Plus, the last time we’d seen him, he’d threatened to arrest her, which was probably a better indicator that they simply were not meant to be. Mom might not have the best taste in men, but she had a healthy sense of self-preservation.
“Hey, kid,” the detective said when I reached him. “You live here, right?”
Since I’d dumped lemonade in his lap the last time he’d interrogated my mother, it seemed unlikely he’d forgotten me. I rolled my eyes, stepping past him to unlock the door.
“You gonna invite me in?”
I shrugged, turning on the light in the entryway. “You have a warrant?” Inside, the hall smelled like orange peels and socks, a sad case for a house built with the grand, imposing feel of a Victorian mansion. Mom must have been gone most of the day, and the house had been closed up, hot air thickening.
“It’s not that kind of visit. I just need to speak with your mother.”
“With or without handcuffs?” I turned back toward him. He’d gripped the side of the door, holding it open.
He gave me a bland, unamused smile.
I smiled right back. “She’s not here right now.”
“When do you think she might be home?”
“Late,” I said. Although, since she’d told me not to leave after school, there was every chance she’d pull into the driveway and prove me a liar at any moment.
“I can wait,” Detective Wyle said.
I hesitated, wondering how difficult it would be to annoy him into leaving. I looked at him again. Wedding band—on. But he’d twisted it at least twice since we’d been standing there. He looked as though he’d skipped shaving that morning. His clothing was somewhat wrinkled, too, and he seemed tired, a little worn out.
“Don’t want to go home, huh? What, did your wife kick you out?”
“You’re a detective, too?” He scratched the stubble on his chin and gave me a hard glare, but I figured he was just trying to intimidate me.
I shrugged again. “Fortune-teller,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. You can come in if you let me give you a reading.”
I expected that to send him running for the hills, but I must have underestimated either his need to talk to my mother or his desire not to go home, because I found myself leading him into the house, past the stairway, and into the sitting room. I told him to have a seat on the sofa while I found him something to drink. The air conditioning was broken—again—and the heat was heavy around us. That orange-peels-and-socks smell lingered.
Detective Wyle watched me suspiciously. “That’s staying in the glass this time, right?”
I set the lemonade in front of him. “Only if you use a coaster. I’ll get cranky if you ruin Gram’s table.” I dropped my book bag to the floor and knelt on the carpet across from him, reaching for my Nav cards. The news about Kelly had rattled me, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to focus, but the motion of shuffling soothed me. I took slow breaths, feeling the texture of the cards, the edges worn by long years of use. I glanced up at Detective Wyle. I wasn’t sure what exactly I hoped to see, but if he was planning to harass my mother, I wanted whatever advantage I could get. Inconsistent though my Knowings were, a reading might give me something.
Or fail miserably, as my reading for Tink had. I couldn’t be certain.
“How does this work?” he asked. “Is that a tarot deck?”
“Nope. My own cards. Gram gave them to me. You just sit there and daydream about sending bad guys to jail or something. You can think of a question if you want.”
He grunted.
“What’s your first name, Detective? It helps.”
He hesitated, his fingers tapping the table. He was a big man —tall, broad-shouldered, fit—and he seemed out of place on the dainty floral sofa my mother had placed in the room. Like an action figure in a dollhouse.
“Mickey,” he said.
I laughed. “Mickey. Really? Never mind—we’re sticking with Wyle.”
He smiled, but he hadn’t touched his drink. He probably thought I’d poisoned him, or that drinking pink lemonade in a room decorated with pastels and paintings of fruit might ruin his tough-guy image.
“You gonna open a window?”
“This works better if you don’t talk,” I said, but I stopped shuffling to oblige him. I rose and tugged both of the far windows open, pausing at the sill to breathe. A cool wind pushed in, the sound of traffic, the rustle of birds taking flight.
Detective Wyle shifted slightly when I turned, though his expression didn’t change. He’d been scanning the room, I realized. Working his way across the walls, the bookshelves. Nothing in it was wrong, out of place—no black pants or dark hoodies laying around, nothing that might hint of mysteries tucked behind the doors. But I shivered. He was searching.
I returned to my cards. “Okay, Wyle. I’m going to lay out ten cards, and they’ll tell me all your secrets.”
“I must not have many secrets,” he said.
“I’m just that good.”
I knelt, finished shuffling, and set down the first card. Card fifty. Inverted Crescent. Good. I placed it in the center and laid out the rest of the cards.
I began at the top, taking another long breath and focusing. Card one, Compass. Card eight, The Witch. Card sixteen, The Beggar.
I frowned. In readings, the Compass card was always my mother. And this I got a sense of: the cooling twilight; a woman in black; a face in profile, the slope of her nose; light refracting off water. A single star shining. The Witch and The Beggar. Someone searched for and unseen.
He was after my mother, all right. He might not have proof of who she was—but he had his suspicions.
Still, I wasn’t about to tell him that.
“You’re getting a divorce,” I said.
“I thought you’d already figured that one out. Not really fortune-telling.”
“I’m getting there,” I said. “Here. Card forty-nine. Inverted Anchor. You’re feeling lost. You’re probably one of those people who mostly has couple friends, and they’ve all taken her side. And she’s getting the house, too, huh?”
He crossed his arms. “You didn’t get that from the cards. You got that from looking at me. Are you planning a career in law enforcement?”
“Here, the cross cards. Forty-five, Sign of Brothers. Crossed by The Warrior and The Prisoner.”
He leaned forward. “Meaning what?”
This part was easy, a Knowing so clear I wouldn’t even have needed the cards. “You didn’t start out wanting to be a cop. You followed in your father’s footsteps. You probably wanted to be something totally ridiculous, like a football player, or a rock star.”
“Baseball player.” His lips twitched.
“Another score for the fortune-teller.”
“You’ve got good intuition, kid,” he said. But he was giving me a look. A look that meant I was playing it a little too straight, and he was already suspicious of my mother, and he was well-armed with brains and his own common sense. It was probably not a good idea to give him any ammunition.
“Now the terminal cards,” I said. “Sign of Lovers. Sign of Swords.”
I bit my lip. That meant—
Well. I didn’t really know what that meant.
The cards had been helping, up to this point. Sense and feeling coming into alignment, thoughts taking shape within me. My Knowing had formed an image of this man, Detective Mickey Wyle, who had spent his boyhood summers fly fishing in Canada, whose eyes still saw past the dirt of city streets into the northern half-light of autumn, who went to bars with his cop buddies but rarely drank. But these two cards felt strange when I pressed my fingertips to them, and abruptly the world around us came into close focus. Details sharpened. I noticed the touch of gray at his temples. I saw the dust that floated in the light pushing in through the blinds. I breathed the deep, earthworm scent of soil that dwelled beneath the smell of the house—the smell of alleys at night, the smell of graveyards.
I wouldn’t tell him that.
I couldn’t tell him there was something chasing him, something like a voice in the dark, or that I could see that he hadn’t slept in three days and it had nothing to do with the wife he didn’t want to go home to. That it was possible he wouldn’t live very long.
I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know why he was really here, in this room, with his rumpled clothing and quiet stare. And suddenly I was a little frightened. I didn’t know what it meant, but—
He knew.
About Mom. About us.
Some part of him knew.
I couldn’t say that. So I went for the obvious answer. Lovers and Swords. Not a difficult leap, though an incorrect one. “You caught her cheating,” I told him.
“Way off the mark,” he said, but he was smiling, a little. He ran a hand through his hair, leaning back against the cushions of the sofa.
“She was too successful. You’re threatened by strong women.”
He grinned at me. “Now you’re just stabbing in the dark. But nice try, kid.”
I was flustered, so I didn’t say anything, just picked up my cards and began shuffling them idly.
“My turn,” he said. “And I won’t use any cards or fortunetelling.”
“Somewhere you’ve got a file on my mom. It probably tells you everything you need to know about me.”
“I don’t need a file. You’re easy to read.”
I frowned, watching him warily, but kept my silence.
“You’re close with your mom,” he began.
“Wow. Impressive.”
He ignored me. “Protective of her. It’s just the two of you, so you think you need to look out for her. You worry that I mean her harm—but I don’t. And I think you know exactly what I’m talking about when I say I believe your mother is a very gifted individual.”
The front door eased open.
“Mom!” I called, jumping up and running to meet her, to warn her, before Detective Wyle caught her off guard. She tilted her head at me when she entered, frowning slightly. Mom was in the habit of dressing brightly during the day to contrast with her nightly attire, and today she wore old blue jeans with a rosecolored belt and a vivid pink tank top—but over it she wore her dark H&H Security coat. Very official looking. She yawned into her free hand as she looked at me.
“We, uh, have a visitor,” I said.
He was already at my side, leaning against the door frame and giving my mother a lazy smile.
“Entertaining kid you’ve got here, Mrs. Whitticomb. I’m thinking of recruiting her.”
I could see the storm brewing behind her eyes, and took a step backward.
“Miss. I never married,” she corrected. “As I’m sure you know.” She clenched a fist. “Audrey, how exactly have you been entertaining?”
“Um . . . I gave Mickey a reading.”
“I thought we were sticking with Wyle,” he said.
“Mickey is less threatening,” I told him. “My mom’s a little vulnerable right now. She turns forty next month.”
She sounded strangled. “Audrey. Room. Now.”
Oh well. I already had a talk in store. I gave her a quick salute, then leaned in close to whisper. “Be careful, Mom. He’s totally on to you.”
5
Over the years, Mom had been interrogated by the police on a number of occasions.
It was sort of inevitable, given her choice of careers. In the past, she’d always managed to explain away her activities with her connection to H&H Security. She even had a couple of friends on the force—or acquaintances, at any rate; Mom wasn’t very big on friends. She tended to laugh off the idea that she’d be caught. Cops were far too pragmatic to believe in Morning Star, she told me. And maybe she was right. She’d never been arrested. She’d never been charged. Detective Wyle had been the first to even truly suspect her of anything.
“He’s a pain in the ass,” she’d told me, after the first time he’d questioned her. “But I can handle him.”
Personally, I’d always thought Mom rather liked being able to fool everyone. She didn’t have to wear a costume, I’d argued once. It would be easier if she just saved the city in obscurity. Her response had been to tell me that Morning Star wasn’t a costume, it was an identity. Part of who she was.
It hadn’t begun that way. Not intentionally. It hadn’t even been an outfit at first; it was just a bulky sweater with a star on it that some great-aunt had knitted her one Christmas.
“I wore it ironically,” Mom had told me. “And because I didn’t care if I ruined it.” She had ruined it, too. She’d thrown it away after it became nothing more than a tattered, bloodstained rag, but by then, more than a few witnesses had seen a teenage vigilante running around wearing an eight-pointed star.
“And thus a legend was born,” I’d joked.
That, apparently, had been the wrong thing to say. Mom had gone quiet and had never finished the story.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy playing with fire. I’d seen her snickering over newspaper articles that mentioned her alter ego a few too many times to think otherwise. I just hoped she was right and she could handle Detective Wyle. I felt a touch of apprehension. There had been no malice in him, but that didn’t make him harmless.
An hour passed before he left. I slogged halfheartedly through my homework and watched the green numbers of my clock blink upward. Tink called to inform me that Greg, although not undead, was a terrible kisser, and she was gravely disappointed my reading had failed to reveal that.
I laughed, momentarily distracted. “Rejected him already? You work fast.”
“What can I say? I know what I want.”
“Too bad what you want changes by the hour.”
“We can’t all be Gideon, pining stupidly for the same girl for three years. That boy needs a good kick—”
I shushed her, listening to the movement below me. Downstairs, the hall door opened. Footsteps sounded in the entrance. I crossed to my window and shifted the blinds with my fingers. Outside, on the walkway, Detective Wyle shuffled toward the street. He turned, once, looking back at the house. Then he was gone.
Which meant—
“Audrey!” When my mother wanted to, she could really bellow. I supposed the superstrength extended to her lungs. “Down here, now!”
“Uh, I’ll call you back. I have to go get yelled at,” I told Tink, then hurried downstairs. Mom was in the sitting room, curled up on the sofa, drinking cocoa and appearing for all the world as though she couldn’t actually rip both my arms off or dangle me upside down.
“You forgot a coaster,” I said, pointing at her mug.
She rolled her eyes at me but dutifully slid one of the ceramic coasters beneath her cup. “We really should examine your priorities.”
“Gram loved that table.”
“Gram bought it at a garage sale for two dollars. Nice try distracting me, though. Since it didn’t work, why don’t you explain to me why I just spent several minutes talking to Detective Wyle about my ‘deeply intuitive’ daughter.”
“Deeply intuitive—without an ounce of common sense.”
That was Leon.
I turned. I hadn’t noticed him in the room—but then, it was possible he hadn’t been there. He had this annoying habit of simply appearing, without bothering with nuisances like doors or asking permission. And though he was only three years older than me, he seemed to think being a Guardian meant he knew more about the world in general than I ever would.
I shot him a glare. He stood near the window, arms crossed, leaning back against the wall. Like Mom, Leon gave the illusion of being totally harmless. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but he was so skinny that most of his shirts just sort of hung on him. And he was tidy, clean-cut, the kind of guy you’d expect to see at some Ivy League college, taking eight classes and sucking up to professors, not smiting evildoers. He didn’t like to go anywhere without a tie, and his white button-down shirts were always ironed. (I’d actually seen him iron them.) Sure, he looked good—I c
ould admit that, just not to his face—but he didn’t exactly look dangerous.
Of course, even if he’d wanted to appear moody and mysterious, the effect would’ve been ruined by the dusting of flour in his dark hair. Not to mention that he usually smelled like cake and frosting, and often appeared with cookies. You’d think that someone who had shown up in Minneapolis on a motorcycle with nothing but a backpack and half a cheese sandwich to his name might not want to criticize anyone else’s life choices—but no. Leon was convinced he knew how to fix the world, starting with me. He didn’t think I had any sense, common or otherwise. And since he appeared to be cookieless tonight, I wasn’t feeling very forgiving.
I stepped toward him, giving him the sweetest smile I could manage. “We can’t all be as perfect as you, Leon.”
It took him a second. A little furrow appeared on his forehead —there was flour there, too—then he shrugged. “True. But that’s no reason not to try.”
“I hate doing things I’m not good at,” I said. “Perfection will have to remain beyond my grasp. But, hey, lucky me, I’ve got you here to show me the error of my ways.”
That actually seemed to annoy him. His frown settled into a glower. “You must have a brain in there somewhere. It’s a shame you don’t use it.”
“God forbid I disagree with Almighty Leon.”
Mom banged her mug on the table like a gavel. “As entertaining as it is listening to you two bicker, I’m still waiting on that explanation, Audrey.”
Dark Star Page 3
