by Anna Leonard
“The Night Serpent.” She spoke out loud without realizing it.
Stephens took his eyes off the road and looked at her. “Yeah?”
“He said…that I knew. That I could tell him…what?”
Her escort turned his attention back to the road. “Ms. Malkin, you can’t think too hard about what crazy folk say. Leave that to people like Agent Patrick. He specializes in crazy.”
Lily absorbed that. Yes. He did. And did that explain his fascination for her? Was she crazy, too? Was that why the Night Serpent found her, because they were both crazy together? Had they met before, in previous lives? The connection Jon had spoken about. Cat-scratch crazy.
It didn’t make any sense, otherwise, all of it. Her life was quiet, contained. And now, suddenly, she was stalked, mugged, escorted by cops, having fabulous sex with a guy she’d only known a week….
And convinced that she’d lived another life before this one. A number of lives, actually. Eight, to be precise.
This was her ninth.
She was out of lives.
And she had no idea, still, what she was supposed to do.
Come home.
The Night Serpent knew.
“Hey.”
“What?” She practically jumped out of her seat, held in place only by the seat belt.
Stephens was looking at her oddly. “We’re here.”
They had pulled onto her street without her even noticing. She struggled to control the things in her head, shoving them away so that she had time and room to think.
The cop saw her struggle, but misunderstood the cause. “The doc said he gave you a prescription for something for stress, help you relax. I forgot to ask if you wanted to drop it off at the drugstore to be filled—should we go back?”
Lily touched her shoulder bag almost reflexively, reassuring herself that the slip of paper was still in there. “No. I don’t think so.” It was tempting: take a pill, make everything go away. No more stress, no more hallucinations, no more weird freaky feelings or eyesight problems or feeling as if she was about to slide out of her own skin…Except it would still all be there. She just wouldn’t care so much.
She had the feeling that it was important to care. It was important to remember.
“You sure? No offense, Ms. Malkin, but you look like you could use something, and I’m thinking you’re not much for a knockback of whiskey.”
She almost smiled at that. No, she wasn’t much of a drinker, other than the occasional glass of wine or beer with dinner. She didn’t think she even had any alcohol in the house, except for some cooking sherry.
But she said the only thing that he might understand. “I’d rather keep my head clear.”
Stephens pulled into her driveway, hesitated, then turned to her without turning off the engine. “About five years ago. My partner and I were involved in a shooting downtown. Totally justified, I did everything by the book, but for a while I had the shakes pretty bad. Took time off, went on some meds the doctor suggested when things got too bad. I was scared it would screw with me, make me not able to do my job? But…it helped me do my job, on the bad days. I wasn’t trying to second-guess what was a real doubt, and what was a stress-memory.”
That hit home, quivering like an arrow thunking into flesh. She had never talked about that with her therapist, had never thought to ask. “How do you tell the difference? Between real and…stress?”
He shrugged. “You have to trust yourself. And accept that mistakes are gonna happen, but if they do, you’re gonna take responsibility for them too.”
“Yeah.” Lily leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, willing the quivering to go away. “That’s always the trick, isn’t it?” She shook her head, smiled and reached over to unhook her seat belt. “I’ll think about it. That’s all I can promise.”
Stephens turned off the engine and got out of the car in time to help her out of her own seat. “And if all else fails,” he said only half jokingly, “there’s always whiskey.”
She shook her head as he escorted her to the door.
“Thank you for the ride home. But you’re off duty. You don’t really have to…”
“Ms. Malkin. Even if I were willing to leave you alone after getting mugged in our parking lot, Detective Petrosian would have my—” he started to say one thing, and then switched midthought “—badge in a minute if I didn’t make sure you were okay until Agent Patrick got here.”
Her eyes narrowed, and the itch in her fingers came back with a vengeance. Even as she knew her anger was probably unwarranted, she let it come, relishing in the outrage. “Has this all been worked out then? That the helpless female has a keeper at all times?”
Stephens might not have been married, but he knew when he’d overstepped. He also knew his job. And nobody would ever fault his bravery.
“No, ma’am. But you have a concussion. If you want to call a friend to stay with you instead, that’s fine. But I will wait until they arrive.”
Lily stared at him, his crew cut and square jaw making him look like a grown-up Cub Scout. She could call half a dozen people; she had people—not many, but Ronnie and Aggie—who would drop everything if they heard she had been injured and needed help. But if she did that, asked for help, they would assume she was worse off than she actually was, and they would never leave her be, after. Stephens, at least, knew the limits of the job.
And if Agent Patrick did show up? After abandoning her to the E.R., turning off his phone, ignoring her for hours? Too much. Too much to handle right now. They’d deal with that if and when it happened.
“Did you get anything to eat at the hospital? All I’ve got are leftovers, but we should be able to put together something reasonably healthy.” She hung her coat in the closet and went into the kitchen. If he was going to play nanny, he could hang up his own coat.
“There’s…brown rice and sesame chicken. Some salad. Half a parm—”
The radio at Stephens’s hip squawked, and he tabbed it on, listening to whatever was being reported. Lily felt herself tense, the hand on the refrigerator door tightening until the knuckles turned white. Her fingertips tingled again, and she felt a faint burn, as though the skin was splitting under her nails.
Stephens came into the kitchen, and she forced herself to go back to inspecting the contents of the fridge. “What happened?” It wasn’t Jon. It wasn’t. She would not allow it to be….
“Shooting.” Lily’s gut tightened with cold fear until he continued, “Down by the Bridges.” A series of interlocked pedestrian walkways over the river, by the park. Not the best neighborhood. “Somebody took potshots at a patrol car.” He shook his head, resigned but not worried. “Every now and again, the gene pool gets cleaned out.”
“Idiots,” she said in agreement, feeling her chest begin to expand and contract again. “So, you want—”
The doorbell rang.
“You expecting someone?” she asked Stephens. Maybe it was Dunkirk or one of the other cops on drive-by duty, stopping by for coffee. They didn’t, as a rule, but you never knew….
He shook his head again, and motioned her to stand closer to the refrigerator. Stephens went to the door, right hand by his hip, near where his gun was holstered. He approached the door sideways, looking out the side window. The tension released, and he went to open the door.
“Agent Patrick.”
“People who turn off their cell phones and don’t call don’t get any dinner,” Lily sang out, suddenly feeling reckless. He was alive. He was safe. He was an utter bastard for abandoning her like that, casting her…
Casting her aside in order to focus on his job.
“You have no more use to me. They will never trust you again, once it is discovered what you did. But the man who brings the betrayer to justice, he will be rewarded beyond measure….”
Her lover’s face, shadowed and cruel. She reached for him, tried to touch him, to bring him back to her. Then there was a hot blow to her side, and a cold re
d haze crept over her eyes….
“No.”
“Lily?” Jon was at her side, and she stared blankly at him. The man she had seen outside the hospital had looked nothing like the man suspected of being the Night Serpent. But his eyes, his face…
He looked an awful lot like one Jon T. Patrick.
Laughter—more than slightly hysterical—bubbled up inside her. Never say she didn’t have a type….
“Lily?” Jon looked over his shoulder at Stephens, who was reaching for his coat, the very picture of a man getting the hell out of the way. Petrosian was behind him, closing the front door against the night chill.
“You didn’t get him.” She wasn’t looking at him. What was wrong?
“No. But we found his lair.”
“More dead cats?’ Her voice sounded…flat. Monotone.
“No cats at all. No real ones, anyway. There was…Lily, are you all right?”
“Yes. I’m fine. The doctor said so.”
Ow. Patrick winced. He had meant to get back to her, to meet her at the hospital, but the things they had discovered at the site had to be dealt with right away. Lily wanted the guy caught; she understood that had to be priority. Didn’t she?
He sucked at relationships. He always had. And when had this suddenly become a relationship? What had happened to some fun sex with a lovely and willing woman?
And who the hell was he trying to kid? He would have laughed, except it would have gone down completely wrong, and possibly gotten him killed with a kitchen knife.
The words the cop had said in the parking lot came back to him. “It was like he saw you and flipped.” The guy was a meth-head, fried and finished. Maybe he looked like an old teacher who’d flunked the guy, or Lily like an old girlfriend who dumped him. There was no way there was a connection between some random junkie and this case.
There was no way the Serpent had somehow lured them to the police station, set that guy on them, to harm Lily, to separate them. That was…Crazy.
“Sir?” Stephens beckoned to him and, with a worried look at Lily, who was busy pulling cartons out of the fridge, he went back to speak with the two cops. A quick update on what the doctor had said, and Lily’s comments on the trip back to the house, caught Patrick up.
Something was wrong. Something was…crazy. Right now, he wasn’t discounting anything, and he wasn’t taking any more chances.
“Thanks. And thank you,” he said to Stephens. “Go home and get some rest. We’ll take over for tonight.”
By the time he got back to the kitchen, Lily had a platter piled with an assortment of leftovers, and was placing it in the microwave.
“I assume you didn’t have dinner.”
“Or lunch,” he said in agreement. “And I’m an ass.”
“Yes. You are.”
Her voice was still flat. He wanted to protect her, keep her safe. He also wanted to tell her what they had found, get her take on it. He wanted that lovely brain that went with the lovely body. But he didn’t know where to begin, with this monosyllabic, quiet-voiced woman who was so clearly pissed at him. Somehow, he didn’t think that running down to the quick-mart for flowers was going to do the trick.
The detective, having seen Stephens out the door, came back into the kitchen. “Hey, Aggie,” she said in greeting, still in that monotone voice.
“Lily. You scared the hell out of me, girl.”
Petrosian got a smile for that, and Patrick felt an unexpected pang of jealousy hit him. Jealousy, and anger—why did the older man get a smile, and he got the freeze-out? He had apologized….
Maybe flowers were the way to go. Not lilies, though.
The microwave went off, and the moment was lost. The next few minutes were an almost comfortable fuss of getting glasses, platter and plates to the table. But once everyone settled themselves with the food, he felt the awkward silence return.
It was a marked contrast to their first meal together, when he had actively pursued, and she had been cautiously amused. Now he felt as though he were walking on a minefield, and she…
He had no idea what she was right now.
“The doctor gave you a clean bill of health, Stephens said.” Her eyes looked normal, the few times she’d let him catch her gaze. She was twitchy, though: her fingers closed over her fork as though she wasn’t quite sure how to hold it, and her head kept cocking to the side, as though she was listening for something.
“Yes. Physically, I’m fine. What did you find?” The question was directed to Petrosian.
The cop looked over at Patrick, and then shrugged. “Weird. I’m not any kind of expert on crazy, but this seemed pretty textbook. Empty—he’d skedaddled, probably just before we got there. But all his stuff was there. He was building some kind of archway, all draped in black. A couple of stuffed cats, the taxidermy kind of stuffed, the ones that are meant to look cute but are just creepy? Like he was using them as placeholders or something, moving them around until he was satisfied it looked right. And there was a statue, a cat statue, made of—get this—foam, and spray painted black, too. A bunch of symbols on the wall, chalked outlines, like he hadn’t gotten around to filling them in yet.”
“Symbols? You mean something satanic?”
“Not quite,” Patrick said. “Hieroglyphics. Egyptian.”
Her eyes flickered to him, and then back to Petrosian, but in that instant Patrick saw something in them, something that set him on edge, set off all of his alarms, both professional and personal.
Fear. No—terror.
Chapter 15
Lily excused herself to go use the bathroom. Once there, she rested her forehead against the closed door and let herself give in to the shudders.
Egyptian. Of course.
She couldn’t deny it any longer. Whatever was happening, whatever had brought the Night Serpent to her town, and into her life…she was the cause. Or the catalyst. Or somehow responsible in a way she couldn’t avoid.
She had to tell them.
“Oh sure, right,” she said, hearing the near hysteria edging back into her voice. “This guy? He’s here because of me. Only, not the me I was. Or something that’s trying to get through, using me. I don’t know what. But I have memories, and he thinks because of that I know something he needs.
“How does he know? What, do I look like I have the answers?
“Oh, and Agent Patrick? I don’t trust you worth a damn, either. Except I don’t have any choice but to trust you.”
Hysteria. Definitely.
She splashed water on her face, dried it roughly to bring some color to her skin and stared at herself in the mirror.
Black hair. Hazel eyes. Skin more golden than pale. She had always thought that she looked like her father’s side of the family, a mixture of Italian and Spanish. The snub nose and rounded chin were from her mother.
She didn’t know what an Egyptian might look like. Mummies were all she knew about that country. Mummies, and pyramids, and things blowing up on the news, and…
Bast. Bastet. The cat-headed goddess.
She knew more about the goddess than she should. If she would only let herself completely remember.
But if she did, if she let the memories come back over her—where would Lily go?
That was the thought that terrified her.
Where would Lily go if she was someone else, as well?
By the time she came back, the guys had cleared the table, and the coffee machine had been started. Jon. It should have been nice, having someone feel so comfortable in her home. It wasn’t.
Nothing felt nice right now.
The guys were sitting in the living room, photos spread out over the coffee table in front of them. The television was on, turned to the 11:00 p.m. news, the sound turned low. A reporter was standing in front of the Newfield Zoo. A follow-up to the break-in. Lily hoped that nobody got hurt—Jon hadn’t told her. Jon—Agent Patrick—hadn’t told her shit. She liked the sound of the swearword. Shit. She felt like saying it out loud
, but didn’t.
“We sent e-files to the office,” Patrick was saying. “There are specialists they can work with to see if there’s anything we’re missing. But right now I’m building a case that this guy is fixated on ancient Egypt specifically for the cats.”
“They were considered holy back then,” Lily said, sitting down on the sofa next to her lover. She was still angry with him. But she wanted to be near him, too. “Killing a cat was considered murder, and families went into mourning when a pet died. They shaved their eyebrows.”
“Really?” Petrosian raised his own shaggy brows.
“So he’s killing them in front of a statue of a cat-headed goddess…and this one—” Jon pointed to one of the photos showing a close-up of a statue of a man with the head of a jackal “—that’s Osiris, god of the underworld. He judged the dead, decided if—”
“That was Anubis,” she corrected him.
“What?”
“Anubis. He weighed the soul against a feather. It had to balance before a soul could move on to its reward.”
Jon looked at the photo, then back at her. “What happened if it didn’t balance?”
Lily stared at the photos, but couldn’t bring herself to answer.
Ma’at. The word came to her, a match lit in the darkness. Truth. Harmony. Justice.
But justice for whom? Was that what the Night Serpent was saying, that she should know? Was the Night Serpent there for her? To bring her to justice for a sin committed lifetimes ago?
Or was she the one who had to bring him into harmony? Impossible to know. Impossible, period. One thing she did know: he was looking for her. And that couldn’t be good.
“All right.” Lily came back to the conversation that had continued while she zoned. “So he’s gone from killing cats to killing cats in a ritual manner, to killing and building an arch, and you think that he’s invoking, or trying to reach, an Egyptian god or gods?”
“Short version—he’s a nut.”
Jon grimaced at Petrosian’s summation, echoing Lily’s comment days ago. “But he’s a nut with a plan. And one that involves Lily somehow. Or he wants it to, or thinks it needs to. Whatever he’s doing isn’t working, and because of her connection with cats in the media’s eyes, he’s focusing on her as having the solution.”
