“We are part of Mia’s circle.”
Okay, well the mind reader thing was handy, but a bit unnerving.
The oldest of the trio cleared her throat. “Yes, about that. My name is Delores.”
“Nice to meet you.” I gave a tight smile.
“And you already met Julia.” The Amazon woman smiled. “And I, the Amazon, am more often called Emma Hamilton.”
Heat rose in my cheeks, a sure sign that I was blushing. One of the many flaws to pale skin and hair is the inability to hide blushes to any degree of accuracy. “Nice to meet you all.”
“We came by to remind you that there is a circle tomorrow. I know you must be busy settling in, but we can’t have it without another female. We would be short and it would throw the balance haywire.” Delores threw up her hands with this statement.
I tilted my head at Julia and tried not to think anything dumb while having no idea what they were talking about.
“Tomorrow is a full moon, and we have circles to celebrate them. Honey, I told you…Wiccan.”
Why must everyone in this damned town call me honey?
“I think it’s the hair. I get that a lot, too, and my hair is too light to look like a true honey.” This was from, of course, Emma.
“So, it’s a party and I bring food?”
“Kind of. It is a celebration, but it is more ceremonial than anything I would call a party. Basically, we call on the five elements and then—”
“Five?” I interrupted Julia.
“Yes, you know.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Fire, Water, Earth, Air and Akasha—”
“Isn’t that the name of the Queen of the Damned…Anne Rice?” Told you, I am up on my pop culture.
“Um, yes. Well, I think she borrowed that. Akasha represents the soul, space.”
I nodded. What?
“We are making this too confusing for you. I thought that you would know more because of your friendship with Mia.” Emma’s tone was apologetic.
“We are friends. I know she is a witch, and we both kind of did our own thing from there.” Julia looked at me funny. So did Emma.
“I mean, I am cool with it and all,” I tried. Sometimes I wish life had a soundtrack. If it did, though, right then mine would have had the sound of crickets chirping cheerfully to fill the dead silence. Well, not dead silence. That woman was still picking through incense sticks one at a time.
Once, in high school, I smoked pot, but decided it was not my thing. At all. When I went to another party and turned it down, everyone looked at me as if maybe, just maybe, I planned to get them in trouble. Like I was a plant or something, there to narc them all out. This was that moment all over again.
Only now, I was surrounded by three witches trying to decide if I was too normal to have told about their ovals. Or crop circles. Whatever. If they decided I wasn’t, what were they going to do? Turn me into a frog? I shifted uneasily.
“So, you never discussed what she did, or could do?”
I shrugged. “I saw enough to know she was good at what she did.” And she saw enough to know I was good at what I did.
Emma stared at me. “What do you do?”
I glared at her. I should have had coffee before coming down. I was never at my best with out my caffeine. “It isn’t important what I do.” I crossed my arms over my chest. Like I was going to go into that with them.
“No, you’re right.” This time I could read her mind, solely based on her expression. She was relieved. I guess she really didn’t care what I did, so long as I did something abnormal. Ironic for me, since I’d spent my entire life trying to be normal enough, and here were three woman concerned that I was too normal.
“Okay, well.” Julia cleared her throat. “All you do is show up, yes, and bring food. When we have the circle you just listen, stand there, and try to add your energy to the circle. If anyone has any thing they need done, we’ll do it. Then we’ll make some holy water and close the circle.”
I nodded. They had a priest at these things?
Emma looked vaguely exasperated. “No, but sometimes we have a priestess.”
I nodded again. The return of bobble-head Janie.
Julia reached out and touched my arm. “It will be fun. Since it isn’t a big holiday, its just us girls. It’s fun to celebrate being a woman sometimes. Since you are newly divorced, maybe it will be good for you to remember the power that is yours as a woman. That’s what it is really about—celebrating being a woman, a creator. Celebrating what we are, and all that we can and will be. Mia was right when she said that you needed this anyway. I don’t think you take much pride in what you are.” Understatement of the year.
The minute I thought it, I looked at Emma. She also lifted a hand and touched my arm. “I won’t pry anymore. We all have a right to our secrets, but you can’t blame me for protecting my sisters.”
I nodded at her. Fair enough.
The older woman, Delores, touched my arm, too. “You have a right to be what the God and Goddess made you. Quit blaming yourself for that which you are. Take pride in it. There are no mistakes in Creation. Everything has its purpose, whether we see it or not. Fire destroys forests, but allows young trees to grow. Is the fire evil for destroying or is it cleaning for new growth?”
“Delores is empathic. She can sense what you are feeling, not thinking,” Emma explained before I could form a thought.
I looked down at their hands on my arm—one young and free of any blemish, one old and gnarled, and one in between. If I wasn’t mistaken, my arm tingled. “Yeah.” Emma smiled. “Your aura was dim. We just gave you a little boost.”
Oh, hmmm.
They left and picky incense lady came to the counter with her selections. She looked to the door and then back at me. “Be careful of those women.”
“Okay.” I flipped through my notebook for prices.
“They are funny, if you know what I mean.” Her eyebrows were near her hairline, and she shook her head at me.
“Yeah, I picked up on that.” This from a woman who is blowing twenty bucks on smelly sticks.
~
Sven came back down, trailed by Vickie, PSP in tow. Vickie claimed the windowseat and proceeded to get lost in some game. Sven took over the counter, and I dusted things. There were quite a lot of things to be dusted in a store like Mia’s. I randomly picked things up as I went and tried to decide how they might be useful. Mostly, I was in the dark. I fiddled with a huge selection of rocks and herbs. Some of the herbs seemed useful, like chamomile and aloe. Others, like feverfew, had no use as far as I knew.
The rocks were mostly just pretty, but some looked uglier than common driveway gravel. Mia told me once that each had a purpose, but I could think of none offhand, other than making jewelry or paving driveways.
While I hung out in the back room and played with crystal balls and fancy cups, Vickie’s laughter rang out from the front. I peered through the beaded curtain to see what caused her to laugh. Still seated in the window, a tall, lean form perched opposite her. Vance, talking to my daughter.
Which bothered me. My daughter should not be talking to the walking dead. Any walking dead. I moved quickly to the front. “Hi.” Positioning myself between them, my smile felt fake and forced.
“Hi.” Vance looked at me in a way that made my toes curl a little, and I mostly ignored it.
“Vickie, isn’t it your bedtime?”
“Nope. I have fifteen minutes. Mom, do you know Vance?”
“Yeah, we met last night.”
“Did you know he can beat all the levels on Final Fantasy?”
“No. He didn’t mention it.” I looked at him. Somehow, the contradictory image of him playing video games tainted the image of big, bad vampire.
“I enjoy technology.” He looked a little sheepish.
“Uh, huh.” I quirked my eyebrow at him.
“Mom, can I take Vance upstairs and show him the rest of my games?”
I tried to say with my eyes t
hat I thought she had gone off her rocker, but my telepathy skills sucked. “No.” I have no idea why I thought the child would let it go at that. Nothing in all of my years with her suggested she would just blindly obey me.
“Why not?”
“Since when have I let you talk to strange men?”
“My teacher is a strange man. You told me to talk to him. Also policemen, and—”
“Yeah, well, not Vance.” How do you explain to a kid that she can’t invite bloodsuckers to see her video games on a school night? The subject was one of the many things you think you won’t ever wonder about when you have a kid. Kind of like when she was younger and I had to tell her, “No, we don’t drink from the toilet.” As an adult, there are things we just know. Kids have to figure all of that stuff out.
She gave me the mom-is-an-unreasonable-ogre look, and I could feel Vance looking at me. Sven walked by us without sparing a glance. “I got the store covered if you want to go up for awhile,” he said in passing. I glared at him as my daughter caught my arm and up the stairs we went followed by a vampire.
I gritted my teeth. “Sit down,” ordered Queen Vickie. “I’ll go grab my stuff.”
We sat. Vance touched my arm. “Why does this bother you?”
I glared at him some more. “Why would I want my kid talking to you?”
He shrugged. “Why not? I’m not going to hurt her.”
I shook my head. “She needs friends with a pulse. You don’t have one.”
“Thanks for the news flash. Here I thought I did. If anything, it is good if I befriend your child.”
I studied at him. “Okay, let me in on how that works.”
“Name one creature that can best a vampire.”
Sirens, some witches, whatever else happened to be real in the creepy make-believe world.
“There aren’t any sirens, most witches would never stand against a vampire, nothing else I know of has managed to kill me, and I have been around for quite a while.”
I rolled my eyes. “So, I should let my kid talk to a vampire because you can kick butt and she might need butts kicked someday?”
“Mostly, yeah.” He leaned back and propped one leg over the other.
“If my daughter ever needs butts kicked, that is what I’m here for.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you are one terrifying woman.”
I shrugged and leaned back as Vance got bombarded by Vickie’s return and the ensuing onslaught of Playstation talk. I sat and watched the clock tick.
At the moment the hand hit nine, I cleared my throat and pointed smiling at Vickie. She did her usual and pleaded for five more minutes. I said nothing and aimed my pointing finger to her room. Grumbling, she gathered her things and trotted off to her bedroom and slammed the door. I got up and followed her. Waiting about two minutes outside the door, I then tapped.
“Come in!” She’d changed into her pajamas and sat on the bed, giving me a dirty look. I kissed her, tickled her and took down her hair. We read the next chapter in her latest book and I tried to pretend there wasn’t a vampire waiting in the living room. When her breathing evened out, I got up and planted a final kiss on her head. Smoothing her hair back, I sighed.
As I left the room and closed the door, I leaned on it for a moment, gathering myself.
When I turned, Vance caught me in his arms.
He spun me and pushed me into the wall opposite Vickie’s door and put his face less than an inch from mine.
Our breath mixed, and my pulse sped. “I have wanted to do this ever since I woke.” His lips closed over mine possessively. I rose to my toes to deepen the kiss. My heart raced, and my breathing hitched. Heat scorched me, and I opened my mouth to allow him better access.
After a moment, he released my lips to breathe harshly in my ear. I am not sure why the sound was so erotic, but it was. I tried to calm my own breathing, while burying my hand in his hair. I clung to him.
I did not cling—it just wasn’t me. I pushed him back a bit to clear my head. With his body pressed into mine, sanity eluded me. Of course, then I could see him. He wore a black leather blazer over a black button down shirt and jeans that someone must have painted on him. That did nothing to help me regain sanity, so I walked past him to enter the kitchen.
Turning my back on him showed I trusted him though, dammit. No one turns their back on an enemy, so some part of me did trust him. Probably the same weak part that got married and thought with dewy-eyed innocence that love could conquer all. It sure wasn’t a more logical part of me. The logical part said, Hello? Vampire!
Pouring a glass of water, I drank it and focused on the feel of the coolness going down my suddenly dry throat. Leaning patiently on the counter, Vance watched me. Sighing, I took the key ring from my belt loop and opened the fridge. I pulled out one of the blood bags and passed it to him. I very carefully did not look at him until I heard him throw it away. “More?” I offered, politely.
“No, thank you.”
When the phone on the counter jangled, I was happy for the inturruption. “Hello?”
It was Sven “Hey, is Vickie in bed yet?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Come down here, if you can. And don’t, well, just you, okay?”
“Okay.” I relayed this to Vance, who stood still for a moment.
“The cops are down there. I didn’t hear them. I was distracted.”
I had distracted him, I guess. I slid into my shoes and headed down. Sven looked flustered and pointed at me the minute I made it down the stairs. A man and a woman stood in the store—cops, according to Vance. Paranoid, I thought they knew about the body I found the night before.
“Janie Smith?” The man glanced at a small white tablet when he asked, then spared me a glance. Dressed in a brown suit and white shirt, I noticed his tie tilted to far to the right of his throat.
“Yes.” I crossed my arms in front of me.
“You are a friend of Mia Cunningham?”
I nodded.
“Do you know where she is?” The woman cop spoke sharply, her words like gunshots being fired into the room.
“No, I’m sorry. She left a note saying that she had to go out of town and that she wanted me to help out here.” Which wasn’t a lie. I didn’t know where Mia was at that point. I knew where she was earlier today, but where she’d gone since? I had no idea.
“We need to ask her a few questions regarding Vansickle Masterson.”
“Why not just ask me?” Vance had come up behind me and he placed one hand on my shoulder. I concentrated on keeping my breathing even. It was stupid that his just standing there rattled my nerves, but it did.
The woman got a little smile, and I figured that was everyone’s response to Vance. He was awfully good looking for a dead guy. The man frowned. “We have a coroner’s report that says you are deceased.”
“As you can see,” Vance swept into the room past me, “the rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.”
“Isn’t that a quote?” I looked around the room in general. “Mark Twain or something?”
Vance quirked a brow back at me before turning back to the nice officers.
“Could we ask you to come down for some questioning?”
He nodded. “But you will find that is unnecessary.”
“Really, Pete, isn’t that unnecessary?” The woman still appeared dazed by Vance.
“Yes, it does seem to be. I mean, there he is, right?”
I studied Vance, who looked into their eyes intently.
“And you can take care of everything, clearing Odd Stuff and its proprietor of any further suspicion,” continued Vance, in an odd monotone.
“Actually, Pete, none of this has anything to do with some little harbor business or its owner.”
“Really, it was silly to begin with. I mean, Mia has never done anything out of the ordinary. She is a pillar in this community, what with her drawing in tourism.”
Vance nodded at them, and they got their things to leave. They w
eren’t even going to offer us their card. I turned to Vance. “What are you doing to them?”
He glared at me. The nice officers looked at me blankly. Sven poked me in the ribs, which nearly sent me across the room.
“Nothing. Just answering their questions.”
I leaned on the counter and waited for the cops to leave. Then, I rounded on Vance. “That was bullshit!! You just manipulated them!”
He shrugged. “One of the perks of being me. Besides, did you want them going after your best friend?”
I shook my head. “Of course not, but that was wrong!”
“Why?”
“You can’t just bend people to your will! This is America…land of free speech!”
“I did nothing to their ability to speak. And they are free to think what they will, but they just aren’t going to think it about Mia.”
“What is your problem?” Sven shook a finger at me. “He just got them off our backs.”
“By making them think what he wanted them to! How is that right? You gave me the sob story about sirens last night and you are worse than them!”
“I am not!” Vance twitched his hair behind him like some big cloak.
“How do you figure? Sirens ruled you and you had no choice you said, but what choice did those officers have? You fed them a line of crap and now they have to try to make it work. What do you think their superior officers are gonna say when they trot in there and say, oh, Vance is alive. Yeah, we saw him. Nope, we saw no reason to bring anyone in. They are going to have a hell of a time, all because you couldn’t be bothered with it!”
“So?” Sven gestured helplessly.
“Sirens were calling us to our deaths.” Vance’s anger rolled off him in waves, but I didn’t care. I was too mad to care. “Hardly the same thing. That was why they got killed off, not because they could alter our thinking.”
“What is the difference? Were all the sirens doing it or did you guys kill off an entire race because of the acts of a few?”
Vance looked at me as if I had gone daft. “Well, they were all cold as the seas. I mean, they had their perks, but for the most part—”
“Perks?” I sputtered.
Odd Stuff Page 8
