by R. L. King
He looks at his claw-free hands and swallows hard. “Yeah…okay…no claws. That musta been it…”
I back off, next to Twyla. “Can you look at his aura?” I whisper, wondering if she’s far enough from Nick to make it work.
“Already did.” She still sounds freaked out, but not quite as much as before. “He’s agitated, but I don’t see anything else concerning. What the hell just happened? Because there definitely were—”
“Shh,” I caution, nodding toward the other guy. To him, I say louder, “Are you sure you’re okay? Can you get back where you need to be?”
“Uh…yeah. I can call somebody, I guess. But…somethin’ happened here. Should I call the cops?”
“I don’t think it’ll do much good,” Nick says.
“Yeah,” I agree. “What will you say? ‘I had a bad dream and woke up somewhere else?’ I guess they could go after the bar, but—” I shrug as if to say, do you really think it’ll get you anywhere?
He considers, then nods reluctantly. “Yeah. Okay. I have got no fuckin’ idea what happened, but maybe I just need to get myself home and have a good long sleep. And never go back to that bar again. You sure you guys aren’t hurt?”
“We’re fine,” Nick says. “Take care of yourself, man.”
“Yeah…” He wanders off, shaking his head.
“That guy is gonna need some serious therapy,” Nick says when he’s gone.
Twyla doesn’t look like she’s recovered much from whatever happened. “What…did you two do?” she demands, looking between us. “What happened to me? I don’t care what you said to that guy—we had claws. Both of us did. And that other woman. Bron—we were trying to kill you. I remember that. All I could think of was ripping you open and…and…” She sags back onto the bench the guy had just vacated. “…I wanted to eat you. Both of you.” Burying her face in her hands, she begins to sob.
I sit next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. It’s hard, because I’m pretty much as freaked out as she is, but comforting her settles me down some. “We should go,” I say. “I think we need to talk.”
“Yeah…but…how did you stop us? You didn’t do any magic, Bron. I can see it in your aura. You—” She looks up and catches sight of Nick standing behind me. “Wait…was it you?”
“Uh…mmmaybe…” Nick drawls uncertainly. “Jury’s still out on that one.”
“You’re a—” She shoots a sharp look at me. “Wait. You said before he was ‘unusual.’ Is that what you meant?”
I sigh. “Twy, we’ve got a lot to talk about. I don’t know about you, but I want to get the hell out of here before anybody else comes after us. Is that okay?”
“Yeah.” She nods emphatically and hauls herself up. “But I want him to come with us.” She points at Nick. “I want to know how he did that.”
I don’t like the idea. My evening has just gotten about a hundred times more complicated, and Nick will do nothing but add a couple more dimensions of crazy to the whole thing. “Look—I want to know what you were going to tell me. And I don’t think—”
She shakes her head, just as emphatically. “He’s coming. You want my story, I want yours. It’s only fair.” Shuddering, she adds, “Bron, I’m still remembering how I wanted to sink my teeth into your guts and chow down. I feel like I’m gonna puke. I want to know what happened to me, and how you guys got rid of it.”
I can see there’s no arguing with her—and besides, Nick’s got the only car. “Fine. Let’s go somewhere and talk. Do you have any idea where your rental car is?”
“Last I knew, it was back at the meeting today.” Her eyes get big. “That’s the last thing I remember. We had the meeting, and then Mr. DeVries took me to lunch. Wait! I just realized something! How did you guys know to come here—wherever here is?”
I’d forgotten about that little detail. “You texted me. Said you wanted to meet here before dinner.” I pull out my phone and show her the text.
“No I didn’t,” she protests, narrowing her eyes indignantly. “I don’t write like that!” Suddenly she looks scared. “Oh, no—where’s my bag? Where’s my phone?”
I look at Nick. “Well, I see now what must have happened. Somebody got hold of her phone during the time she can’t remember.”
“Or else maybe they forced her to send the text?” he suggests. “Can you guys do that?”
“There are ways, yeah.” I sigh.
“Oh, no…” Twyla moans again.
“We need to find your car. Maybe there’s something there that might give us a clue about what happened.”
“We’ll go look for it after dinner,” Nick says. “If it’s there, I’ll drop you two off and Bron can drive you back to her place.”
I shoot him a sharp glance, not sure whether I’m glad or annoyed that he’s taking charge. But either way, I definitely don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to. I wave Twyla ahead of me—I still want to keep an eye on her—and we head back out to Nick’s car.
The parking lot looks so normal after what just happened. It’s not every day your old friend goes all Zombie Apocalypse on you and tries to eat you, but you’d never know it by the cars rolling by.
Twyla’s quiet in the back seat as I direct Nick to the restaurant a few blocks away. She seems to have even more on her mind than usual, so I leave her alone except to check her every couple minutes to make sure she’s not switching back to Walking Dead mode. When we arrive at Casa Rosita, she follows us inside, ignoring the cheerful Mexican music and the crowd of people at the bar. It’s almost as if she still doesn’t quite know where she is. I exchange worried glances with Nick.
I ask the hostess for the most private table they have, and she leads us back through the main dining room into a smaller one with semi-enclosed booths. There are still a lot of people back here, but the combination of the music, laughter from a pair of large parties, and the booth’s wooden structure means nobody will hear us talking even if we shout.
I wait until the server comes by to drop off chips and salsa and take our drink orders before turning to Twyla, who’s still looking shell-shocked.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s talk about this, okay?” I force myself to keep my voice gentle—as much as this whole business is freaking me out, it must be even worse for her.
She picks up a chip and stares at it for several seconds before dunking it in the salsa and thoughtfully chewing. Then she rubs her forehead, shoving her long, black hair back.
“Why don’t you tell us the last thing you remember?” Nick prompts. “You said you had lunch with the producer guy, right?”
“Yeah.” She nods without looking up. “Mr. DeVries.”
“He’s the one you had the meeting with?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Anybody else?”
She shakes her head. “No, it was just him.”
“Do you remember the meeting?”
“Yeah. We talked about some fundraising spots for an hour or so. After that, he invited me to lunch.”
Something about her tone catches my attention. “Is that normal, for somebody like that to invite you to lunch?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m not exactly experienced with this kind of thing.” She still seems out of it, like she’s answering by rote. I don’t blame her—I’d be pretty upset if that happened to me. Hell, I am upset.
“Twy…” I say carefully, “Was there anything unusual about Mr. DeVries? Did he do anything you didn’t expect?”
Her cheeks flush a little, and she suddenly becomes very interested in eating more chips and salsa.
I tilt my head. “Did you two do more than just have lunch?”
She doesn’t answer.
Nick’s giving me a questioning look, but I ignore him. “Come on—it’s important. Did you?”
“So what if we did?” she snaps. “It’s none of your business.”
“Twy, you just tried to eat me tonight. That kind of makes this whole thing my business. Now, unless
you want me to give Nana a call and catch her up on everything that’s happened—”
I hate to go with the nuclear option right away—it’s not exactly fair—but right now I don’t give a damn about anything but getting this story out of her. If that means I have to go there, I’ll go there.
It works, too, just like I knew it would. Her expression goes from sullen to scared and she drops her chip. “No!” she says quickly, raising her hands. “Bron, you can’t tell Nana.”
“Well, then, tell me. Did you and Mr. DeVries have a little extracurricular activity before you went to lunch? Or after?”
I don’t need to see her aura to watch her deflate. “Yeah, we did. Okay? Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“I don’t know what I want to hear, Twy. Except to figure out what the hell happened to you, and why you ended up attacking us. Now come on—tell us the whole story. Everything you remember. Don’t leave anything out.”
Nick, prudently, remains silent. He munches chips, sips his drink, and stays in the background.
Twyla bows her head. “Yeah. Okay. I met with Mr. DeVries. We did talk about the production. Everything was going really well. He seemed receptive to my ideas, and he had some of his own. He said he felt he could work with me and the family to make something we could be proud of.”
“Okay, so far so good. But what about the rest?”
She shrugs. “I…felt something between us as we were working together. An attraction, okay? He was older, but he was hot. When he suggested going to lunch, I took him up on it right away. And when he brought up going somewhere afterward…”
I sigh. I’ve never judged her for sleeping around—it’s her life, and she can do whatever she wants. It never affected our friendship, as long as she didn’t try to get me to join in. But more than once I’d been frustrated when I had to clean up after the latest disastrous breakup she dropped in my lap, spending days moping over it before she met somebody else and started the whole cycle over again. Twyla’s one of the smartest women I know, but when it comes to men, she has all the sense and discretion of a toddler in a toy shop.
“Okay,” I say, keeping my tone even. “So you went somewhere. Where did you go?”
“To a hotel. A nice one,” she adds quickly. “Not a dump. They had a nice bar. We had a couple of drinks when we got there, then went upstairs.”
“Then what?” I hold up my hand. “I don’t want to hear about what you did. But what else do you remember? Did anything unusual happen?”
“He was really good in bed,” she says with a wistful smile.
“Twy—”
“Yeah, fine, okay. But he was. Anyway, the room had a little bar in it, so afterward he fixed us both another drink. And…”
“And?” Both Nick and I lean forward.
Her expression clouds. “And…that’s the last thing I remember.” Her eyes widen. “Oh, my God—it is. I don’t remember leaving the hotel.”
“Did you black out?” Nick asked. He looks at me. “You think that guy roofied her?”
“I don’t think so. What’s the point of giving her a date-rape drug after they’d already had sex?” I look hard at Twyla. “I think he gave you something, though.”
“Wait.” She gets more serious and stops robotically nibbling on chips. “You think Mr. DeVries was responsible for…what happened to me?” She looks down at her hands like she expects to see claws starting to poke out of her fingers again.
I shrug. “If I had to guess, I’d say he knows about it, at least. Maybe his job was to get you off guard and knock you out, then deliver you to somebody else. But it’s obvious somebody did something magical to you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I messed it up,” Nick says.
“Huh?” She switches her wide-eyed stare to him. “What are you talking about?”
I take a deep breath. I don’t really want to go into all of this tonight, but it’s looking like I don’t have a choice. I glance at Nick, who shrugs as if to say, tell her whatever you need to.
“You were asking me about Nick before,” I tell her. “Why he’s unusual.”
“Yeah…?”
“He’s a wild talent—a kind I’ve never heard of before. He glitches magic.”
She blinks. “What’s that mean?”
“He messes it up. It doesn’t work right around him.”
“It’s true,” Nick says, nodding.
“Wait.” She turns to stare at him, and her eyes go unfocused in the classic magical-sight pose. “So…that’s why your aura looks so weird? Why I can’t get a good read on you? In fact, I can’t even get a good read on Bron right now.”
“That’s me,” Nick says. “I haven’t known about it for long—believe me, it’s still freaking me out a lot—but I’ve seen enough proof of it to know it’s really happening.”
“So…” Her voice trembles and she looks back at me. “Whatever happened to me…wanting to attack you, to eat you…he stopped it?”
“Can’t think of any other good explanation.” The server comes by and we hastily give her our orders—none of us has even bothered to look at the menu, so we all scramble to pick something pretty much at random just to get her to leave.
Nick’s looking pale, swallowing hard and gripping the table as the server takes the menus away.
“You okay?” I ask him.
“I don’t know.” He looks down at the table. “Holy shit, Bron, do you realize how lucky we were?”
“How so?”
“I stopped it. That guy did something to Twyla—maybe those other people too—something that made them freak out and go feral, and getting near me just…turned them back to normal. But what if it—” He trails off, shuddering.
I know what he’s talking about. Last time his power affected something like this, it changed a relatively harmless alchemical potion into a deadly poison. Tonight, his ability had worked to our advantage, but it just as easily could have gone disastrously wrong.
Though, to be fair, being eaten doesn’t sound like much fun either.
Twyla is looking at us like we’re both crazy. “You’re saying…he can…mess up magic?”
“Yep,” Nick says.
“Without even meaning to?”
“Yep.”
“And you don’t know how to control it?”
“Nope. Not yet, anyway. I don’t even know if there is a way to control it.”
She looks like somebody just punched her in the stomach. “Wow,” she breathes. “That’s…”
“Dangerous,” I supply. “Yeah. At least around mages it is. So be careful doing any magic around him. Seriously—just don’t do it.”
Nick bows his head. “Listen to her. This isn’t the first time I’ve caused some pretty bad things to happen.”
“Okay,” I say quickly. “But we’re not here to talk about Nick, Twy. We’re here to talk about you. So, the last thing you remember is having drinks with this DeVries guy after you got busy. Do you remember which hotel you went to? Where you had lunch?”
“I remember where we had lunch because it was right near his office. I sent you the address of the office, remember? But the hotel…I don’t know. We went in his car, and I wasn’t really paying attention. I think we were both a little tipsy.”
“Oh, great, let’s add drunk driving to the rest of this mess.” Seriously, some things never change. When she gets horny, Twyla’s good sense goes right out the window.
“Bron—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. We’ll talk about your total lack of common sense some other time. We need to go back to that office. I want to talk to this DeVries guy. But first, I want to hear what you were going to tell me last night.”
She pales. “Oh, God, I almost forgot about that, if you can believe it.”
Nick finishes his drink and starts to rise. “You want me to clear out for a while? This part sounds like it’s none of my business. I can go sit in the bar—”
I wave him back down. �
�I think it just became your business.” I don’t like it—even I don’t like to think about what happened that day five years ago—but maybe it’s time to stop hiding from it. Or at least from talking about it.
“It’s okay,” I tell Twyla. “Nick’s okay. Go ahead and tell me. What did you mean, you don’t think what happened was my fault?”
She looks miserable, as much as she did last night, with an extra side of coming down off what happened tonight. For a while, all she does is stare into the salsa bowl.
I’m about to say something to prompt her when she looks up, then back down. “I’m sorry I never contacted you,” she mumbles. “Even when I thought it was your fault, I know you didn’t mean to do it.”
I don’t reply. That doesn’t need a reply. Of course I didn’t mean to do it. I’d loved Mara Rainwater like a second mother ever since Twyla and I were toddlers back in New York. Even now, five years after she died, thinking about her brings prickled tears to my eyes.
“I just—it never felt like the right time, you know? And when you didn’t call me either, I—” She spreads her hands. “I figured you didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. It just got harder and harder, the more time that passed. You know?”
Oh, hell yes, I know. I can’t count the number of times I almost picked up the phone, almost sent a text, almost wrote a letter. Once I even considered buying a plane ticket back to New York and dropping in for a surprise visit. But every time I chickened out, the next time got harder. Eventually, the wall of baggage and emotional expectations grew so thick I decided it was better to put that stage of my life behind me.
Even if it meant losing my family.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I get it. I should have been the one to talk to you. But…after what happened, I couldn’t face you. I couldn’t face anybody in the family. I couldn’t face myself.”
She nods. She’s picked up a chip and is breaking it into tiny pieces on her bread plate. “I hated you for a while, Bron,” she whispers. “I’m not proud of that, but it’s true.”
I swallow hard and glance at Nick. He’s sitting there looking half-attentive, half-uncomfortable, like he’s intruding where he doesn’t belong. Which is basically true, but damn it, I’ve got to trust somebody who’s not in the middle of this whole mess. “Twy…do you mind if I tell Nick what happened?”