I glanced around, saw half the tables occupied. Nobody looked out of the ordinary, but then again, what did I expect? Horns and tails from folks like me? Disgusted with myself, I turned to Saldana, who took a seat at the bar and waited for the ’tender.
Judging by her freckles, a natural redhead came over after she finished pouring beer for the guys sitting two stools down from us. They could’ve been construction workers in their dusty hats, plaid shirts, and Wrangler jeans.
With her coppery curls caught up in a pigtail, she radiated country cute. “Hi, Jesse. It’s always good to see you.”
A place where everybody knows your name . . . and you’re always glad you came . . . if you’re Jesse Saldana, that is. I wasn’t so sure of my own welcome. I’ve had to move in a hurry too many times to take anything at face value.
“Hey, Jeannie. This is Corine. Make her feel at home, will you?”
“Oh.” The bartender’s scrutiny gained weight and intensity.
I could feel her searching me as if she could tell by sight alone what my gift might be. Despite my intention to be cool, no matter what the night brought, my fingers curled. I didn’t want to show my scars any more than I wanted to hide them from squeamish strangers. If I flashed them, I’d bet she would observe that I hadn’t been born gifted, as if I’d stolen this ability, and I was tired of hearing it. Salt in the wound, so to speak.
I wasn’t a killer, although my mother had warned me of people who shed blood to take other people’s magick. Rapt, I’d listened to her stories the same way other girls my age clung to fairy tales. I just hadn’t known it was possible to give power away.
Not until she died.
The moment passed, but damn if I knew what Jeannie read in me. “What’ll you have?” she asked.
“Corona for me, please.” Saldana glanced at me. “You?”
“How are your margaritas?” I wasn’t the designated driver anymore.
Jeannie grinned. “Cold and strong. Want one?”
I considered for a moment. “Nah, I think I need to shake things up a bit. Can you make a blue diablo?”
Tequila, Blue Curacao, lemon juice, and Rose’s lime juice, served over ice. I wasn’t a heavy drinker, but I liked my tequila. Well, the good stuff anyway—the cheap variety produced a fast drunk and a wicked hangover. For my money, Patrón was best for sipping, followed by Herradura for mixing, but you couldn’t go wrong with Don Julio either.
She cocked her hip and answered with an exaggerated Southern accent. “I can make anything you’d know to order, sweet pea.”
“You feeling blue deviled, sugar?” Saldana’s voice came low near my ear, limned in sympathy.
“You don’t know the half of it.” I spoke beneath the music.
Between Chance and his missing mama, it was a wonder I didn’t stay right here at the bar until I forgot my own name. I didn’t want to talk about it, so I changed the subject. I leaned toward Saldana. “Jeannie. That’s not . . . I mean, she doesn’t—” To my embarrassment she heard me when she returned with his beer.
Her gray eyes twinkled, crinkling at the edges when she smiled. I revised my estimate of her age to north of forty. “Grant wishes? The whole ‘yes, master,’ flick my ponytail thing? Nah, that’s just my name.”
“Right.” I hunched my shoulders, feeling out of my depth.
“Thanks, Jeannie. Is Twila around?” Right then I could’ve kissed Saldana for changing the subject.
The bartender arched a well-plucked brow. “How come you don’t come in here just to see me anymore?”
Jesse came back, “Because your husband threatened to tie me up with my own intestines if I didn’t stop mooning after his woman.”
She beamed. “Twenty years, and Bucky’s still a sweetheart.” I didn’t think that sounded sweet, but I’d already made an ass of myself. “She’s in the office, honey. You can take your drinks on back.” Her gaze returned to me. “I’ll have yours in a minute.”
Jesse headed off, but I waited until she delivered my diablo in a chilled, salted glass. “Nice meeting you,” I said to her.
“Come on.” As he wove through the tables, he beckoned me. “I know she’ll want to meet you.”
Will she? Why?
The fly-spider feeling came over me but I fought the urge to cut and run. Mustering my courage, I followed him.
Two Truths and a Lie
Twila turned out to be a tall, dark-skinned woman with long braids bound back in a golden snood. She didn’t look surprised to see us as she rose and offered a hand to Saldana. Her office offered more faded opulence; the pawnshop owner in me immediately started pricing the furniture.
The heavy cherry desk appeared to be a genuine antique and as such would fetch a hefty price. On a nearby table twin candles burned, filling the room with the smell of incense. The distant throb of bass from the bar shivered into the soles of my feet, rousing the urge to dance, except that’d be socially inappropriate. I fought the urge to tug on my sweater in the face of her penetrating onyx gaze.
“Jesse,” she said in the sort of smoky voice that made me think of sex. God only knew what effect it must have on Saldana. Her accent rang faintly with an island flavor. Haiti, perhaps. “It’s been too long. Who have you brought me?”
I didn’t like her phrasing. Typically, offerings got tied to a rock and left for a hungry dragon. I eyed the door over my shoulder. Dammit, I shouldn’t have worn the wedge heels.
“Hello, Twila.” To my astonishment, Saldana bent and kissed her knuckles in a courtly gesture.
Should I curtsy? I thought it would be pretty hard to pull that off in cargo pants. Figures, the one time I don’t wear a skirt . . . I contented myself with a nod.
“Nice to meet you,” I murmured.
“Sit down, won’t you?” She indicated the leather chairs across from her desk.
Since this was Saldana’s show, I sat back while he performed the introductions.
Twila studied me for a moment before turning to him. “I see why you brought her. Fascinating.” In her eyes I saw she already knew my secrets, all of them, great and small. But how could she? “You smell of fire. I see it licking at your aura.”
I swallowed. Quite uncomfortable to have your secrets laid bare. “Do I?”
“You fear your gift,” she went on. “You fear everything you touch will turn to ash.”
It always does, sooner or later.
“Such a long shadow, falling on you year after year.” I glimpsed distance in her eyes then, as if she saw beyond the office walls. “It shaped what has been and what will be, but you can part your path from it, if you make the right choices.”
Color me cynical. “I suppose you’re going to tell me what those are.”
To my surprise, she shook her head. “Only you can decide your course, child. Seldom have I seen two such divergent futures. One is dark indeed. But this much I can tell you: those who broke your heart so long ago did not act of their own volition. They too were shadow-touched.”
I felt raw, exposed, but I had to ask. “You’re saying something made them want to hurt my mother?”
“Suspicion and jealousy, mere embers fanned to violent life. Yes. If you want the truth, you must return to Kilmer.”
I shuddered. Before, there had remained to me a kernel of doubt. Saldana might have brought me here for some bizarre reason of his own, intending to impress me. There might not be any truth to his claims of a gifted secret society. But my skepticism dissolved. There was no orthodox way she could know about my hometown, and she hadn’t gleaned her knowledge via any ritual I recognized. According to my mother’s books, a spell like that took time.
“How do you know such things?”
With a faint, feral smile, Twila shook her head. “No. You get nothing more for free. If you expect more of me, you must earn it.”
I glanced at Saldana, who sat beside me quiet and impassive. “What do you want?”
She slid a dagger toward me. “Read this and tell me what you see.”
So it would be a sacrifice, after all.
Though it meant another scar, I didn’t hesitate. I wrapped my fingers around the blade, braced for the pain. It came in long, red waves, worse than usual, and by the time I let go, I felt sick. The knife clattered to the desk.
“You used it to kill a man,” I managed. “Stabbed him through the heart.”
Her gaze flickered to the cop beside me, as if wondering whether she could be arrested on that basis alone. “Some men need killing.”
I couldn’t argue with that, as I wrapped my wounded palm around my iced glass. Jesse reached for my hand and I don’t know why I let him take it, possibly because he could feel my nausea and pain. For a moment he merely studied the livid burn.
“I’ll get you some ice,” he said, and left me alone with her.
“You are real.” Her tone reflected a peculiar sort of wonder. “People would kill to make use of you.” That much I knew. “I’ve only met one before you. He came from a family of gifted, though, so his talent didn’t carry the same price.”
“Lucky him,” I muttered. “How come it sucks so much for me?” It was mostly a rhetorical question.
I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to call on this ability effortlessly. No pain. No fire. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than for it to burn itself out, leaving me normal.
She seemed to think I really wanted an answer. “Think of it this way. Your power doesn’t come natural. When you use it, you’re exercising a limb where the transplant didn’t quite take. That’s why it wounds you.”
An unexpected quirk of the spell—I can’t imagine my mother meant for me to suffer. I don’t think she wanted me to feel her pain every time I touched a charged object, but some things even a good witch can’t foresee. I’d probably never know what went wrong in her final moments.
I sighed. “I guess there’s no cure for that.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Saldana returned with a dishcloth full of ice, which I took. He sank down beside me, somehow expectant. Then I realized I should tell her about the sending. Perhaps she could shed some light on things. Quickly I summarized the details.
“Unfortunately, I’m not the one to ask. Like yours, my ability doesn’t rely on ritual.”
“You have the Sight?”
“That’s one word for it. In exchange for certain . . . tribute, the Loa let me see threads of fate. It’s not . . . linear, as you know it, and not entirely reliable. I see the larger patterns in play, forces influencing the balance.” The light glazed her dusky skin, made of her eyes twin shadows that drank the light. “It hasn’t been this bad since the Black Death.”
A chill ran over me, dead man’s hands. Dark times. I’ve said so myself, even lacking the ability to see as Twila did.
“Do you know what’s causing it?”
“I could speculate.” She tilted her head, cast a meaningful look at Saldana. “To find your enemy, you should see Maris, but I don’t think she’s in tonight. She’ll know who could manage such a powerful sending.”