all where to go. I walked for a long time, aimlessly, letting the streets carry me. Not the best thing, I supposed, for a young girl to be doing in a strange city. Still, I remembered the strength I felt dealing with Moon’s and Hyde’s killer. I felt practically invincible. “Bring on your worst,” I whispered to the streets. “I can handle anything this town can throw at me.”
Finally growing hungry and tired, I stopped some fifteen blocks away from the bus station at a neon sign for what appeared to be an Irish pub. Opening the door and peering inside, I saw that it was cozy, not particularly large, but with a few tables, a long bar and a jukebox. There were enough patrons to indicate it was a fairly reasonable place to be, but not so many as to make it a tourist bar. I walked up to the bar and took a seat toward the far end, stowing my bags at the foot rail.
The bartender came over to me and gave me a sharp look. “ID?”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you an ID about you?” He had a thick Irish accent.
“Oh. Yeah.” I leaned over and stretched my arm down to pick up my purse, placed it on my lap and fished out my wallet. My shiny new license was there and I showed it to him. “Will this do?”
“And you know it will.” He smiled at me then. “So what’ll you be having, Miss Lily Williams?”
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