Cross Your Heart: A Broken Heart Novel

by Michele Bardsley

  We went into the cozy kitchen. The table occupying the breakfast nook was already set. Lenette was tall, her hair a stunning red, and, as Tez might say, stacked. She nodded toward her sister.

  “Nell told us you’d be arriving soon,” she said. “And that you might be feeling unsettled.”

  Nell was blond, thin, and quiet. She offered us a smile. “We’re glad you’re here,” she said in a whispery voice. “You are always welcome.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Tez. “Thanks.”

  Each sister held a particular gift: Lenette’s was, as she called it, necromancy lite; Nell could see into the future, but only by hours; and Dorica read auras. Her hair was brown, and freckles splashed across her dainty nose like cinnamon. She was the middle sister, and fit the designation well: shorter and thinner than Lenette, but taller and plumper than Nell.

  Dorica studied both me and Tez, and frowned slightly. Oh, this can’t be good. Tez didn’t seem to notice the scrutiny. He chose the chair next to mine, and waited for the sisters to join us. We made small talk while I sipped their excellent jasmine tea, and Tez tried for a world record in how many scones he could eat in five minutes.

  “How did it go at the mansion?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much more information to share. Connor and Phoebe said the symbols of Mammon’s shadow were knotted. It might take a while to remove the circle. I added some protection spells in the attic and some around the house, too. But that demon magic . . . it’s not something I’ve ever felt before.”

  Tez ate yet another scone, and I turned to look at him.

  “These are awesome,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said Lenette. “I’ll make some for you to take with you on your trip tomorrow.”

  “You know about us going to Tulsa?” I asked. I snared a scone and split it so I could add some clotted cream. Except I didn’t think Tez would be accompanying me. Not with the were-cat party to attend. I really needed to stop worrying so much about it.

  If only I could stop, though.

  “Gabriel told me about you and Tez doing some extra research into Broken Heart’s past.” Lenette seemed content to sip on her own cup of tea. “We love this town, but we only arrived a few years ago. Unfortunately, we have no history in it. Not like you, Elizabeth, or Jessica or even Eva.”

  “History.” My teacup clinked loudly as I clumsily dropped it on its saucer. I don’t know why Lenette’s comment sparked the information, but now I knew why “five” had been so important. “Five families.”

  I turned to Tez. “During the Oklahoma land run, five families staked out claims around this area. The Silverstones, the LeRoys, the McCrees, the Clarks, and the Allens.”

  “You’re the Silverstone,” said Tez.

  “Jessica is a McCree. Phoebe is an Allen. Eva is a LeRoy.” My excitement turned to ashes. “Darlene was a Clark, but she was killed.”

  “Aren’t you all technically dead?” asked Tez.

  “Darlene was vampire, too,” I said, “but we had some problems with a military group named ETAC. One of the soldiers killed her. All we found was her ashes.”

  “Harsh,” said Tez.

  “Her daughter, Marissa, lives here,” said Lenette. “She’s eleven now—she was six when she almost died from drowning, if I remember right. Her father is Dr. Clark. He moved back to town after he realized he needed help with his daughter’s special needs.”

  “Special needs?” I asked. I didn’t know Dr. Clark or Marissa very well. Actually, I hadn’t particularly liked Darlene Clark. She was a decent mother, I supposed, but much too concerned with appearances. And she didn’t seem to have a lot of common sense.

  “Marissa crossed the veil when she drowned,” said Dorica in her whiskey voice. “She was touched by death.”

  Lenette nodded. “We’re helping her deal with her powers.”

  “Which are what?” asked Tez. He eyed my scone, and I pushed my plate toward him. He happily devoured both halves.

  “It’s difficult to explain,” said Lenette. “She has a connection to death. Her gift manifests in different ways. We’re still trying to figure it out.” She turned to me. “You think the entity that attacked you is somehow related to an old secret.”

  It wasn’t a question. “Yes, I do.” I explained about my vision, finding the bones of the other Elizabeth, and the two strangulation incidents.

  “You’re on the right track,” said Nell. “You’ll find more answers in Tulsa.”

  “Be careful,” said Dorica. “Danger is all around you.” Her gaze snagged mine. “You’ll have a decision to make soon, Elizabeth. You might find neither choice will be palatable.”

  “Dire warnings from witches,” said Lenette. She sent an admonishing look to her sister, who shrugged it off. “Don’t let it bend your brain, okay?”

  Tez reached under the table and squeezed my hand. “We’ll be all right.”

  His reassurance eased back the fear creeping through me. How in the world had I come to rely on him so thoroughly in such a short amount of time? If I were to believe Tez’s story, then I was his mate and felt exactly as I should. Or, more likely, I had hidden from myself how desperately I missed male companionship and I eagerly accepted every ounce of affection and comfort he gave. I wasn’t sure which scenario was worse.

  “I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep in my tea.” I wanted to dismiss the talk about unfair decisions, and all thoughts of mating with Tez. All right. Maybe not all thoughts.

  “I’ll show you to your room,” said Lenette.

  Tez and I said our good-nights to the sisters, and then followed Lenette down a set of stairs into what had once been the basement of the house. She walked us down the hallway.

  “How’s Meyer?” I asked.

  “Still loves numbers. The more complicated the equation, the happier he is.”

  Meyer P. Dennison was Lenette’s fiancé. He’d arrived in Broken Heart as an IRS agent under the mistaken impression he was going to audit Jessica, and had no idea she was a vampire. He’d been accidently bitten by a zombie; Lenette’s necromagick saved him. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t quite alive, either. He stopped aging, ate rarely, and required little sleep. He was, I supposed, a half-zombie. He’d taken an accounting position with the Consortium, and he and Lenette seemed very much in love.

  She opened a door at the end of the hall and turned on the light. She swept inside, turning down the covers on the four-poster bed, and doing a general inspection to make sure all was in order.

  “Please don’t worry so much about Dorica’s warning,” she said. “My sister can be dramatic.”

  Tez put his arm around me. “We’ll take it as it comes,” said Tez. “Thanks for the room.”

  “You’re welcome. While you’re here, you’re safe. No evil can penetrate our magick,” she said. “Sleep well.”

  She left, quietly shutting the door behind her.

  My suitcase and Tez’s duffel bag had already been put on luggage racks in the opened closet. I took the bathroom first, brushing my teeth, washing my face, and putting on my nightgown.

  Tez whistled when I stepped out of the bathroom. “Nice nightie, princess.” He grinned wickedly. “Hope you don’t mind. I like to sleep in the buff.”

  I wrapped my arms around his neck, and kissed him softly. “Mmm. I don’t mind a bit. Too bad I will be, quite literally, dead to the world.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “That is a problem.”

  He went into the bathroom, and I got tucked into bed, plumping the pillows. I waited for him to join me; I hoped for snuggling. It had been a long time since I’d shared a bed with someone else.

  Tez crawled into bed and gathered me into his arms as if it was the most natural action in the world. Despite his earlier teasing, he was wearing boxer shorts, which I admit I was disappointed to see.

  Pressed against Tez’s delectable chest, listening to the comforting sound of his heartbeat, I surrendered to vampire sl
umber.

  Chapter 11

  In the attic, in the secret room, he accuses me of greed.

  I have never asked for trinkets. His petty words wound me, and I want to hurt him back. I hold my tongue, though, because I owe him, and he knows it. It’s why he can be so cruel, and why I do nothing.

  Candlelight flickers across his handsome face. Here was a man I had thought I might love. Why does he want to torment me? He stares at me, and the look in his eyes is so strange, I feel my heart skip a fearful beat.

  “You’re mine,” he whispers. “Mine.”

  Desperation tinges his words, that and some other emotion I cannot define.

  I shouldn’t have followed him upstairs to this terrible room. I shouldn’t have kept his secret. It was wrong.

  It seems I am doomed to make the wrong choices.

  I look at the floor, at the odd symbols that float like coal dust above the wood planks. It smells like rotten eggs, and I hold my gloved hand up to my nose. “What have you done?”

  His eyes are wild, and I’m frightened.

  Downstairs in my beautiful home, the party is in full swing, and I am the hostess. I am wearing my pretty brown velveteen dress, the one with the copper roses. I have removed my hat. It, too, has copper roses. I’m very pleased with my outfit, but I suppose he would accuse me of vanity should I say so.

  “We should go,” I say, and I back up a step. “The guests.”

  “You were with him.”

  I shake my head because I cannot trust my voice. I try to be brave. I think of my children, and I know that no matter what harm I might’ve caused, they were worth the price. The choice.

  “You betrayed me!”

  Panic wells. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, and I know he wants to hurt me.

  “I have done everything right,” he says. “You’re mine. I won’t share you.” He rips the hat out of my hand and tosses it to the floor. “You think I don’t know where you got that necklace? Give it to me.”

  I put my hand on the sapphire that dangles from my neck. “No.”

  He grabs the chain and pulls so hard, it cuts into my neck. It does not break, and that infuriates him. I cry out, and back away, but he’s worked up now. His rage is palpable.

  He cocks his fist—and hits me.

  The pain is immediate and intense. I slam into the wall and hit my head. Then I fall, fall, fall into darkness.

  Chapter 12

  When I woke up, I found Tez already out of bed and awake. He was pacing, shoving his fingers through his already ruffled hair. His worried expression had me sitting up and tossing off the covers.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Elizabeth.” He pulled me out of bed and wrapped his arms around me. “I’m sorry, princess. I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  He pulled back and stared down at me. “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. Lenette came down about an hour ago. Your friend Eva tried to commit suicide.”

  I went cold.

  “No. Never.”

  “I’m only telling you what Lenette said. With everything else going on in this place, I don’t really believe it, either.”

  “Where is she?”

  “The hospital.”

  “And Lorcan?”

  Tez hesitated. “He’s disappeared.”

  “He would never abandon Eva. So, either he’s hurt or stuck somewhere.” Horror slicked through me. “The shadow.”

  Tez’s expression confirmed my fears. “No one’s said so, but, yeah, I think he took Lorcan’s form and did the same thing to Eva that he did to Patsy.”

  “Why?” I cried. Frustration and fury wound through me. “What purpose does it have? To destroy love?”

  Shocked by my own revelation, I sank to the bed and fisted my hands in the covers. “Is that what he’s doing? Replaying the scenario over and over?”

  “What scenario?”

  I explained about my most recent vision and, in it, the confirmation that I had seen the necklace around Elizabeth’s neck. “She betrayed him by taking a lover. He killed her.” I frowned. “But he’d only called on Mammon’s shadow. I saw the symbols on the floor.”

  “It’s a good theory,” said Tez. “But I feel like there’s a deeper purpose. We don’t know what the end game is yet.”

  “We better figure it out quickly,” I said. “Let’s go see Eva.”

  I hurried into the bathroom and quickly completed my ablutions. As soon as I dressed and packed, Tez grabbed my suitcase and his duffel.

  Lenette was waiting for us in the kitchen. She looked worried as she directed Tez toward the coffeepot. I declined a cup.

  “I can’t believe Eva would intentionally harm herself,” said Lenette. “Mammon’s shadow must’ve affected her, the same he affected Patsy.”

  “That was our thought, too,” said Tez.

  Lenette sighed. “Dr. Clark seems to think she walked into the dawn of her own volition.”

  “Oh, my God. She tried to go into the sunlight?” I asked, horrified. “Who found her?”

  “Tamara hadn’t gone to bed yet,” said Lenette. “Thank the Goddess she was there. Tamara’s been out in the field, training with Durriken. She just got home yesterday.”

  “Training?” asked Tez.

  “Durriken is a Roma—a werewolf who only shifts during the full moon. He and his family are vampire hunters. He’s been training Tamara to fight and to hunt.”

  “You live in a town with vampire hunters?”

  “They have a pact with the Consortium,” clarified Lenette. “Anyway, Tamara heard her mom go outside. She said Eva was upset and telling her she couldn’t live with the heartache of Lorcan’s unfaithfulness.”

  I wasn’t surprised that Lenette already knew most of the story. This was Broken Heart, after all, and small-town secrets were hard to keep—except the long-ago travesty that had set all we were experiencing now into tragic motion. That had been kept secret from all of us.

  “How’d she manage to get her mom back inside?” asked Tez.

  Lenette piled scones into a bakery box and closed the lid. “The Roma hunters are very good at what they do. She dropped Eva with some kind of crazy move and dragged her smoking body back into the house. Then she called Patrick and Jessica.”

  “Where’s Lorcan?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows.”

  “If Eva was harmed, so was he. That’s how the mate bond works.”

  “Well, he’s alive,” said Lenette practically. She eyed Tez, who’d already dipped into the scones she’d just packed, and started putting together another box. “Otherwise, Eva would be gone.”

  “Let’s assume the shadow took Lorcan’s form,” said Tez. “Somewhere between the emergency room and finding Dr. Clark, the Gabriel doppelganger disappears. We think he’s crawled under a rock to heal.”

  “But he took on a new form,” I said. “Lorcan.”

  “Eva goes home and they start digging around in the archives. Maybe they find something, and he’s trying to hide it. He starts pulling the same crap with Eva that he did with Patsy.”

  “He took three days to make Patsy nuts.”

  Tez nodded. “She’s stronger, maybe harder to push toward a breakdown. Or maybe he needed access to the house and that room, and when he was done doing whatever, he pushed her buttons.”

  “I can’t believe he meant for her to stab him to death.” I took the bakery boxes from Lenette; otherwise Tez would empty them before we even got to the car.

  “Probably not.” Tez popped the last bit of his stolen scone into his mouth, and finished off his coffee. He looked longingly at the boxes in my hand and I scooted out of his reach. He sent me a doleful look, but I would not be swayed. Besides, I wanted one, too.

  “If the shadow knows that killing a vampire means killing his mate, maybe he held off on hurting Lorcan until he figured out what Eva knew,” said Tez. “Or maybe he just didn’t have time to kill Lorcan. Could be he’s unconscious and lock
ed up somewhere.”

  “Somewhere a vampire couldn’t escape?” I asked. “Lorcan’s practically an Ancient, and he has shifter abilities. The only thing that could hold him is fairy gold or . . . or I don’t know what else.”

  “Let’s get to the hospital,” said Tez. “Talk to Eva. If I know that security chief of yours, he’s already looking for Lorcan.”

  “Is that grudging admiration I hear in your voice?” I teased.

  “He’s good,” said Tez with a shrug. “I bet dollars to scones he’s turning the hospital upside down right now.”

  “Then the best thing we can do is continue Eva’s research work.”

  “I agree. Soon as we’re done visiting Eva, we’ll head to Tulsa.”

  “I’ll head to Tulsa,” I said. “You’re going to the were-cat party.”

  “Shit.” He looked at me, frowning. “Wait. You’re not going with me?”

  “You didn’t invite me.”

  “I didn’t . . .” He trailed off, obviously annoyed. “Are you kidding me?”

  “You assumed I was going with you? Hmm. Interesting.” I might’ve gotten some satisfaction from Tez’s flummoxed expression, but I was also doing a little girly happy dance that he’d expected me to be his date. Still, he should’ve asked me.

  The priority, however, was to get to Tulsa—although I did have that lovely red wrap dress I hadn’t worn yet. No, Elizabeth. Focus. We needed information more than ever, and it seemed like my great-grandfather’s heirlooms might hold the keys we needed to unlock the mystery and the motive of the shadow man.

  “Good luck,” said Lenette. “I’ll pray that the God and the Goddess keep you protected during your journey.”

  When we got outside, Tez loaded our bags into the Honda’s trunk. He slammed it shut. Then he rounded the car and looked pleadingly at me. “Please go to the party with me. We won’t stay long, I promise.”

  “Well,” I sniffed. “I suppose. But only for a little while.”

  “Cruel, cruel woman,” he muttered. Then he kissed me soundly. “Where’s the hospital?”

  Tez managed to finish off half of one box of scones by the time we got to the hospital. He parked close to the main entrance, and shoved a final bite into his mouth. He looked at me, his expression tinged with guilt. “What? I have a high metabolism. Shifters eat a lot.”