by AnonYMous
She hadn’t actually been in the job long enough to compete. Soon enough, though. “How did you find me, then? Wait, that’s right—you saw the article in the Express. The one with the ridiculous photo of me.”
He put on the blinker. They were getting on the freeway, then. Not a nearby jaunt. She took a long, hard breath.
“I wonder that you have any clients,” he said, “when you speak of your craft with such contempt.”
The remark was mild. But she winced anyway. It was a sore spot, all right. As a kid, she’d bought hook, line, and sinker into her mother’s delusional world. For birthdays, she’d asked for charms and candles and potions, and bragged to her friends at elementary school about the spells her mother could cast. They’d thought it was cool, too, until junior high had struck and everyone had woken up to the fact that her mother was a nutter.
From seventh grade onward, it had been a long, slow fight to free herself from the craziness of her childhood. But look where she was now! Making a living off the same thing she’d spent her entire life trying to escape.
She pushed out a breath. The difference between her and her mother was, she knew it wasn’t real. Magic didn’t exist. Spells didn’t work. The world wasn’t magical. Anyone who claimed otherwise was either selling something or playing make-believe to keep themselves entertained.
“The psychic thing is a temporary gig,” she said. “I needed a job. Luna’s an old friend of my mom’s.” Luna and her mom no longer talked, though. Luna had been cast out of the inner circle a few years back for eating a hamburger. But I was turning anemic, Luna still liked to weep when drunk.
North merged smoothly into the traffic. On the other side of the freeway, the bay glittered in the blazing sun. The sky was remarkably, almost painfully clear; in the distance, the skyline of San Francisco, and the rust-colored arcs of the Golden Gate, seemed artificially crisp. “Then what’s your main gig?” he asked.
“I’m a grad student.” Was and will be, she silently amended.
“Oh? What do you study?”
“History.”
“One of my particular interests as well,” he said.
Great. She braced herself for an homage to Guns, Germs and Steel. Dudes loved Jared Diamond. “Yeah? What do you like about it?”
“‘Like’ is not, perhaps, the right word,” he said mildly. “History is a tradecraft, is it not? He who speaks the history, shapes the history.”
“Very postmodern of you.”
North cracked his window. The breeze ruffled his white-blond hair, and carried over the scent of him—that subtle trace of almost-vanilla cologne, inappropriately delicious.
“I take it you don’t fancy yourself a postmodernist,” he said.
“I guess I do,” she said. “I mean, I’m planning to do a historical analysis of approaches to mental illness. But my interest mainly lies in the ways in which ideas about mental illness effectively produce our understandings of what’s ‘normal.’”
That line usually shut people up. Instead, he glanced over, his interest plain. “And where does your sympathy lie?”
“What?” She didn’t understand.
“With the normal, or the abnormal?”
What a weird question. “I don’t think historians make value judgments like that.”
He laughed. Did he think she was joking? “Is that what draws you to history? The suspension of value judgments?”
She felt unaccountably ruffled. Something in his attitude seemed vaguely condescending, like an adult teasing a child. “I like history because there’s no room for disappointment in it. All the surprises already happened. Where are we going?” Because they had passed the Point Richmond exit, which meant he was heading for the bridge into Marin county.
“Marin,” he said.
“Obviously. Where in Marin?”
“A private residence.”
She suddenly had a very bad feeling. If she’d believed in such things, she would have called it a premonition. “Whose private residence?”
At last, he gave her a full, genuine smile, and the effect was so glorious, so disorientingly gorgeous, that it took a moment for his answer to register.
“Your mother’s,” he said.
*
Damn it. That had slipped out.
He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. It was not in his nature to let things ‘slip out.’ But there was something very peculiar about this woman. So far, her effect was toxic—making him sloppy, careless, unrecognizable to himself.
“My mother,” she said in a low, uneven voice. “You know my mother?”
Deception would not serve now. “We haven’t met. But I know of her.”
She slammed her fist into her door. She was not a particularly tall or solidly built woman, but she could apparently muster a fine amount of force when desired. “Get off. This next exit. As soon as we’re off the bridge.”
Here, too, was an oddity: her voice shook. Her hands made fists. She sat ramrod straight, as though channeling a great emotion that wracked her bones.
But the air between them remained flat and blank. Her mind was veiled from him.
In that cramped little shop, he had noticed the same: a peculiar silence where human thoughts usually swarmed. But he had put it down to a fine hexing. Kate Marsh had no talent, but perhaps her employer did. These little spells sometimes proved surprisingly durable.
Now, however, he was forced to consider other possibilities—more intriguing, but also irritating in regard to the complications they might pose.
“You are estranged from your mother,” he said. “I understand that. I don’t ask you to speak with her, only to accompany—”
“You understand that, do you?” She rounded on him, and the blessed nullness of the space between them allowed him his first clear view in centuries of what human anger did to a face.
Rosy cheeks.
Hazel eyes aglitter with fierce but inaccessible emotion.
Full, pink lips twisted in scorn.
Despite the garish makeup and cartoonish dress, she was an attractive woman. A quiet but complex kind of beauty, built more from the delicate bones of her face than the outward flourishes, the dark loose curls of her long hair and the flash of her eyes.
“Why are you smiling?” she snapped. “Do you think this is some kind of joke?”
No. But he’d forgotten how interesting humans could be, when their tumultuous inner lives did not make them an instant guarantee of a migraine.
She reached into her purse, pulled out her little phone. “I’m calling 911,” she spat. “You’re kidnapping me!”
He hadn’t wanted to do this. He reached over, caught her hand, and willed her to be calm.
She twisted out of his grip like a snake. “Let go of me! If you touch me again—”
So she was immune to the lesser arts. This did grow interesting.
“Fine,” he said, and put on his blinker. The ticking sound appeared to relax her. Her shoulders loosened; she released a long, soft breath.
Astonishing, how well he remembered the old guides to human emotion. How conspicuously they telegraphed their sentiments with their bodies as well as their minds.
He pulled up at the first opportunity. A convenience store, the parking lot crowded. She threw open the door and fled inside.
He followed her. She was pacing by a rack of potato chips, her phone already at her ear. A woman spoke on the other end, voice tinny but distinct to his more-than-human ears.
“That’s crazy, Kate. Are you okay, are you safe? I can be there in half an hour—”
“Yes. I’ll be waiting.” Kate Marsh’s jaw squared as she turned and discovered him watching. “And maybe the police will be, too,” she said pointedly, and stabbed the disconnect button. “You should go,” she told him. “Unless you want to be arrested. And I’m guessing you probably have a lot you want to keep from the police.”
He opened his mouth, then hesitated. In truth, it had been a very long time since he’d been forced
to reason with one of her kind. And the subtle, indirect tactics of his own people—the poetic flourishes and leisurely digressions, the elaborate courtesies as one circled toward one’s point—they would be lost on her. He remembered that much.
“Harmony,” he began, and she winced. “Kate,” he corrected himself. Harmony was her birth name, but he gathered that ‘Kate’ was the name she preferred. “The nature of our bargain has not altered. Simply because the object of persuasion is the one who gave birth to you—”
“Object of persuasion?” She stepped forward, face red, her shoulders knocking against rows of chips. “Look here, dickbag. I don’t know how you found me, or how long you’ve been spying on me—”
“Spying?” He laughed before he could stop himself. “My time is more valuable than that.”
“Shut up,” she bit out. “You’re going to deny it? How else would you know who my mother—”
“The internet,” he said. “Her Facebook is public. She posted a link to the newspaper article.”
She slumped against the Fritos stand. Someone brushed past him, giving him a violent start.
Good gods. He looked around the store, registering for the first time the hive of activity in which they stood. A mother waited with her two cross children outside the bathroom. Four people queued to purchase sodas and snacks. A man not three paces away was cursing at the ATM machine.
And he’d felt none of it.
In his brain, where all these humans’ emotions should be hammering and pinwheeling, he felt . . .
Peace.
When he looked back at Kate Marsh, something in his expression made her take a quick step away from him. He took a deep swift breath, made himself produce his blandest smile.
“She lives in a gated compound,” he said. “I have—”
“She lives in a cult.”
He pushed onward. “I have no intention of harming her, but I must speak with her. I could not think of a better way to ensure entry than to bring her daughter with me.”
That was the truth.
But he was finding more reasons by the minute to keep this woman nearby.
“You lied to me,” said Kate. “I would never, never have come with you if—”
“No?” He paused. “Not even for fifty thousand dollars?”
She blinked very rapidly. A pulse beat in the hollow of her throat. She had a long, lovely throat, did Kate Marsh. A certain limber elegance in the way she held herself, unconsciously regal. Stripped of the abomination she wore, given a dress worthy of her, she would not have looked out of place at Court.
Hearing himself, he took a step away from her. A toxin, indeed. His thoughts did not feel like his own.
He had never taken that kind of interest in a human before.
Then again, he had never been able to truly see one. It was an effect of her presence—it must be—that the assault of the mundane world suddenly had quieted.
“You could have been honest,” she said very quietly. “I don’t like . . .” She reached up to twist a lock of her chestnut hair. “I don’t like being lied to. I can’t trust you.”
“Nor should you,” he said bluntly. “I am a stranger, and deserve nothing of your faith. But at least you now know why I am willing to pay you so well. No one else can ensure me an audience with your mother.”
“No, because she’s crazy,” she said heatedly. “Do you even know what she thinks she’s doing up in that compound? She—” She cut herself off, her mouth contorting in disgust. “Oh, whatever. Screw this!” She turned on her heel and stalked out.
He followed her into the bright sunshine. The heat had deepened, growing oppressive and heavy. A killing heat, in this ecosystem designed for cool wet fogs. Kate Marsh’s mother was misusing the orb, and the Earth was paying the price.
Until he had it in his possession again, he could not let Kate walk away.
She was stalking across the pavement, her Birkenstocks slapping and sucking at the hot tar. With her peculiar immunity to Will, he was going to have to use physical force. The prospect made him foul-tempered. It was a clumsy, particularly human inelegance, a violation of his own principles as well as the Law. Despite the necessity of the circumstances, he knew he would regret it bitterly.
She stopped at the passenger door of his car, turned back to meet his eyes.
“Well?” she snapped. “Let’s get this over with.”
He hesitated, baffled. Did this mean . . .?
She stabbed at her phone, then lifted it to her ear. “I’m fine,” she said to the other woman on the line. “False alarm. No, I promise. No, I mean it. Yes—I know. I’ll text you every hour. Yes, for sure.” Lowering the phone, she glared at him. “Well? Unlock the doors. Or are we walking from here?”
Only once they were back on the freeway did he allow himself cautiously to ask, “What changed your mind?”
Her laugh sounded bitter. “What do you think?”
The money, of course. She had mentioned a debt of some kind. Addiction? If so, she did not carry the usual reek of misery. “What is the precise nature of this debt you carry?”
“‘What is the precise nature of this debt,’” she mimicked. “God, you don’t even talk normally. Where are you from, the Middle Ages? It’s student debt. An MA in psychology costs fifty grand, did you know that? Much good it did my mother. Turns out I lack the talent for curing nutcases.”
“You think your mother is a . . . nutcase?”
Her look seemed to sear. “No,” she said, her sarcasm withering. “No, I think she’s totally sane. I think she really does run a massive coven up here in the hills of Marin, that they cast spells that save the planet, and she’s the greatest eco-witch in the history of witchdom.” She scoffed. “What? What’s that look on your face? You must know what a lunatic she is. You want to speak to her so bad, you must have some idea about her. She runs a cult!” She paused. “Why do you want to speak to her, anyway? You said you were trying to find something—you think she took it?”
He nodded. “Six days ago.” And the next day, the temperature had spiked from the sixties into the nineties. Today, it was forecasted to hit one hundred, with winds of up to forty miles per hour. Five counties in the area had issued wildfire warnings.
“Okay, so what is it?” she asked.
“An antique.”
“What kind of antique?”
“A family heirloom, which rightfully belongs to my people.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Look, asshole. For all the names I could call my mother, thief isn’t one of them.”
“It was auctioned by mistake,” he said. “She did not steal it.”
“Oh.” She seemed briefly pacified. “Are you sure she’s the one who bought it?”
“Yes. And owning it will not be healthy for her.”
She snorted. “What, is it radioactive?”
“It’s a witching orb.”
Her face collapsed. Then she sank back into her seat. “Okay,” she muttered. “Pangaea probably was the buyer.”
Chapter 4
The lyrics to some annoying seventies song were bouncing through Kate’s brain. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave . . . And lo, here she was, back in the same spot she’d vowed never again to visit.
It being a weekday, the rough wooden gates to the compound stood locked. When she got out to punch in the code, North shut off the car. Random bars of birdsong punctuated the sough of the wind through the trees. In the mid-morning tranquility, the shrill beeps of the electronic keypad sounded shockingly loud.
Some peculiar emotion bolted through her when the keypad blared a staccato error noise. A weird mix of disappointment and hurt. “They changed the code on me.”
Well, good! She didn’t need the code.
North had been leaning against the side of the car, but now he eased himself straight—a leisurely movement that somehow seemed menacing. Like a giant cat, bestirring himself idly to take note of a future opportunity for the kill. “So cal
l the main gate.”
Her fingers hesitated on the keypad. His eyes were hidden behind opaque sunglasses, but the granite angle of his jaw, the cold firmness of his full lips and the breadth of his shoulders in that expensive suit, conjured nothing so much as Central Casting’s stereotype of a contract killer.
He knew a little too much about Hidden Springs, didn’t he? He knew there was another gate, a manned gate, inside the compound.
The madrone trees towering behind him should have put him into perspective. Instead, he seemed to loom right along with them.
“What if my mother won’t give you back this orb?” She had gone no-contact with her mother. But she still loved her. She didn’t want her hurt. “What’ll you do then?”
“The orb is useless to her,” he said. “And I mean to make a handsome offer for it.”
That kind of logic—the logic of utility and profit—rarely worked on Pangaea Marsh. “But if she still won’t sell it?”
He blew out a breath. “Then I suppose I’ll have to take her to court. The orb was sold by mistake.”
So he believed in the legal system. That seemed reassuring, very unlike a contract killer.
She hit the pound button. A dial tone crackled, then began to ring.
Someone picked up on the other end. “Yes?” came a bright, cheerful voice.
She swallowed hard. It had been a while since she’d talked to anyone here—eighteen months, to be precise. “Is that Serena?”
A brief, surprised silence. Then, cautiously, “Harmony? Is that . . .” Kate could hear Serena lose faith in the possibility. “I’m sorry, who is this?”
“No, it’s really me,” she said.
“Holy—Someone will be right there!”
That enthusiastic leap in Aunt Serena’s voice was hard to take. She would think that this visit meant something—a rapprochement, the start of a new chapter.
Nope, Kate imagined herself saying flatly. This is what happens when you take on a shitload of debt, and you’ll do anything to pay it off.
North had settled back against the car. The wind ruffled his pale hair as he turned, giving her a view of his sickeningly perfect profile as he surveyed the area.
