by P. R. Frost
“You’ve got to sign a promissory note to help finance my casino before I’ll help Tess do anything,” Donovan said. His color ran high, and his muscles tensed. His temper rode very close to the surface.
Gollum’s new phone chirped an airy waltz. He glanced at the screen. All color drained out of his face. He looked a little unsteady on his feet. “Excuse me, I’ve got to take this.”
He fled.
Donovan smiled wickedly. “Looks to me, Tess, like you might be on the receiving end of rejection this time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s just say, I’ve done my fair share of background checks.
Made more than a few phone calls, too. You’re in for quite a surprise. But that has nothing to do with our agreement for tonight. Just don’t come running back to me afterward.”
Chapter 43
In Spanish, Nevada means snowcapped.
I DON’T LIKE the clipped New York accent that slides into Gollum’s words. He sounds terse and angry through the heavy door. He also sounds a bit sad.
This could be bad news for Tess.
So I slip away from her and hover around Gollum’s left ear trying to hear both sides of his conversation.
Drat, I’m too late. He’s closing the phone that does everything just as I pop through. I count to ten then ten more as he sucks in air and lets it out again verrrrry slowly. That’s his martial arts training. He’s got to regain control over his emotions before he faces Tess again.
This does not bode well.
I never thought to probe his secrets before. He’s so right for my dahling I figured he’d come clean honestly, without manipulation when the time was right. Tess says he did that last night when they were in that cave becoming a couple. A lasting and important couple.
Ouch, he nearly closes the door on my tail. Good thing I’m only partly in this dimension and can slide through the dense wood with little problem. Still it reminds me too much of the nothing place between here and there where the Guardians trapped me.
I do not like dark and dense anymore, even though it does provide nice hiding places from the too-perceptive. I’ll just have to be better at camouflage.
This may call for another feather boa, or some makeup.
First things first. Gollum’s gearing up to say something.
“Tess, let’s figure out this spell. Now. We haven’t a lot of time and there’s no repeat performance,” Gollum ground out the moment he reentered Lady Lucia’s office. His face was bland, but he bit off the last syllable of his words and his gaze would not meet mine.
“What’s wrong?” I reached out to touch his hand.
He jerked away from me as if burned.
“Later. We’ll talk later. I promise. Just not right now.” Each of those last four words sounded like a separate sentence. Maybe even a full paragraph.
Something twisted in my belly. I’m not usually prescient. Gollum’s tense shoulders and board stiff fingers—like he was afraid if he clenched them he’d smash his fist into something, or someone—told me more than I wanted to know.
Then there was Donovan’s satisfied smirk marring his handsome face. If I ever doubted my decision to sever an intimate relationship with him, I didn’t now. This man could be cruel.
The conversation turned to esoteric circles, pentagrams, incense, candle placement, and chants. My cursory reading in ceremonial magic for my books wasn’t deep enough to fathom the importance of the details Gollum pried out of Lady Lucia’s memory.
“I am certain that the black candles belonged in the center of each triangle that formed the points of the pentagram,” she insisted for the third time. “The red ones went inside the pentagon at the center and the white ones between the points but inside the circle marking the pentangle.”
That caught my attention. “In white magic, MoonFeather always places the white candles representing Air at the center, the red for Fire at the points, blue for Water goes between the points, and the black or brown for Earth outside the circle.” My aunt always used multiple symbolism. I knew that in her pentagrams the white center represented purity of spirit. Any darkness that might creep into the spell had to remain outside the circle. Dark Earth also represented a grounding or anchor to reality.
She used a much lighter incense, blending the ingredients from her own herb garden as much as possible.
“This is not white magic,” Lucia reminded me. “Gregbaum needed something very dark, but not truly black.” Hence the heavy, artificial incense and the burning blood. He cut one of his mutant faeries to get that blood. He set plain incense smudge pots at the cardinal direction points around the building. The ones containing blood went around the dormitory in the basement of the building.
If MoonFeather needed blood, she’d use her own menstrual blood or take a little from a goat or chicken, but only an animal that was destined to die anyway to fill her table later.
“I think you should use green candles for Earth. Green the same color as Mickey’s eyes, faery green.”
Gollum nodded assent and made a note on his new cell phone that replaced his PDA and laptop.
“This is not like any magic I know of.” Mickey shook his head. “We are creatures of the Air. Trapping the dancers in the basement, beneath the Earth is draining them of strength more than being away from home for so long.”
“I know this as much as anyone,” Lucia said proudly. She looked as if she intended to say more but bit off the last words.
“You designed the spell.” I kept my voice matter-of-fact, avoiding any hint of accusation.
Her silence said it all.
“I advised Junior on some of the symbolism. How did you guess?” she asked sweetly.
“Because I don’t think Gregbaum or Junior is smart enough to layer symbolism on top of symbolism and rearrange those symbols so subtly.”
Lucia’s smile grew bigger. She almost bared her fangs.
Did all Damiri have those fangs? I didn’t think so. Darren hadn’t, not when he was in human form anyway. Dill had never showed evidence of them, other than prominent eye teeth.
“You are correct.” She nodded her head regally.
“If you set it, then you know how to reverse it,” I said.
“That is just the point, my dear Tess. I do not know how to reverse it. I planned it as a one-time trap, never needed again. Then Gregbaum betrayed me, and I severed our relationship. Now I need to finish severing every connection I ever had to the man.”
Uh-oh. Gregbaum’s blood is on the ring. When it goes back to Lucia, she’ll be able to track him.
Huh?
Trust me, babe. She’ll trace the scent through three dimensions before giving up. Even cleaning it with bleach won’t help.
I didn’t want to think about what Lady Lucia would consider betrayal.
Did Gregbaum take another to his bed? Eeewwwwww!
Or had the slimy lounge lizard deprived Lucia of a meal? Double eeewwwww!
I hoped, I really, really hoped, that he had just cheated her out of some money.
And to think, nine months ago I didn’t believe in any of this crap. Now I easily envisioned Junior bent over a bowl of water, scrying our conversation through magic, tracing us through a drop of Gregbaum’s blood in the water to call to the blood on the ring.
“We’re out of here,” I said. “Gollum, you and Mickey go back to the hotel and put your heads together on this.”
“What are you going to do?” Gollum looked up, meeting my eyes for the first time since his phone call. He’d banished the strong emotions and now showed only a deep interest in something bizarre.
“What any self-respecting woman would do. I’m going to call my mom. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll contact the Citadel. Someone, somewhere has to know how to get those faeries back home.”
Don’t bet on it, dahling. Can’t we go shopping instead?
“Tess, before we go to our separate tasks, I have to talk to you.” Gollum didn’t look happ
y about that. He didn’t touch my back as he escorted me down the stairs, away from Lady Lucia.
“So talk.”
“Alone.” He looked pointedly at Mickey.
Oooh, one of those talks. I’ll leave you to it while I check out the mall. Scrap popped out. I barely noticed.
“I’ll drop you at The Crown Jewels. Then I’ll check local magic shops for supplies while you talk,” Mickey said distractedly.
“Thank you, Mickey. What are we going to do about the blood . . . ?” I didn’t want to finish that thought.
“You may have some of mine,” Mickey said proudly. “Good faery blood to balance the wrongness of the changed ones.”
We said nothing more until Gollum closed the door of our hotel room. He went immediately to the long windows and stared at the mountains in the distance. A tiny bit of snow glistened on the high peaks, left over from last night’s storm.
“So what is so important?” I asked, making myself comfortable on the bed with pillows propped behind my back. I had a bad feeling about this. Our relationship was so new, still fragile, I didn’t want to risk it just yet. Give it time to grow and strengthen. Then we could weather any storm together.
As we had last night.
Inwardly, I smiled at the specialness of making love with Gollum.
“Tess . . . I . . .” He gulped and swallowed. Then he hung his head, reluctant to turn and meet my gaze.
“Spit it out. One sentence at a time, stripped bare of emotion.” That’s what I did in my books when I didn’t quite know how to get from here to there.
He straightened and stared through the window. His eyes clouded and I knew he looked deeply into his past. A shadowy past I had not shared with him.
“Tess, I’m married.”
The world went white. I grew hot with chill pricking the edges.
“How . . . why didn’t you tell me last autumn when we first met? Why isn’t she with you?” I could write a better fictional excuse to get out of a relationship.
My temper threatened to boil over.
I had to remind myself, this was Gollum, my Gollum.
Well, maybe he wasn’t mine after all. Maybe I should listen more closely.
“We were very young. I was nineteen and had just finished the course work for my first masters. Julia had just graduated from high school. Our parents had known each other forever. They’d planned for us to marry since we were infants. And I do love her. I’ll always love her. She’s special. But in a different way from you. You are my soul mate. She’s a sprite from my childhood.”
He sank onto the edge of the bed opposite me. Finally, he dropped his eyes to mine.
“I know now that Julia and her mother never got along because they are both bipolar. Bridget—that’s my mother-in-law—always saw raising a daughter as a competition. Almost a blood sport. She decided it was time for us to marry because she wanted to put on the social event of the season. I agreed because I thought I could rescue Julia from an emotionally abusive situation.”
I gulped. Living on Cape Cod where some of the wealthiest people in the country had summer homes, I’d seen the same thing happen over and over. I’d even taught some of those girls in school.
“The wedding was a disaster, I take it?” I prodded.
“Yeah. Bridget couldn’t allow Julia to outshine her. She even wore white and commandeered the photographer to follow her around, ignoring the bride and groom.” He said that as if he was an observer and not the groom in question. He suddenly looked younger and more vulnerable. At the same time, his eyes became care-hardened. “My mother wasn’t much better. She, at least, had the decency to wear ice blue—not quite white.”
I thought I understood why he’d taken the job with the financial advisers in New York even though he hated the city. “What happened to send you off to Africa two years later?”
“Three miscarriages.” He had to stop and blink rapidly. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Julia grew more and more depressed. I got her to therapists, specialists, anyone who might help her. She flushed her meds, certain they’d caused her to lose our babies.” He winced. “Maybe they did. Maybe she just wasn’t healthy enough to carry a baby to term.”
Damn, damn, damn.
“After the third one, her mother convinced her she was a total failure as a human being. Julia tried to slit her wrists. Her doctors recommended a stay in a very expensive, very exclusive sanitarium.” He recited each word methodically, without emotion. Just spitting it out.
“Like the one where we stashed WindScribe?” WindScribe, the witch who’d started the imbalance in Faery by killing the king. She’d also murdered Darren Estevez. Her violent tendencies and ravings about demons and beings from other worlds guaranteed she’d never convince the authorities she was sane enough to stand trial or ever earn release. If she’d just kept her mouth shut, Donovan might have married her just to gain custody of the child she carried.
“Actually, they are in the same facility, different wings. Julia isn’t violent, but she does tend to wander. She’s been there for fifteen years. That phone call . . . she escaped and jumped into the river. She . . . Oh, God, Tess, she can’t swim.”
“Did . . . did she drown?”
“No. Her nurse dragged her out in time.” Another long pause.
I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. He looked as if he’d reject any attempt to touch him. So I wrapped my arms around myself and held on tight. If I kept it up, maybe I could keep my heart from breaking.
“When she regained consciousness, she came back to reality, quite lucid and sane. She does that sometimes. The first thing she asks for is me. I’m her only anchor, her only link to happiness. She made the phone call. She wept and asked that I take her back home, to our apartment in New York.”
“Are you going to do that?”
“I doubt her episode of clarity will last long enough to fill out the release papers. But I have to go see her.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I always thought that once I fell in love again, found the right woman, I’d just divorce Julia so I could remarry. Now that I’ve found you . . . now that I know that you and I could have a future together, this happens and I know I can’t divorce her. I can’t abandon her like that.”
“And I’d be a complete heel to ask you to.”
Chapter 44
Las Vegas receives on average 4.13 inches of rainfall a year. Their extensive water management program uses more recycled water than any other. Nothing is wasted.
AFTER SEVERAL LONG MOMENTS of absolute silence, Gollum left.
What could we say? Our emotions rode so close to the surface, any careless word or inflection could shatter us both. Irrevocably.
We both had chores to do before he could return to his wife. Before he could walk out of my life forever.
Maybe he didn’t have to leave forever. Julia existed behind locked doors, incapable of leading a normal life with her husband.
Could I live with a married man, and continue to love him?
I did the only thing I was capable of doing. I went for a walk. The moment I stepped out into the afternoon heat I called my mom. Not that I could tell her anything over the phone. I just needed to connect to her, know that when I needed to talk, she’d be there for me.
“I’m not singing tonight, why don’t we have dinner together,” Mom said on a yawn.
“If it’s early. I have a . . . a date tonight,” I replied.
Off the Strip, Las Vegas was just another city. I walked past homes with desert landscaping—lots of crushed rock and succulent plants and cacti. An occasional cottonwood offered shade from the unrelenting sun. Nearly every corner had a convenience shop, drugstore, or small strip of shops. No different from any other residential neighborhood.
“I hope you and Donovan are finally getting together,” Mom said showing more interest in the conversation than in her yawns.
Not bloody likely.
“He’ll be there ton
ight. It’s sort of a group thing. But I’m not dating him.” Never again. After one night with Gollum I had little interest in Donovan. Even though . . .
Did I have to give up Gollum because of his youthful commitment to Julia? She need never know. Even if someone told her that her husband had chosen another, she might not understand in her few moments of sanity.
I knew what my mother would advise before she left New England. But this new mom, the Las Vegas mom, might have a different perspective on my love life.
My heart twisted with guilt.
“How early is early?” Mom asked.
There was something unusual in Mom’s voice. But then nothing about this trip had been ordinary for her.
“Before sunset, like around five. Six at the latest.”
“Sorry. I’m having brunch right now with friends. I won’t be ready to eat that early. Call me in the morning or when you get back from your date. I’ll be up until about two. That’s my new schedule.” I heard a doorbell ring in the background.
“Mom, last night you spoke with a woman in a red dress and a long strand of pearls,” I continued before she could hang up.
“Oh, her. She wanted me to break my contract with Junior and sing at her club. I don’t remember which one.” The doorbell rang again in the background. “Tess, I’ve got to go . . .”
“Just tell me if she sounded in any way threatening.”
“Threatening? I don’t think so.”
“She looked like she wanted to bite you.”
“Oh, that,” Mom laughed. “I think she’s a lesbian. But it was awful noisy with the whole lounge singing along with you. She had to bend quite close so I could hear her.”
“If you say so.”
She hung up without saying good-bye.
Before I could decide what to do, the phone chirped out the opening phrase of “In The Hall Of The Mountain King.”
“Mom?” I asked hopefully, not bothering to look at the caller ID.