by Jenn Bennett
“I was just teasing,” she said to me, then leaned closer to Jupe. “I can make people afraid.”
“Really?”
“Really. My knack increases anxiety.” Very effectively, in fact. Though it didn’t last long, she could scare the bejesus out of an entire room with a little bit of effort.
“I can make people do what I want,” Jupe blurted.
“Is that right?” Kar Yee said, as if he’d just told us he was an astronaut. “Aren’t you a little young to have a knack?”
“Yes, he is,” I said.
“I’m an early bloomer,” he argued.
Kar Yee smiled and poked a slender finger into his bony chest. “I like you, Jupiter. You’re tall, good-looking, and you make me laugh. When you’re older, give me a call.”
Jupe tore his cell out of his jeans pocket. “Why wait? What’s your home number?”
I reached over the bar and smacked him on the arm. “Don’t do it, Kar Yee. He’ll be texting you from school every half hour. Trust me.” Yesterday’s smorgasbord of texts from Jupe included three general requests about what I was doing, one urgent message begging me to help him cheat on his English test, and two musings about possible magick spells I should work on (i.e., supercharging his dog, Foxglove, so she could run faster). If I didn’t respond right away, he’d text twenty more times to ask if I’d gotten his original message. When I couldn’t reply with a proper answer, I’d somehow agreed to use Lon’s generic text reply: LUBIB. That was shorthand for “Love you but I’m busy.” Jupe said the “love you” part was his personal addition to Lon’s former canned response of BUSY, insisting that it detracted from the sting of being snubbed.
Before Kar Yee could debate whether it was a wise idea to give a teenage kid her digits, someone pounded on the door and Amanda’s shadowy face pressed against the window bars. Kar Yee sauntered away to let her inside.
“Whew! What a storm.” Amanda closed her umbrella and shook out her long, sun-drenched locks as Kar Yee locked the door behind her. “Oh, hey, Cady. I didn’t know you were working today.”
“I’m just dropping off fruit. Toni’s tending bar tonight. This is Lon’s son, by the way. Jupe, this is Amanda, our senior server.”
“Oh, I know who he is!” she said brightly. “You go to school with my cousin, Rosy. I’m from La Sirena, too. My parents own Three Dwarves Pottery Studio in the Village.” The Village was the tourist center of the small beach community, and Amanda’s family’s studio one of the busiest spots—less to do with their pottery skills and more because Amanda and her parents gossip like it’s an Olympic sport and they’re going for the gold.
“Rosy’s pretty cool,” Jupe confirmed casually, “and I know your parents’ place. Next to the crappy ice cream shop that serves freezer-burned Rocky Road.”
Amanda laughed. “Yeah, not my favorite either. Are you spending the weekend with Cady?”
“Lon’s out of town,” I answered. “Jupe’s staying with me tonight.”
He leaned against the bar, readying himself to charm girl number two. At least he didn’t seem traumatized by our run-in with Methbrain in the parking garage.
Amanda set a tinkling box on the bartop—new mummy mugs that her parents had designed for our two-day Halloween promo. Kar Yee came up with the bright idea to charge patrons twenty dollars for an exclusive holiday drink served in collectible mugs that customers could keep. If we could unload all three hundred mugs, we’d make a nice haul.
“So, huge news from La Sirena.” Amanda pried up the edge of the box tape with her fingernail. “Another kid went missing. Dustin Chapman—fifteen-year-old son of a wealthy broker.”
“What?” Jupe said. “I know that guy!”
Amanda’s brow furrowed. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
“I mean, kind of know him,” he admitted. “My dad knows his dad. He goes to private school. What happened?”
“His parents said he was taking out the garbage last night. When he didn’t come back in the house, they looked outside and found trash scattered all over the yard. Dustin was gone.” Amanda ripped the tape off the box with a violent pull. “There was blood on the driveway.”
“Blood?” Jupe squeaked.
“Yeah. So awful. He’s the second kid to go missing in La Sirena. You’ve heard what everyone’s saying?”
He nodded seriously. “The Snatcher.”
Kar Yee frowned. “Snatcher?”
“Some guy who kidnapped teens thirty years ago around Halloween,” Amanda explained. “He took seven kids in a couple of weeks. The day after Halloween—All Saints’ Day—their names were found carved into a circle of trees in Sandpiper Park—just outside the Village—down on the beach. The cops never uncovered who did it, and the kids were never seen again. No bodies ever found.”
“Is this a real crime, or just an urban legend?” I said. “It sounds made up.”
“Oh, it’s real,” Jupe assured me.
“Look it up on the internet,” Amanda challenged. “Sometimes you can even find the original police photos of the circle of trees, but most of the sites that put them up get pressured by the families to take them down. They closed the park after it happened. Ten years later, they leveled the trees and installed a stone memorial. Families of the kids still bring flowers and candles there on Halloween. Totally spooky.”
“It’s supposed to be haunted,” Jupe added.
I rolled my eyes. “You know damn well there’s no such things as ghosts.”
“Are you sure?” Wary eyes slid toward Amanda. I could easily guess his thoughts—he was questioning the fact that she was the only person in the room without a halo.
“She’s not a savage,” I said. Savages are humans who don’t believe in the existence of Earthbounds, magick, or anything else supernatural. Most humans can’t see halos—with my preternatural sight, I was an exception—but some, like Amanda, take our word for it.
In Amanda’s case, she had an extra push from an early age. “Ugly Duckling,” she announced with a raised hand, using the Earthbound term for nondemonic offspring. Her mother is human, father Earthbound. And, like other kids born from an Earthbound-human couple, Amanda is 100 percent human: no halo, no knack.
“Oh, cool. Anyway, I still think ghosts exist,” Jupe said stubbornly. “My dog sees things that I can’t. None of the Earthbounds at my school have seen ghosts, but everyone says you get a weird feeling around that memorial stone in Sandpiper Park.”
Amanda nodded. “You need to be careful, Jupe. Don’t go anywhere alone. You could end up like Dustin—one minute you’re hauling out the garbage, the next you’re gone. Poof! Until Halloween’s over, you better make sure you’ve got someone with you at all times.”
“Damn. It’s not safe anywhere.” Under the bar lights, the faint smattering of freckles over Jupe’s nose and cheekbones seemed to darken against his pebble-brown skin.
“That is, if there’s a Halloween,” Amanda amended. “Some crazy civic watch group is trying to get Halloween festivities canceled. They’re gonna be on the morning news tomorrow, trying to scare the public into supporting them. And not just in La Sirena. Morella, too. They want to cancel the Morella Halloween Parade and ban trick-or-treating throughout the entire county.”
“What?” Jupe and Kar Yee said in chorus.
“No way! I’ve been wanting to go to the city parade for years and Cady promised to take me! They can’t do this! My birthday’s on Halloween!”
“I don’t give a damn bout the parade,” Kar Yee said, “except that it’s bad for business and I’ve just paid for three hundred mummy mugs!”
“Nobody’s canceling Halloween, for the love of Pete,” I said.
“They’d better not.” Kar Yee scowled at Amanda, as if it were her fault for bringing bad news into the bar. Still, she had a point. For demons, Halloween was like St. Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo. Last year we cleared almost $10,000 on Halloween night alone—not to mention the considerable upswing in profits the week before. And that was witho
ut the mummy mugs.
Amanda toyed with the braided hemp bracelets on her wrist. “Whether they cancel it or not, it’s still scary that kids are being taken. I wonder if it’s some copycat crime?”
Whatever it was, she needed to shut the hell up about it in front of Jupe. Tonight was the first time he’d be spending the night at my house, and I just wanted to have a normal, problem-free weekend with the boy while Lon was gone, but that was looking like a pipe dream at this point. Let’s see: nearly mugged in parking garage, check; minor in bar, check; underage lust kindled by best friend, check; scary child-snatcher rumors, kaboom.
Good job, Arcadia Bell.
I spent the rest of the day doing my best to keep Jupe’s mind off the Snatcher, which is probably why he was able to sucker me into hauling him to a downtown comic book shop, where he managed to drop his entire weekly allowance in five minutes. We spent the rest of the night at my place watching movies and playing with my pet hedgehog, Mr. Piggy. I finally got the two of them to conk out in my guest room sometime after three in the morning, and gladly succumbed to exhaustion myself shortly after.
But sleep didn’t last long.
I sat up in bed a few hours later, groggy and disoriented. Steamy light floated out from the cracked door to the master bath. Someone was in the shower. My momentary panic cleared when I noticed a suitcase on the floor and one of the drawers in my bureau standing open: Lon’s drawer. Our big commitment step. I cleaned it out for him a couple of weeks ago. Though he’d only stayed over once, it still felt satisfying that he kept a few things at my house. In turn, he generously gave me an entire side of his walk-in closet. Walk-in “room” was more like it—the closet was big enough to hold a dressing bench and built-in wooden island in the center with a thousand drawers. My closet had louvered doors circa 1975 that were covered in dust and constantly falling off the track.
I laid my head back down on the pillow and stretched my toes. Even without the suitcase and open-drawer evidence, Lon was the only other person with a key to my place, and the house wards hadn’t alerted me to an intruder. But why in the world was he home so early? I hadn’t expected him back until well after my shift started at the bar later in the afternoon, and the alarm clock read 9 a.m.
The shower faucet squeaked off. Seconds later, a wonderfully wet and very naked man emerged from a transitory cloud of steam like a scene out of a ’70s porno flick. He was beautifully built, all lean muscle and golden skin—more golden above the waist than below, I noticed. His outdoor shoot in Mexico must have been spent sans shirt. Good thing he was shooting travel ads and not women in bikinis, or I might’ve been jealous.
My eyes lingered over his taut stomach and followed the enticing dip of muscle curving over his hipbone, then lower. When he stopped toweling his hair, I glanced up, meeting his gaze. My heart hammered and a warm happiness spread through my chest. An easy grin parted his lips, outlined by the thin pirate mustache that trailed down past the corners of his mouth and matched a roguish triangle in the center of his chin. When he smiled, small wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes deepened. I found this strangely enchanting.
“Morning, witch.”
“Hello, devil.” I raised my head and leaned on my elbows. “If this is a dream, it’s a pretty good one,” I rasped, clearing my throat. “What’s going on? Why are you here early?”
“Caught a red-eye,” he said, sounding weary.
“What about your shoot?”
“I got all the night shots before I left.”
“Why?” I repeated.
He finished drying his shoulder-length light brown hair. “Why what?”
“Why did you come back early? You look exhausted.”
“I caught a couple hours of sleep on the plane,” he said with a shrug. “I came home because I got a call from Ambrose Dare.”
That took a couple seconds to register. “Dare? The head of the Hellfire Club?”
“Mmm-hmm.” He flung the wet towel on the floor and stepped to the edge of the bed. I reached out to run my hand over the soft hair on his thigh, still damp from the shower. He smelled good. He looked good. I’d missed him in all sorts of ways.
He made a small noise, one that told me he was listening to my emotions with his empathic knack. Until I met him, I paid little attention to my own feelings. But he did. He often pointed out nuances I’d never considered . . . like arousal. He said that my accompanying emotions sounded like a song going up an octave, and he could identify it even when I was ogling him from several feet away.
“Dare wants to see us,” he said.
“Us,” I repeated languidly. My wandering hand stilled. “Wait, us?”
“About those missing kids.”
“Huh?” I tried my damnedest to process this information. What in the world did we have to do with two missing kids in La Sirena?
“Tomorrow afternoon. Wants some favor from you. Probably magick. He wanted us to come today, but I told him you were working a shift later.” His eyes flicked to Mr. Piggy curled up by my feet. He scooped up the sleeping hedgie, toted him across the room, and set him down inside his open suitcase.
“You could’ve called. And if the meeting’s tomorrow, then why did you leave the shoot early?”
In answer, he returned to the bed and lay down on top of me over the covers. The box spring groaned with his added weight, dipping lower when he shimmied to wedge his thighs between mine. He immediately kissed me several times in quick succession before I could protest.
“Do I have disgusting morning breath?” I asked after the assault, slightly breathless, but unable to stop smiling. Damp locks of wavy hair fell around his face. I tucked it behind his ears.
“No worse than your evening breath.” As I laughed, he slipped his arms around me, gathering me close to bury his face in my neck. “God, I missed you,” he murmured near my ear in a voice that was alluringly deep.
Tiny jolts of happiness surged through me. His warm weight resting on me felt so good. He was startlingly firm between my legs, even through the heavy quilt between us. His beautiful halo swirled in my vision, forest-green flecked with bits of golden light. When he held me close like that, our halos mingled around the edges. I wrapped my arm around his broad shoulders, holding up my hand in the middle of the cloudy haze. Gold, silver, and green lazily curled around my fingers like smoke.
“You kinda look like a sexy Jesus,” I whispered, running a slow hand down his back.
“Would you like to reenact the Gospels?” His mustache tickled the sensitive skin behind my ear. “You could be Magdalene and wash my feet with your hair.”
“Pfft. You could wash mine instead.”
“Or you could pretend to be paralytic. I’ll heal you.”
“With what? Your cock?”
He pulled back to look at me, slitted green eyes shining as he grinned. “The night before I left for Mexico, you said it was a gift from God.”
That coaxed a laugh out of me. “Hmm . . . this does sound better than Nurse and Doctor.”
“How thin are the walls here?”
I sighed. “Paper.”
“Your Silence spell?” he asked with hope.
He referred to a handy sigil that, when charged, would create a field of white noise a few feet around a door. It was too small to help here, and not worth the trouble to set up several in a perimeter along the wall. I’d be so tired by the time I finished, I’d be too nauseous to do anything else. I shook my head no.
“Damn. I was looking forward to hearing you wail.”
My jaw dropped indignantly. “Wail?”
“Mmm-hmm. Like a cat giving birth.”
I squeezed one eye shut, considering. “Wow . . . that’s what I call romantic. I guess I should thank you for choosing cat over hippopotamus or some other sort of extra-degrading analogy.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Is that why you came home early?”
“Maybe.”
It totally was. I grinned up at him. �
��For the record, I like it when you sound like a dying horse.”
His hips rocked against mine in one slow but insistent push. “First Jesus, now a stallion? You’ve really got it bad for me, don’t you.”
“I’m not the one who took an early flight home,” I said as I smacked him on the ass with the tips of my fingers.
He retaliated by running his teeth over my neck and making a humorous growl that sounded neither holy nor horse. “Goddamn, it’s cold in your house, Cadybell. You gonna let me inside the sheets?” He hooked a finger over the bedcovers. “Hold on just one minute . . . are you wearing”—he tugged at the quilt, trying to pull it down—“a nightgown?”
Crud. I’d forgotten all about it.
I didn’t own much lingerie. Before Lon, I slept in a T-shirt. After Lon, I mostly slept naked. But this was the first time Jupe had spent the night at my house, and all of my acceptable lounge pants were dirty or at Lon’s. I didn’t want to be surprised in the middle of the night if the kid couldn’t sleep, which is why I was wearing the ugliest nightgown known to human- or demon-kind. The printed design was scattered with cupcakes, hearts, and the word HUGS! repeated on a Pepto-Bismol-pink background. Kar Yee gave it to me in college as a prank. Hard to believe at times, but she really did have a sense of humor.
“Cupcakes?” His nose crinkled and he struggled to yank down the covers while I slapped at his fingers. I couldn’t have been more embarrassed. This was so not helping my ongoing anxiety over our age difference. He knotted his fingers into my sides to tickle me. I jumped and squealed. He redoubled his effort. I tried to buck him off of me, half laughing, half yelling in protest.
Without warning, the door to my bedroom was flung open and slammed against the wall with a loud crack.
A throaty “Hey!” boomed from the open doorway.
Lon and I yelped in surprise.
“Goddammit, Jupe!” Lon bellowed.
“Dad?” Squinting away sleep, he stood in the doorway with his hand over his heart and his shoulders sagging in relief. No shirt, barefoot, army-green drawstring pajama bottoms, his hair a frazzled electric mess. “I thought maybe that mugger from the parking garage had followed us and broken into the house or something.”
