“Leave the singing to me from now on, witch.” A wave of unreasonable and uncalled for jealousy washed over me, leaving me with little more than a grumble for a voice. I wished I could be as girly as her sometimes. Not often, but sometimes.
She glared. “At least my voice doesn’t make men go mad.”
“I wouldn’t place bets on that. Go public. My money’s on you.”
“Ha ha. And here I was going to offer you a cup of coffee.”
Shifting my weight to another leg, I waggled my eyebrows and tried to look hopeful. “My kingdom for your Maxwell House?”
“Cheap aren’t you?” Mia poured me a mug. “Vickie catch the bus today?”
“Yup.” I looked at the mug curiously. Weird symbols circled it. Maybe runes? I sipped carefully. It tasted safe. You never can tell with a witch.
“You meet with the FBI lady today?” She either didn’t notice my coffee mug study or discreetly ignored it.
“Yup.”
“Monosyllables…up late?” Practically purring, Mia peered at me out of the corner of her eye.
“I am not gratifying you with a sick rehashing of my sex life.”
She smirked. “Since when?”
Just then, Sven swept into the room in a cloud of Cool Water for Him, wearing his favorite blazer—leopard print. He was one of a kind. In deference to the weather, he sported a pink fuzzy scarf and matching mittens. His tee shirt of the day read, Ask me about the Other Side. All this caught my eye because, aside from the fashion train wreck, he stood nearly seven feet tall. The man was a modern gentle giant. “Morning, Sven.” I nodded in greeting.
He slouched in the entrance and leaned on the wall. “Morning.” He spoke through a yawn so enormous, it stretched his cavern-like jaw to its limits. A person could lose a two year old in that mouth.
Right then, the theme song to Gilligan’s Island began to play. I grabbed my cell phone and picked it up as it sang, abo-o-ard this tiny ship.
“You gotta change that.” Sven did an exaggerated eye roll. “That is just wrong.”
I rolled my eyes back at him and mouthed Never. I grinned at his disgusted expression and used my business voice to chirp, “Good morning!”
“Janie?” I recognized FBI agent Shawna Pierson’s voice immediately. My new boss, Shawna, offered me seven hundred bucks a week to look into the cases which struck her as weird, so I’d snatched up the job. The X-Files nature of the position appealed to me. I am Sculley. Yeah.
“Hi, Shawna. What’s up?”
“I am going to have to bump up our meeting, if that is okay with you. I have this interoffice lunch thing. Can we get together for coffee instead?”
“Let me check my schedule.” I stared at the cupboard for a minute and Mia tried not to laugh at me. I glanced at Sven, nearly falling asleep on his feet. That is weird.
“Uh, yeah, I’m free. When do you want to meet?” I fiddled with the rune markings on my coffee mug to occupy my eyes and hands instead of staring at Sven.
“How long would it take you to get to the Jefferson Diner?”
“Fifteen minutes?” I glanced out the window. A few random flakes had started falling, but the snow had yet to get serious.
“Great! I’ll see you there.” Mia sneezed as I hung up.
“Bless you. I have to go to Jefferson and meet with Shawna now rather than for lunch and—”
“That sucks.” Mia sniffled and reached across the counter to pull a tissue from the box. “At least before, you were reaming the government for lunch.” She sneezed again.
“Bless you.” I straightened and pulled my keys out of my pocket.
“You better go run a brush through your wig. It’s a rats’ nest.” Again, Sven yawned deeply.
“It can’t be.” It was bad enough I had to wear the wig; it didn’t seem fair that I would have to look like crap while doing so. I shook my head, denying the criticism. “I just bought it yesterday.”
“I don’t know how you did it, but it’s a wreck.”
I blew at the front of it, knowing exactly what I had done. My scratching probably matted the damned thing. “Do you think I should just lose it and go with my siren look for the FBI anyway?”
“Might as well.” Mia rubbed her nose with a tissue. “It isn’t like that half-ass disguise is going to work for long anyway. We aren’t cartoon characters or superheroes, you idiot. You can’t don a pair of dork glasses or a wig and hope that no one notices that you’re Superman.”
I gave her a dirty look and huffed out of the room. Sven shuffled after me. “Ignore her. She’s a raving bitch when she gets sick.”
“I know.” I looked at him in the mirror. “Is she right? Is it really that bad of a get up?”
“No. You aren’t trying to hide big buff muscles in a suit, just pretending your hair is a different color. If the truth comes out, big deal. Say you went punk. If people find out you lost weight, say it was Jenny Craig. It’s the two thousands, not the medieval era. No one is going to look at you and gasp, ‘O-mi-god-she-is-the-last-siren’ if they notice you have silver hair and weight loss.”
I sighed and looked in the mirror. He was right. For the most part, modern cosmetics could explain my transformation. I yanked off the offending wig, pitched it in the sink, and ran my fingers through my short cap of hair. It glowed silvery white and framed my narrow face, which looked more elfin than before, but that was bone structure. I couldn’t do a hell of a lot about genetics. My eyes reflected the colors of the sea, blue for the most part with hints of green and turquoise. The week before, I wore contacts to spice up my mundane blue eyes, but since the change it was all me. My skin, when I fed—long story, tell you later—shone like pearls, but as I had not consumed anything other than coffee and junk food recently, it was a reasonably normal color. I didn’t look very predatory at the moment. All good things. I congratulated myself. Probably no one would try to kill me. Probably no one on the day side would even sense I had come to power or know that I existed.
I hoped.
Too many conjectures, even for me, bounced in my head, but I didn’t have time to worry about them. I had told Shawna I would be in Jefferson in fifteen minutes. Jefferson is a fifteen minutes’ drive south of Ashtabula, and I had blown a good five staring at myself in the mirror. I looked at Sven, who leaned on the wall, eyes half-closed. What is with him?
I shrugged, punched him in the arm to rouse him, and grabbed my coat and car keys. I yelled a goodbye to a crabby Mia, and got a, Later, Wonder Bitch, in reply.
On the drive to Jefferson, I sang along to the radio in an attempt to keep warm. The temperatures, already frigid, kept dropping. The heat kicked on and pumped out delicious warmth by the time I turned off Route Eleven. Jewel came on with Have a Little Faith in Me.
I sang along quite happily until I realized that Jewel and I had company. Looking like a forbidden dessert plopped into my passenger seat, Chance had appeared without my notice. I hit the off button and Chance sang alone for a minute.
“I been lovin’ you for such a long, long time and all you gotta do is have a little faith in me!” He wailed rather than actually harmonizing.
I glared at him.
“What?” His eyebrows rose innocently. As if Chance could ever be innocent of anything. “Good song, not a bad cover.”
“And you are here why?”
“You didn’t miss me?” He flipped in his seat to face me.
“No.”
“Where are we going?”
“You are going back to wherever you were before you beamed into my Focus.” The waver in my tone probably undid my attempt to sound firm.
“It isn’t beaming.” He glowered at me, as if disappointed I wasn’t thrilled at his entrance. Not that Chance’s tendency to pop by unannounced ever thrilled me, but he seemed hopeful I would magically change my mind about it.
“Bye.” I gritted my teeth in irritation. Somehow my car, spacious moments before, seemed overfull. I wasn’t sure if his scent permeated the
very air around me and stole the available oxygen, or if he filled the space with emotions I didn’t care to deal with.
I stared at the road and hoped he would disappear. We were getting close to Jefferson, and I didn’t want to meet Shawna with Chance in tow. Who knew what damage he would do, and I had just landed the job. I had to get rid of him.
Chance is…hard to describe. Hair some shade between brown and red framed eyes so green, they reminded me of beer bottles. No one knew exactly what he was. He wasn’t a vampire, a witch, a siren, a were, or an elf. He was something Other. Maybe an alien. As if the ability to shove power into me akin to eating a bolt of lightning wasn’t daunting enough, when he hung out with me, a silver cord attached us. He claimed the cord meant we were soulmates and that he’d waited his supposedly long life for me. I felt pretty confident he was nuts. “I have a meeting in a couple minutes and self-defense with you later. Can’t you leave me alone until then? You can’t touch me anyway. Remember, the game?”
“I could leave you alone, but it would be dull. Besides, your little protective game has an interesting rule. I can’t touch you, but you can touch me. I have to be close for you to do that when you want.” He tucked a lock of hair behind one of his ears. “Have you ever considered the lyrics to that song?”
I sighed. “I am not going to touch you, and no, I have not considered the lyrics, but I am sure you’re about to tell me why I should have.” He wanted to have some deep, meaningful, conversation before he left me alone, even though I wasn’t going to get it—I never did. I tossed my hair back and then remembered I didn’t have enough to toss. A muscle in my jaw hardened as I remembered that this too was his fault.
He gestured a hand at me, and I licked my lips as I looked at those long fingers. Although logic reminded me I had no interest in him, my libido sometimes had other ideas. Like when it popped a picture in my head of those fingers on my skin, for instance. “You should touch me because you know you want to. Since you’re not ready to admit that, let’s look at the lyrics, pretend your life is a sitcom.”
“First my life is compared to a comic book, now a sitcom. Today is going to be one of those Mondays, isn’t it?” I met his gaze for the first time since he’d poofed into my car. Big mistake.
The cord suddenly appeared between us. It thrummed like a pulse in my chest, and I sucked in a breath at the shock of it. I shut my eyes for a moment and tried to block the feelings out before remembering to watch the road. Through the open cord, I sensed him tremble and collect himself. I stared down the highway ignoring him and the visible connection. He might have been a lot older, but the cord clarified that the unfamiliar feelings affected to him, too. He wasn’t fond of all of them either. I kept my eyes deliberately on the road and waited.
He laughed and pretended that the intimate connection hadn’t happened. “Mia must have compared your life to a comic book.”
“Superman.” I wanted to fill the car with sound to make the moment pass, but I could barely get out the single word.
“Okay, back to my point. That song…the lyrics. In life, we often forget that all we have to do is have faith. Faith is the basis of life. If the Crusaders had had faith in their Lord, would they have killed the Muslims?”
“What?” See? Already he lost me.
“The Muslims. The Christians killed the Muslims because they were not Christians. If the Christians had truly had faith, they would have realized that the Lord could have converted their enemies without slaughter. Instead, the void of faith resulted in loss of life. Do you have faith?” His cheerful smile lit up his eyes.
“Are you asking me if I am a Christian?” I still wasn’t sure where his lecture was going.
“What?” His brows furrowed, the smiling façade gone like a cloud had traveled in front of the sun.
“Or are you asking me if I have faith?”
“No! I am saying that faith is powerful. Faith in people is powerful. Do you have faith in those around you? Do you have faith in me?” He tapped his chest as he spoke, and I looked again at his long fingers a moment before focusing back on the road.
“Loads—in the guy who claims to be my soul mate.” I tried to lace my tone with sarcasm, but my throat went dry as I imagined those deft fingers on my skin while his mouth covered mine. I was torn on which I wanted to do more, pull over and rip off his clothes or pull over and hit him until my fists hurt. I leaned toward the latter. Chance always gets a reaction out of me, just not the one he seems to hope for.
“Faith is the glue that holds society together.”
Now he knows it all. Pompous ass. “Okay.” I tried to sound amicable hoping he would drop it and disappear.
“You aren’t getting this.” His tone went flat. A flick of his wrist at my radio and the song start playing again. Now that was cool, since it was live radio, not a CD or XM. Impressed, I nodded to him. He rolled his eyes at me. “Listen to the song.” The order in his tone would have made my hackles rise if I was a dog and had hackles.
Men. I listened. The lyrics still said the same thing. “So you want me to have a little faith in you?”
“That would be nice, yes, but I would like you to have a little faith, period. You don’t really believe in anyone or anything right now. Not even yourself.”
“How in the hell would you know? You just met me!” I tried not to yell at him but I failed miserably. “Is this some wax on, wax off, crap?”
“You just met me, but you still make a lot of judgment calls about me.” His expression was dark when I darted another glance his way.
“You’re nuts. I am right about that one.” I bit my lip and turned my eyes back to the road, hoping he would take a hint. He threw up his hands and poofed out again. I had a feeling he would pick up the line of conversation again later, making it a temporary reprieve.
He’d timed his exit well, since I’d arrived in the center of town. I waited through a stop light, then proceeded downtown to park near the Jefferson Diner. Hunched beneath my coat, I dodged past two other patrons to enter the small restaurant. A scan of the room showed Shawna toward the back, a laptop opened on the table in front of her. Braided black hair, some dyed bright red, hung around dark mahogany skin. She reached onto the seat next to her as I approached, sifted through files, and handed me one. “The Harbor Hammer was a mugger in the 1930’s in Ashtabula Harbor.”
I opened the file and fought to catch up. She pulled several eight by ten, black and white pictures of the harbor as it must have looked back in the thirties. I’ve seen similar shots, most of us who lived around there had at some point or another. People in fancy clothes, women in bustles, men in suits and spectacles, walking down streets that looked pretty much as they did today. The Harbor teemed with sailors and tall ships, bustling with enterprise—a far cry from the current rustbelt economy.
Tapping the photos, Shawna sipped her coffee with her free hand and she explained. “In the 1930’s, the Harbor District was an important area. Trade came through, primarily by ships coming in from Lake Erie, and unloaded onto railcars making Ashtabula Harbor a major port. New York, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Cleveland…all of the major cities of the day were easily accessed by rail through Ashtabula Harbor. As a major port of call, the harbor had everything a sailor could want…cat houses, bars, a big city…and a killer. The Harbor Hammer had a good run, too. He took a hammer and hit the drunken sailors in the head then he robbed them. Pretty up front and simple crime. They never caught him. He just stopped hammering after about year, and they assumed he either retired or died.
“Years passed. Then, mysteriously, another Harbor Hammer had a year long run. Once again, never caught. A few years later, another. And then we see the pattern forming. Every leap year there is a Hammer who hangs around for twelve months and then disappears. Guess what? Local authorities have found two bodies already.”
She pulled out more photographs and laid them on the table in front of me, this time of crime scenes. Okay, when Sculley looked at this kind of stuff,
she didn’t toss her cookies, so neither would I. But I wanted to. Ick, is that real blood? Logic suggested yes, but my brain did not want to digest the information.
Wait, I am one of the monsters, and I’m dating a flipping vampire. I was not allowed to be grossed out by a dead body. Who was I kidding? I was so grossed out. I tapped the pictures together neatly and passed them back.
“So, it’s a copycat.” I don’t watch NCIS for nothing.
“No, I don’t think so. It goes back even further than the thirties. I want you to look into it. If I’m right, I might be looking at finding bodies for the next year. So far, I have only two. That means over three hundred more bodies are possible if this continues as it has before. Or you could ask some questions, and I might have a shot at finding a killer. What could it hurt?”
Put that way…”I’ll ask around.” I stifled my excitement. I could really make a difference and help people! Smiling would probably give the wrong impression, so I bit back the emotion and the expression.
“Here are the files I have on it. I don’t know how much any of it will help, since no one has ever caught any of the Hammers but, here.” Shawna passed the folders to me and her eyes flashed gold for a moment. It must have been a trick of the light. I was on the case.
ABout theAuthor
Virginia Nelson believed them when they said, “Write what you know.” Small town girl writing small town romance, her characters are as full of flaws, misunderstandings, and flat out mistakes as Virginia herself. When she’s is not writing or plotting to take over the world, she likes to hang out with the greatest kids in history, play in the mud, drive far too fast, and scream at inanimate objects. Virginia likes knights in rusted and dinged up armor, heroes that snarl instead of croon, and heroines who can’t remember to say the right thing even with an author writing their dialogue. Her books are full of snark, sex, and random acts of ineptitude—not always in that order.
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