Fury’s Kiss

by Nicola R. White

  There can be absolution in vengeance, Alecto advised and I began to see. This man’s wife couldn’t be avenged by any harm done to her husband, but I could serve her by giving him back to her.

  I stared into the grandfather’s eyes as the little girl blew bubbles nearby, dipping a plastic wand into a dollar store bottle of soapsuds. My own eyes, shaded from the sun by my hat, leaked a couple of bloody tears, and my hair strained to escape from under my cap. I leaned forward to breathe into the man’s face, hoping it would be enough. There was no way to give him the full-on Fury’s kiss without attracting attention. I tried to place a suggestion in his mind to overcome his fear of illness and devote himself to his wife’s care, but I was met with resistance.

  We are the spirit of vengeance. Alecto was amused. We are not healers. His conscience will not accept being let off without a punishment to fit his crime.

  OK then. What could I come up with that would stick?

  Then I had it. “For giving in to your fear of illness and neglecting your wife when she needed you most, you will voluntarily submit yourself to every long-feared medical checkup and procedure you have been putting off for the past ten years.”

  This time, my suggestion took hold and I received a burst of energy from the man. Satisfied, I backed off and took another look at his hands. The stains were fading already and guilt was replaced by resolve to take the little girl to see her grandmother that very day, as well as an uncomfortable, anxious compulsion to see a doctor. The man hurried away from me without a backward glance and I wiped away my bloody tears before anyone saw.

  Why didn’t you tell me we could help as well as punish? I asked Alecto. I stretched and my muscles pulsed with the tingle of energy I’d taken from the man

  We have been together such a short time and there is so much to teach you, to show you. Some of it, you will have to learn as you go.

  Alecto reminded me of our deal, and obediently, I went to find a place to go to ground. Another cheap motel fee later, and I had another tacky, polyester-covered bed all to myself. I set the alarm and lay down on the bed in hopes of getting a few more hours of sleep. My last thought as I looked up at the water-stained ceiling was to wonder if Jackson had woken yet to find me gone.

  Chapter 29

  When I awoke, I squinted at the glowing red numbers next to the bed. Nine o’clock. I remembered Alecto’s warning that all was not as it seemed with Elena, and decided to go early to the Beacon Hill address the heiress had provided, in case any more surprises waited for me.

  When I got to Louisburg Square, the most exclusive block of real estate in town, the streets were quiet. The Greek revival townhouses on the Square were all red brick and black shutters, like those on the surrounding streets, but the feeling of privilege seemed most concentrated in this spot, spreading outward from manicured grass to waft over brick sidewalks. I knew that the houses on the Square belonged to a who’s who of Boston society, ranging from politicians to authors, businessmen to movie stars, and cost anywhere from six million dollars up to a cool twenty.

  I tried the door at number twenty-eight and found it unlocked, as Elena had said it would be. I let myself in and eyeballed the foyer. Money was the first word that came to mind. I heard voices above and started for the stairs.

  “Hey!” a voice shouted softly behind me. I whipped my head around, looking for the speaker. It was a boy, hovering in a doorway to my right. This must be Nikos, Graves’s ‘anonymous’ tipster.

  “You should find someplace to hide until this is over,” I whispered at him. There was no need to explain what ‘this’ was. No doubt the kid knew more about what Spiro was up to than I did.

  “Don’t worry. Perris won’t kill me. I’m too valuable.” He pushed up his sleeves in an unconscious, bring-it-on gesture that had me thinking of what Jackson must have been like at that age. “Oracles don’t just grow on trees, you know.”

  “You may be right, but you still need to find a place to stay out of the way.”

  “I could help you. Distract him for you or something.”

  The kid’s heart was in the right place, but there was no way that was going to happen. “You can help me by staying safe so I don’t have to worry about you. It’s bad enough I’ll have Elena to worry about.”

  He glowered. “Yeah, right. She’s worse than he is. Don’t trust either one of them.”

  With the kid’s warning coming on the heels of Alecto’s, I was ready to listen, but I couldn’t understand how Elena had fooled me. I’d checked her out at the hospital, and there had been nowhere near enough blood on her hands to put her in the same category as her great-grandfather, much less in a league of her own.

  “What do you mean, she’s worse than him? Elena’s the one who told me what Spiro was up to. She asked me to help you two get away from him.”

  “She’s setting you up, is more like it. Come on, you have to get away from here.” He grabbed my hand and tried to drag me to the door, but I dug in my heels. Well-intentioned or not, there was no way a pipsqueak like him was going to drag a Fury anywhere she didn’t want to go. His attempt to pull me to the door was interrupted by a scream and a crash from upstairs.

  “Stop it! Stay away from me!” a woman shrieked. It sounded like Elena.

  I pried Nikos’s fingers off my wrists and headed for the stairs. Even if she was up to something, I had to get up there. I couldn’t just let Spiro slice her up like he’d done to so many other women.

  Like he’d tried to do to me.

  I took the stairs at a run and when I reached the fifth, topmost floor, I followed the sounds of a struggle to a library at the end of a hallway. Elena stood in the middle of the dark, richly appointed room, her silk dress torn down the front. Her hair hung in wild disarray around her face, and her tawny skin was flushed. I’d never seen a damsel in distress before, but she was it if there ever was one.

  “Shut up, Hélène, will you?” said the dark-haired man standing opposite her. “I can’t think when you carry on that way.” He was dark, while Christos had been golden, but the family resemblance was there. So was the same spark of malevolent intelligence burning in his rich, brown eyes.

  “Dimitris, I presume?” I came into the room. “Or should I call you Spiro?”

  Elena huddled back against a shelf of leather-bound volumes that were probably worth as much as the entire house I rented with my roommates. “He’s gone crazy,” she gasped. “He thinks I’m Hélène, his first wife. Tara, do something.”

  “Oh, give it up,” the man snapped at her. “Surely by now she’s figured out who you really are. It should be obvious, even if the boy hasn’t already told her.”

  I hadn’t figured out who she was, actually, but I wasn’t about to admit it. Now that the truth was in front of me, though, it all added up. Spiro hadn’t let Elena live—she’d been Hélène, his first wife, all along.

  And she’d drawn me in, right where Spiro wanted me.

  “Now.” He grinned and walked toward me. “Let’s have some fun.”

  “Let’s,” I agreed. I lashed out with my right foot, kneecapping him when he got close enough. He let out a strangled scream and doubled over.

  “You bitch!” He grabbed the edge of a dark mahogany desk for balance. “Now I’m really going to enjoy myself.”

  “Where have I heard that before?”

  He pulled himself back to standing and hauled open a desk drawer, but I leaped across the room and was on him before his hand could close around the gun hidden inside. I slammed the drawer shut on his hand, then got him by the throat and held him at arm’s length, away from the desk. Talk about déjà vu. I fished the gun out of the drawer with my other hand and pointed it at Elena.

  “Now start talking. What do you want with Ruby, and what’s the deal with you two? How’d you get the power and where did it come from? And don’t even think of trying to jump to another body. If one of you goes, the other one dies.”

  “So kill him!” Elena burst out. “You think
I care? Almost a hundred years, I’ve been stuck with him. I could kill him myself!”

  “Hélène? What are you saying?” Spiro gasped around the grip I had on his neck.

  “I’ve had enough!” She stamped an elegantly heeled foot. “For years, you made me wear the body of your second wife, that Greek whore, Chloris. But this! This is the last straw. Nearly ten years now I have been stuck as perfect little Elena, Christos’s sister.” Enraged, she reverted to her native French. “Pas plus! No more!”

  “Do you think I haven’t noticed the way you pursue the staff? And the attacks in the news—did you think I wouldn’t know it was you? Always I have forgiven your indiscretions, been a dutiful wife to you. But now, I am forced to pose as your sister while you salivate over these sluts, unable even to be seen as your wife in public.”

  I couldn’t tear my eyes off of her. It was like watching an evil version of Days of Our Lives.

  “So you two faked Hélène’s death back in the day so you could marry your second wife and get at her family’s money?” I tried to follow the convoluted plot of Elena’s outburst.

  “Meanwhile,” someone supplied from behind me, “Hélène had control of Chloris’s body all along.”

  “Rachel?” I took my eyes off of Elena for just a second to look out into the hallway. Rachel and Alex stood at the entrance to the library, followed by Jackson. “What are you doing here?” I looked past Jackson to see Nikos dogging his heels. “And what were you thinking, bringing him up here?”

  “He insisted,” Alex said. “And there was no time to argue with the kid. Besides, he’s the one who told us what their deal is. They’ve been running the DeVille empire for years, stealing bodies from their own relatives when they get too old or injured.”

  Rachel’s discovery that the Perris men were all into extreme sports suddenly made sense. Why worry about the consequences of your actions when there were none?

  “Nikos isn’t even my real name,” the boy said. “It’s Nicholas. He just liked the idea of an oracle with an old-fashioned, Greek name better.” He pointed at Spiro.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “There’s nowhere you could go that I wouldn’t find you,” Jackson said. “When I woke up and you weren’t there this morning, I knew exactly which way you’d gone. I didn’t want to admit it, but it’s been like that for me since I found you with Priest at the Stardust.”

  “That’s how you found Nora and Ruby at my house the day Alecto took over my body,” I realized.

  “And Ruby sent us to meet him here,” Alex said. “She had a vision, said you needed help and pointed us in the right direction.”

  “Are Nora and Ruby OK? Where are they?”

  “They’re fine. They’re with Ty at the safe—”

  “How touching,” Hélène interrupted, sneering. “This is all very lovely, but I’m afraid I have someplace else to be.”

  “Don’t even think about it, you hussy,” warned yet another voice from behind Jackson, this one speaking with a British accent. “I’ve spellbound this entire block. You won’t be able to jump to a new body unless you get past me.” Her eyes narrowed. “And that, I would very much like to see you try.”

  By now, I wasn’t even surprised to see the witch. If Ruby had sent Alex and Rachel, why not her, too? At least Hester would be an asset in a fight against a magic-wielding, body-snatching bitch like Hélène.

  “You can put him down if you like,” Hester said to me, pointing at Spiro. “I imagine your arm is getting tired.”

  She was right. It was.

  I threw Spiro into an oxblood, leather-upholstered armchair and motioned with the gun for Hélène to take a seat as well. There were a few questions that still needed to be answered.

  “What do you want with the oracles?” I demanded.

  “Idiot,” Hélène spat at me. “What do you think? They’re oracles, they tell the future. It was the boy who told us where to find you.”

  Nicky hung his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. They made me do it.”

  “It’s OK,” I reassured him. “No hard feelings.” He’d been unbelievably brave, and I knew who was really to blame. It sure as hell wasn’t the kid these monsters had imprisoned in their home.

  “They want to be gods. They’re supposed to kill you, and in exchange they get to live forever. They won’t have to keep switching bodies. And they made me tell them about you and Ruby.”

  “Why Ruby? Why did they need her if they had you?”

  “She’s younger, but she’s stronger. It has to do with who we descended from. Pythia was the strongest oracle of them all. And we’ll get stronger the older we get, so they were gonna keep us and use us both.”

  “Who told them to kill me and gave them their power?”

  “I don’t know. I just know it’s someone they think will make them like you.”

  “Like her?” Spiro laughed. “You’re nothing but a myth stuck in a human body, forgotten for centuries. I will be a god.”

  “I hope she kills you!” Hélène screeched at him. “I would rather be dead than stuck with you for eternity.”

  Oops. Looked like the hundred-year honeymoon had really lost its appeal. Speaking as a Fury, I felt qualified to classify her as a real harpy.

  “Who gave you the power to steal the lives of others?” Hester asked, striding forward to face Spiro and Hélène.

  “You’re the witch.” Hélène looked down her nose at Hester. “You figure it out.”

  “Was it Loki? Kokopelli? Puck?” Hester paced around the room, flapping her hands as she muttered to herself. “It was Puck, wasn’t it? I told Will not to give him such a plum role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and now look where it’s gotten us. I said it would go right to his head, didn’t I? But nobody listened.”

  Hélène reached up to snatch something from around her neck. The gold pendant she’d worn at the hospital.

  Of course, Alecto said, more to herself than me. She’d recognized that something was wrong with Elena back at the hospital, but she hadn’t been able to pinpoint what it was. Now she dredged it up from centuries-old memories. She’d never imagined that a human would carry the talisman of Apate, the spirit of deceit, but the proof was right in front of us.

  “Hester.” I stepped between Hélène and the doorway. “Alecto says she’s got Apate’s sigil.”

  If anyone in the room would know what that meant, she would.

  Hélène held the necklace in front of her by its chain, using it like a shield as she advanced. Now that the pendant itself no longer touched her skin, I could see the blood that covered far more than just her hands and arms. It glistened wetly everywhere on her skin, coating her like Carrie at the prom, so real I could smell the coppery scent of it in the air.

  “Hélène? What are you doing?” Spiro leaped out of his chair to follow her. I stepped toward him, but she flung out a hand and threw him back into his chair from across the room.

  “Shut up! I am so sick of you, Spiro! A hundred years of Hélène, do this, go there. You know what?” she hissed. “It. Got. Old.”

  “I thought you said she was spellbound?” I muttered at Hester.

  Hester’s lips thinned. “I didn’t have time for a complete warding. My main goal was to make sure they stayed in those bodies.”

  “You can’t do this to me!” Spiro struggled to his feet again. “She promised us both! We are to be gods.”

  “You are nothing!” Hélène raged. “Do you hear me? Nothing! I will be a goddess and you will be dead at last. You pathetic. Stupid. Man.”

  Each word was punctuated by an invisible blow, driving him backward toward tall, velvet-draped windows, and I moved to stop her before she could deliver the final push that would send Dimitris Perris’s body crashing to the street below. I wasn’t above killing him myself if I had to, but I wasn’t about to let her murder him. We still needed answers and, incredibly, he was starting to look like the saner of the two.

  But I didn
’t make it in time. Spiro flew backward against the antique, leaded glass window and it exploded behind him. He screamed as he fell, and his body hit the sidewalk with a horrifying, heavy crack while Hélène laughed. It was a hideous, crazed sound.

  Finally, I reached her side and grabbed her by the arm, but she shook me off as easily as I’d shaken off Nicky in the foyer. I staggered back, shaken. It shouldn’t have been possible for her to be so strong. The goddess of deceit may have given Hélène and Spiro the power to jump from one body to another, but I knew from what Alecto had shown me that there were supposed to be limits. That was the way the old, blood magic worked—you made your sacrifice and you got something specific in return. You certainly didn’t get Fury-level strength and psychokinesis along with it.

  Not from Apate, at any rate. One of the evils released into the world when Pandora opened the box entrusted to her by Zeus, Apate was a primordial deity, not a world changer. She was supposed to be interested only in tricks and lies, not superpowers and bestowing godhood. And since she’d been toying with Spiro and Hélène for decades, allowing them to steal body after body, why had she suddenly become interested in me?

  But my questions would have to wait. Right now, I needed to focus on taking out the madwoman who threatened my friends.

  “Get out of the way,” I said to Alex and Rachel. “And get Nicky out of here. Jackson—go with them, keep them safe.”

  Alex and Rachel ushered the boy down the hall toward the stairs, but Jackson ignored me, planting himself firmly at my side. I wanted him out of danger, but it helped to know he was there. The two of us advanced with Hester, flanking Hélène, who simply laughed at our approach. Sirens wailed in the distance and I knew they were headed for us. Someone would have called 911 about Spiro’s dramatic exit from the house by now.

  “Maybe after I kill you and your friends, I’ll have some fun of my own with your boyfriend,” Hélène mocked me. “There must be something to all that cutting Spiro enjoyed so much.” She winked. “Don’t tell anyone, but I always felt a little…stifled in my marriage.”