“It was a wedding. There was a church, some vows, a wedding dinner and some dancing. I understand that’s typical of weddings.”
“You’ve never been to a wedding before?” he asked surprised.
“No. My mom was my only family. I’ve seen them on TV and in movies, but I can hardly trust that to be stereotypical. TV tends to exaggerate.”
“I’ve noticed. And Rourke was there?”
“Yeah. LeBron invited her, I can imagine only out of some strange sense of duty. She was behaving herself and holding up a wall when I left.”
“That sounds like Sam,” he chuckled softly. “She can be very sentimental, probably why she agreed to go.”
“I’ll have to take your word on that. I can’t imagine Rourke with a soft side.”
“She can be incredibly soft and gentle,” he said, his eyes glazing as he rooted about deep in his memories. “But she changed, as all people do. Some of that was my fault I guess.” Rourke and Hamilton were lovers in the past. I stared at him as he shook his head, clearing away the fog of memory.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you about you and her.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Not that long if you both hurt so much still.” He looked at me in denial that the breakup had hurt him at all. For all Hamilton’s bravado, I knew he wasn’t the asshole he made himself out to be. I crossed my arms over my chest. My look told him I didn’t buy it. He sighed.
“She was a young detective, made me chase her for a year before she would agree to have coffee with me. Coffee turned into dinner. Later dinner became much more. She liked to keep control and she couldn’t control me, couldn’t control how I made her feel. So it started to go south. I’m kind of a private man and she started sticking her nose into places it didn’t belong. Trying to rake up things from my past that are best left alone. It…” he took a deep breath, “hurt me, so I hurt her and that’s what our relationship devolved into. One giant pissing contest.”
“I did notice that part.”
“The sex was always great though.” I doubled over a little and dry heaved.
“Oh I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.” He laughed a loud, head back, deep-throated chuckle. A warm hand touched my arm and I turned to look into DJ’s face. He looked concerned.
“Are you alright Cassandra?” I looked down at my body. I was clutching my stomach in pain.
“I’m perfectly fine,” I said with a slightly annoyed voice, straightening up to my full height. I stared at his hand, waiting for him to remove it. Hamilton looked DJ up and down and DJ returned the visual assessment. Hamilton turned his eyes back to me.
“This your new man?”
DJ said yes as I said no. I glared at the werewolf, letting a confused silence fall and warned him not to speak with my finger.
“No,” I clarified to Hamilton and turned on DJ. “I thought I told you to go.”
“And still I say how would you get back without me?”
“I’ll learn to fly,” I growled at him. It sounded childish, but it was possible that I might learn. Virginia said so. Virginia Toogood, once my mentor, I was not speaking to now. I was very angry at her for keeping secrets from me about what I am, what my mother was.
DJ crossed his arms over his chest and gave me a disapproving look.
“Stop being an ass and get in my car. It’s not exactly warm out here and you didn’t bring a coat.” I opened my mouth to argue, and then closed it again. He saw me brokering resistance one arm stretched out and pointing where he’d parked the jeep. Trying to speak again, I looked at Hamilton. Before I knew it, I was walking towards the jeep with no idea why I was obeying. Later, I reasoned I didn’t relish walking home in that dress as the night wore on and it got colder. The jeep unlocked, I pulled the door open and scrambled into the seat. I ignored DJ’s exchanged pleasantries with Hamilton before joining me. I put the seat belt on and stared at the dashboard completely enraged, at DJ and myself. I didn’t like his high handed treatment and worse, that I let him order me around. I got in the car with him again, even though I’d sworn earlier I wouldn’t. DJ saw the tense line of my shoulder and the furrow of my brow, and let the silence hang in the air. He just drove and let me brood.
I felt better when we got back to town, knowing the drive would soon be over. When he pulled up to the curb outside my building, I couldn’t get out of my seatbelt fast enough. I would say goodbye and thank him for the lift when I was safely on the pavement. I heard a click and the pin shot down as I reached for the door. I tried pulling it up but it wouldn’t go. Furious again, I turned to DJ.
“You let me out of this car right now.”
“With all due respect, no, no I won’t. I want to talk to you, and if this is the only way to get you to sit still and listen, so be it.” I crossed my arms over my chest and fell back against the seat, sullen. I know that was childish, but he locked me in. He clearly started it.
“Cassandra, I like you. In fact I more than like you. I thought you liked me too.” I sighed, giving in and trying to be an adult. I turned to face him and uncrossed my arms.
“I did like you. I still do, but you’re making it awfully hard on me. You keep pushing for something from me that I don’t want.” He nodded, understanding, but kept on.
“We have a good time together once you relax. You’re attracted to me. I’ve felt you react to me. We’d be really good together. I don’t understand why you won’t consider it.”
“Because that’s not what I want.”
“I don’t think you know what you want,” he said a little tersely, gripping the wheel. It was his turn to be sullen.
“Maybe I don’t, and maybe I will change my mind,” I said, knowing how unlikely that was. I was a girl who made a decision and stuck to it.
“But you keep pushing yourself at me, putting yourself in my way every chance you get and it’s not an attractive quality.” In fact it was bloody irritating, but I was trying once again to be nice and let him down gently.
“You like your space, I get that, but you know you can count on me. You must know that or you wouldn’t have called me that time.”
DJ was referring to when Trinket, my assistant slash housekeeper – when I first met her – broke the lock on my door to enter my apartment. I’d called DJ because at the time, I had been mad at Simian who was the only other man I knew who had do it yourself skills.
“Maybe if we just had sex,” he said. I gaped at him. He saw the look on my face and closed his mouth, cutting off what he was going to follow with.
“No. I can’t do that.” It wasn’t that the idea of having sex with DJ hadn’t crossed my mind before. It had, but it just wasn’t a good idea. I wasn’t a one night stand kind of girl, and DJ would see that as a commitment because he wasn’t a one night stand kind of person either. There was also a third reason. I promised Aram that I wouldn’t have sex with anyone but him until I broke up with him officially. I loved him, but I put our relationship on hold while I found myself. He asked that of me and I agreed. Though at the time, I’d not been smart enough to exact the same promise from him. He could be having a merry old time while I lived like a nun. I shook that image out of my head in a hurry.
All my energy left me and I felt deflated, like a balloon. I was just tired.
“Please let me out of the car now.” My voice was very calm and quiet, but I knew he had no problem hearing me with his werewolf senses. I heard the click as the pins shot up again. I climbed out of the car and held the door open for a minute.
“Thank you for driving me home. Goodnight.” He gave a cursory nod, in deep thought himself. I shut the door firmly on both the car and that conversation. From the steps, I watched as he drove away before I headed into the building and my office. Trinket greeted me with a pile of mail.
“How was the wedding?”
“It was very,” I looked down at my dress, “yellow.”
Trinket smiled and it always amazed me how quickly the little co
gs moved to create her facial features. Trinket was a clockwork doll, a mix of alchemy, engineering and magic. Her personality was operated by a soul trapped inside by a spell, attached to a power source that could run out at any moment in the next five to six years. She picked up all the day shifts at Grimoires and worked for me at night to pay for her upcoming trip.
She manned the phone in the office so that I didn’t have to. This allowed me to get much more sleep than I had been, which I enjoyed, and if anything interesting came up she could just take the elevator upstairs and wake me. I flipped through the mail, an assortment of bills, a check for the retrieval of a missing cat which would pay those bills and a buff colored envelope. I examined it and put the rest down on my desk. The stationery was expensive, and when I flipped it over, a golden orange pumpkin grinned at me obscenely. I pulled up the flap and pulled out a stiff piece of card with a cartoon wolf man along one side howling at an embossed moon on the opposite side.
“What is it?” asked Trinket, trying to peer around my elbow to see what I was holding. She wasn’t tall enough to look over my shoulder.
“I’ve been invited to the werewolf community’s annual Halloween party.”
You’d think because of the traditional concepts of Halloween – candy and costumes – that a preternatural group like the werewolves would shun it. Halloween has become an excuse to wear slutty costumes and consume massive amounts of candy, rather than a festival of the dead where the veil between worlds is at its thinnest and spirits have the most power all year. Mediums and full on ectomancers hole-up on all hallows eve to save themselves some grief. I thought the vampires, faced with the prospect of thousands of fake fangs and Dracula impressions, hole-up as well, but they open as normal and tolerate the few who, in the spirit of the holiday, come dressed in unflattering costumes.
The werewolves, however, hold a full-blown Halloween party every year by invite only. Simian told me about it once, but I never warranted an invite before. The card was signed by Leroy Craven, the local pack leader. They referred to him as king because of that Shangri-Las song Leader of the pack. Under the elaborately styled signature was a small note in brackets, costumes are mandatory. Back when I thought I was a witch, I dispensed with the whole costume wearing, hunkered down to watch a selection of horror movies, and avoided the streets. I didn’t want to see people with fake warts, green skin or worse, people who drew lightning bolts on their foreheads with red sharpies.
“You should go. It might be fun,” said Trinket with definite encouragement in her voice. Trinket tends to be a mother hen. She always wants me to go out, meet new people, and try new things.
“I don’t know.” On one hand, it would be nice to spend my first Halloween as a preternatural creature with others of a similar mindset. On the other hand, I was comfortable with my whole hide and watch movies routine. Plus, I already bought the popcorn. “I’ll think about it. Right now I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Chapter Three
My alarm went off an hour before sun up so that I could put my locket back on. I put it in its little niche between recharging crystals when I got in so it would have enough energy to go for another three days if I needed it to. I collapsed back into bed when it was around my neck and promptly fell into a deep sleep.
I woke again much later when peels of sunlight shimmered across my face. The bedside clock read 10:00 a.m. I got up, showered, and then bounced around my kitchen wearing an over-sized concert t-shirt over my underwear while my stereo filled the apartment with power ballads.
Breakfast was reheated pizza from a box in the fridge because, aside from a couple of bottles of beer and some milk that looked iffy, that was all there was. Trinket wrote on the wall calendar that she’d get groceries after her shift at Grimoires, and reminded me not to bring home take-out. She hated when I did that without telling her, or if I missed meals and didn’t call. She’d huff and puff – despite a lack of needing to breath –while packing meals in Tupperware to reheat another night, mumbling that she didn’t cook for herself. She was trying to get me to eat better. Her reasoning being that I was going to live a lot longer and needed to take better care of myself. She also claimed that the take-outs would make me fat. I had to draw the line when she wanted me to weigh in once a week. She took taking care of me way too seriously, especially as I didn’t ask her to. I have been taking care of myself for years. I took my pizza and sat Indian style on my bed, tapping my foot to the music while reaching under the edge of my bed for my laptop. I switched it on and chewed my cheesy, day old treat while waiting for it to start up, and then even longer for the internet to connect.
I still use dial up. After blowing up three wireless routers within the space of a month, I gave up trying to get a decent connection. Magic plus wireless technology equaled kablooie.
I blankly stared at my screen for a long moment. How should I begin a search for a symbol? I wished there was a search engine you could draw things into and search for a page with something that matched. I thought about the apple from the table. Putting apple into a search engine would bring up either fruit or iPods. I associated the apple at the scene with Eve, so I typed that in. The top entry I got was eveonline, a MMORG – Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. Geek Fodder, not what I wanted. The next two were Wikipedia articles about rapper Eve Jeffers and the biblical eve, the one I was looking for. I clicked the link.
I never liked the story of Adam and Eve, personally. All the blame lay on the woman for the fall from the Garden of Eden. If god had been really smart, he wouldn’t have put such a tree in the garden to start with. If I’d wanted them ignorant and compliant I’d have put it elsewhere. He created temptation in the first place and then scorned them for not resisting it. Temptation is very subjective. It is easy to resist something as long as you don’t have to walk past it every day. Like the man in his grand house who monitored his intake very carefully. Day to day he could control himself because he didn’t allow extravagances in the house, but put a feast before him.
I scanned the page for useful words to spark something off. Temptation is used a lot, and always in a negative connotation. No one is tempted into to doing something good. Then I saw the word sin.
I flashed back to my religious education when I was a teenager and being told by a nun what sin is. Religious education is mandatory in British schools. The nun hadn’t liked me one bit and she kept me behind to go into more detail. I thought there were seven really bad ones I was told to watch out for. I typed in seven sins. The screen chirped at me. Did you mean the seven deadly sins? If they were truly deadly that could be a start. I clicked the link to a page.
The seven deadly sins, also called the cardinal vices or cardinal sins, are a classification of objectionable vices that have been used since early Christian times to educate and instruct fallen humanity’s tendency to sin. The versions of these sins are wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony.
Gluttony? Gluttony had to do with food, I was sure of it. I clicked the link embedded in the text. Gluttony, derived from the Latin gluttire, meaning to gulp down or swallow, over indulgence and over consumption of food and drink to the point of extravagance or waste. It showed a wood carving of a man in front of a large banquet table guzzling, growing fat while keeping a small child from trying to get some of the food. It also said that Gluttony was linked to the pig and the color orange.
There wasn’t any specific symbol that went along with it though, even if the one I had seen glowed orange. I turned to the bedside table and rummaged in the drawer for a pen and piece of paper. I rested the pad on my knee and drew the symbol out from memory. It looked like a wonky J with two lines across it and a stick man wearing parachute pants while holding a hockey stick across his body. If it was a magical symbol, I’d never seen it before, but there was some familiarity to it that told me I should know it. At least some part of my brain said I should know it. I picked up the phone thinking of who I could ask. I began calling
Virginia but stopped mid dial while I thought about that. After a while, the automated phone voice said the number I dialed had not been recognized, so I hung up. My natural instinct was always to call Virginia. She was my mentor. She taught me control of my magic, magical lore, and took me through some of her case files from when she’d been an enforcer. It’s always a blow when your mentor, your yoda, lets you down. Virginia had let me down in the worst way. She thought she was protecting me by keeping me ignorant of myself, but events had set off a chain reaction. Instead of helping me keep my head above water, she watched me drown. She let me be afraid. I hadn’t seen her a lot since I discovered how much she really kept from me. I saw her once when I borrowed some books and again when I returned them. Neither time had our conversations ended well. I wanted full disclosure and an apology. She still wanted me to drop the subject and pretend like nothing was wrong. Calling her was not an idea that would end well. After staring into space for a minute, I shut down the computer and went out. Since I wore my locket, I’d be on the alternate side with Grimoires and could gather information there. Truth didn’t mind seeing me – a misnomer as she was born blind – because I always brought her the most interesting puzzles.
I pulled on some skinny fit black jeans under the t-shirt and donned my favorite pair of low-heeled boots. I rummaged in my wardrobe, pulling out my winter coat as it was getting progressively cooler and wrapped up in it. Stuffing my drawing into my pocket, I took the elevator down, giving it a customary kick at the fourth floor. Once in the foyer, I checked my office door to make sure Trinket locked it before she went to her day job, and then to the mailbox. There was only a heavy, plain, long, brown envelope inside. There was no address on it so I figured someone hand delivered it to my mailbox. I snuck my nail under the seal, ripping it open and tipping the contents into my hand. A small square of paper fluttered to the ground. I looked at what was in my hand, a small brass key like those found in an antique wardrobe or vanity table to lock the drawers. I didn’t own anything that it would fit. I bent down and picked up the piece of paper trapped with the toe of my boot from blowing away. The small, neat italic writing was painfully familiar to me. My stalker was back.
Deadly Sin (Cassandra Farbanks) Page 4
