“Miss Jordan, it’s Tucker Briggs.”
I turned away from Chaz when I recognized the voice. “Tucker. What can I do for you?”
The kid behind me kicked the seat again and I frowned.
“I wanted to see if we were meeting on Sunday like you said.” His voice was hurried.
“That was the plan. Did Shadow find you?”
“Yes, Ma’am. He told us that you felt something.”
“Are you guys okay?”
“Fine. He also told us of your kindness.”
I snorted. “I gave him leftovers.”
“You don’t understand, Miss Jordan . . .”
I couldn’t let him finish. “Tucker Briggs. Take care of yourself for the next two days and you can explain it to me then.”
The kid kicked my chair again and then a tuff of yellow hair stuck out around the edge of the booth.
“Good bye, Tucker.”
I snapped the phone closed and stuck my head around the edge of the booth to be nose to nose with the little tyke with a foot like David Beckham. Just for an instant, I let the panther slip through into my eyes and let out a little growl.
The little boy slipped back into his booth and began to cry. I went back to looking at my boyfriend.
Chaz stared back at me with an arched eyebrow.
“What?” I asked innocently.
He leaned across the table and dropped his voice. “I don’t think that the Powers gave you this gift to scare children.”
The family behind me got up and took their screaming child with them, leaving Chaz and I alone in the small section of the restaurant.
“I’d like to think that I have earned dinner with my boyfriend.”
“That I’m going to have to cut short.”
My jaw clenched. “Cause?”
“They need me to deliver something.” He slipped his phone back into his jacket pocket.
Anger sizzled around my skin. “One night, Chaz. Valentine’s Day. They can’t even give us one night.”
Chaz reached across the table. “Calm down, Vi. It will just be one more night.”
I snatched my hand away. “Call them back and tell them that you’re off duty.”
“Violet, I can’t.”
“Then tell them that we are on the brink of figuring out how to unlock Jovan’s curse.”
“But we haven’t even started.”
“Then I suggest you try a little acting to go along with that modeling.”
“Are you making me choose?” The furrow was back as he leaned across the table.
“If that’s how you want to interpret it. I need your help right now. Not that fancy power of yours. You.”
Chaz took in a deep breath and let it out across the table. “Give me a few minutes.”
He slid out of the booth and headed outside.
My head hit the table. Yep. This is my life. I have to black mail my boyfriend to spend Valentine’s Day with me. I really was the worse girlfriend ever.
WHEN PEOPLE GET to know each other, usually, there is some talking and some kissing and then some soul-searching on their first weekend away. They talk about family, they talk about brothers and cousins, and they hold hands as the sun goes down.
Chaz and I really got to know each other while digging through his guest bedroom, looking for a magical spell book or stone tablet or something else as mystical to break a demonic curse.
After dinner, we went through the attic, the garage, but circumvented his bedroom entirely. We were just about to tackle the guest bedroom.
“This is a little déjà vu–ish,” I said as I tossed the rack of worn winter coats on the bed, dust swooshing up into the air.
Chaz chuckled as he leaned in the doorway, watching me destroy the second room in his house that day. “It has been almost six months.”
“Are you supposed to celebrate the anniversary of the first day your boyfriend kidnapped you?”
“I think we can.”
I smirked at him. “Flashlight.”
He pulled the silver torch out of his back pocket and handed it over.
I flipped on the ancient light and looked down at the massive trunk in the bottom of the closet. It looked ancient enough to hold the dusty bones of kings and the lock on it looked strong enough to hold in curses for a thousand years. We found our winner.
“A key would just be asking for too much, wouldn’t it?” I asked the universe and as usual, no one answered.
I kneeled down and ran my hand over the ancient leather. The smell alone told me tales of travel and rain. The roughness of the edges told me of use and protection. The texture and the smell whispered stories to me and the strangest notion was left across my lips. “Do you something with a canary on it?”
“What?” Chaz asked from behind, his shadow looming over me.
“A book, something square with a bird on the front, some yellow bird.”
I looked up at Chaz and his lips had paled and parted.
“You do.”
He nodded. “How did you know?”
How did I know? The same way I knew it was Jessa calling me. The same way I knew that Wednesday was not the day to flat iron my hair before the weather man predicted rain. The truth of it hummed through me like it had been there my whole life.
“Jourdaine thing?” I suggested.
“Like your dreams from your mother?”
I pulled myself up by the door handle. “Maybe.”
“Are they while you are awake now?”
“No.” God. That was a horrible lie. “Maybe. Do you have a book with a bird on it?”
Chaz’s lips were not pressed as tight as the furrow between his dark brows.
“What?”
“Sometimes you scare the shit out of me.”
“You don’t think I’m riding that same roller coaster?”
Chaz disappeared into the house for a few moments, and I rested my head against the door jam.
Of course, I scared him. I am a freaking panther, the descendant of the man who killed his father and if I have a bad day, I could predict the end of the world or have him for dinner. I’d just made him lie to the Powers and scared a little kid so that I could selfishly have a quiet night with my boyfriend. I was still pondering the new layer of why I was the worst girlfriend on the planet when he came back into the room.
A brass key dangled from his fingers on a red ribbon. “Found it in this book. Just where you said.”
Chaz knelt down and tried the key into the huge brass lock, but it wouldn’t turn. “Probably just old.”
“Hasn’t been opened in a millennium, so maybe.”
Chaz tried again and again, until kicking at it was the only obvious solution to the problem.
While he was going caveman on the poor trunk, I took a moment to sit on my favorite bed in his house and flip through the pages of the children’s book. The Littlest Canary was a short illustrated tale of the smallest canary in the flock who couldn’t fly as fast or peck as hard as the others, but he could sing prettier than any other bird around.
The pages were smudged from wear and the binding was nearly broken. I looked up at my ape of a boyfriend then back down at the book. “Was this your favorite?”
Chaz stopped his assault and ran his fingers through his hair. It didn’t do much, but it must have made him feel better as he dropped on the bed beside me.
“My mother used to read it to me.”
I turned to the last page. The last page was almost pristine, because no one turns past the last page of the story.
Except for Violet.
The last page of the book had another key taped to the back cover. It was small and silver and looked brand new.
“That wasn’t . . .” Chaz faded off.
“I’m good with books, remember?” I smiled as I carefully peeled the key off the cardboard bindings and handed the book to Chaz.
He cradled it to his chest as he watched me.
I knelt before the trunk and focused. T
he biggest lock would engulf the small key, but there were too smaller key holes to the sides of the larger hole.
“God bless the History Channel,” I laughed. “A secret hole. I saw it once, way back when I had time to watch TV.”
I heard Chaz grunt behind me.
“They made these locks so that the face turns and another key can be used.”
I easily slide the lock face to the right, and it clicked into place, another key hole opening that was four times smaller than the original one.
“You’re brilliant.”
“No. Your dad was brilliant. I’m just annoyingly preternatural.”
“You know I love it when you use big words.”
Turning, I stuck my tongue out at him as the lock easily opened. I prepared for every nasty thing that has ever been stuck in a trunk for more than ten years. Bodies, moths, satanic spirits waiting to avenge their murders. You know, the usual.
As I pushed the trunk lid up, I was awash in the smell of lavender.
Chaz’s trek to join me was momentarily halted. “My mom smelled like that.”
We looked in together, him remembering the flashlight.
On top was a simple white linen dress. “Wedding dress?”
Chaz went silent on me. I knew it. Where as I had bawled my eyes out as I explored my family history, he would just turn to stone. But at least I knew that. Maybe I’m not the worst girlfriend on the planet.
Carefully, he picked up the dress and laid it reverently on the bed while I kept poking around in the trunk.
There was a large dark book sitting on the top and as my finger brushed it, the slick feeling of darkness crept up my arm. Black magic. I’d felt it before in the book that Spencer had been using to resurrect a demon.
Under that were red candles and a silver dagger whose sharp blade caught the reflection of my light and danced eagerly.
“What else do we have in there?” he asked.
The story filled my head so quickly, I didn’t want to think if it was my brain or my blood. Black magic and a wedding dress? Do I need to draw the picture of someone trying to bring their wife back from the dead? The layers explained it all. When he couldn’t go through with it, he put the key in a place that would constantly remind him of what he should be focusing on: his son.
I jerked my hands back from the leather trunk and slammed the top closed before Chaz could see. Some days I hated the way my brain worked and some days it saved the world as we know it.
“Can you make us some coffee?” I asked as I rose to block Chaz from seeing further into the trunk. “You know my brain doesn’t work without coffee.”
His furrow came back. He knew me like I knew him. He knew that I was hiding something, but he took a few steps back toward the door. “Cinnamon?”
“You’re an angel.”
He left and I turned quickly back for the book. I threw the lid open. Something like this might be powerful enough to break a demon possession, or at least tell me how to create one.
Just touching the book left a chill up my arm, and I rubbed my hand furiously up my blue-jeaned thighs after I dropped the book on the ground.
Quickly, I opened the book and was accosted by the acrid smell of rot. Not being sure that something or someone hadn’t actually died in the book, I turned the pages quickly.
I felt the darkness curl between my fingers and as I flipped the pages, the ancient text began to swirl around into words that I could make out. The damn book was making itself easier for the user to read.
My stomach turned over on itself as I flipped through symbols drawn in what could only be blood, diagrams of bird intestines, devices to harvest souls. Where had such a golden soul like Seth Garrett dug up a book like this?
Something itched in the back of my mind. A guardian would never invoke this kind of darkness. Unless it was easy. Unless it was given to him without any ties or promises on the darkest moment of his life.
This entire thing reeked of Haverty. The acidic smell of cigars clung to this. I just didn’t have any proof. And if I’ve learned anything from my police dog, it was that we can’t jump to conclusions and nothing is as it seems.
I quickly rummaged through the rest of the trunk and only found one thing that wasn’t tainted by the cold creep of evil.
It was a hinged black velvet box. With my thumb, I flipped it open and inside sat a diamond ring. The setting was beautiful, but the diamonds were small. Like what would happen if a diamond sneezed.
“Always wondered what happened to that.”
I jumped at Chaz’s voice and quickly shut the lid to the trunk. He didn’t need to see the half-burned tapers. Not yet.
He reached out for the box, and I gladly gave it to him.
“It was my mothers.”
“Sort of figured that.”
“Never knew what Dad did with it.”
“People do crazy things when their spouses . . .” I’d never heard the actual story. It had always been alluded to, but the story never told.
Chaz walked out into the living room, using the ring like a pied piper to get me to follow him. Which was good. The pull of the book was making my arms ache and my skin sore.
He set the box on the counter between us and fixed our coffees. He had put cinnamon in the filter, like he had almost six months ago. The smell of it filled the open area of his kitchen living room combo.
“She died when I was about twelve.”
I had a hard time getting the words out. “Was it something . . .”
Luckily, Chaz didn’t let me finish. “Cancer. Pure and simple cancer.”
“But she was so young.”
“But she was so stubborn,” he smiled as he looked down at the ring box. “She and dad argued a lot. But she always won, even about that.”
I pulled up the stool and sat. Leaning forward on the counter, head in my hands, I watched him. His light brown hair, his warm brown eyes.
“Tell me the story, Chaz. Start from the beginning.”
As he started, slowly, stumbling, I listened. As I listened, my hand dropped on top of the ring box and the images began to form in my head. The story came to me like a movie as Chaz spoke.
Seth had been hurt. Again. This time he needed stitches, and he wasn’t going to let Iris try her hand at that. So he went to the ER. And waited and waited and waited. Finally, a nurse called his name, and he hobbled back to a curtained off room where another nurse greeted him.
She was tall, slender, and had the rosiest lips he’d ever seen and hair the color of gold. She smiled at him and that’s when he knew that he was going to marry this ER nurse.
She fought him on that point too and it took the perseverance of a god to get her to say yes to his date request. But she finally did, after he covered her car in rose petals.
A year later, they were married. A year after that, he told her what he was and why he’d really been in the ER that night. After a few months apart, she came back to him. Nine months after that, Chaz was born.
They were the perfect nuclear family. Sort of. Mom worked nights. Dad worked contract construction, and when he was called to help other Wanderers, Chaz got handed over to Iris.
It wasn’t until Chaz was ten that he even noticed something wrong. His mother was sick. He thought it was just a really long flu; but when cancer was diagnosed, all Chaz remembered was a huge fight and Dad left for a few days. Mom quit her job at the hospital and pulled Chaz out of school. They played and read and went to the zoo and Chaz thought it was the perfect life.
He didn’t understand until she was bedridden what was going on. His mother was a nurse and the only kind of chemotherapy that was available at the time would suck all the life right out of her. Chaz realized too late that she was trying to cram a lifetime of memories into a year.
His mother passed away peacefully in bed, and Seth didn’t have a funeral. In fact, Chaz didn’t see his father for about six months after that. He lived with Iris, went to school in Waxahachie, and worked on his tal
ents.
The moment he could control it, he went to find his father. At thirteen, he was already a big kid and when he drug his father home from the bar stool, he was going to make sure that the one healthy parent he had left was going to stay that way.
“When I came back, he’d already packed up all her things. Took the pictures off the walls, everything.”
I looked away from the black velvet box and shook my head, knocking a tear loose that ran down my cheek. “And you didn’t think to put them back at some point?”
“I had a father to put back together.”
I took my mug and held it between my hands. “You had to grow up pretty fast after that.”
“Says the girl who lost her parents at the same time.”
Chaz looked down at his coffee. “What about you? You don’t talk about anything beyond L.A.”
“It’s not a particularly unique story.”
“Neither is most of the stuff on TV, but we still watch it.”
I looked down at the caramel coffee and let it hypnotize me for a moment. “After the car accident, I went to live with my aunt Glory and my cousin Waylon. He was three years older than me, and was more than tolerant of a weepy teenage girl. I went to school, buried myself in books and graduated with top marks that got me into college, where I buried myself in books to get a job in L.A., where I, you guessed it, buried myself in other people’s books, other people’s stories. Jessa was the first person that I took an interest in and then Kyle took an interest in me and the rest is history.”
“So two orphans alone in the world together?” he asked.
I nodded. “Adds a whole new meaning to ‘takes one to know one.’ ”
The rift I’d felt the past two months was a distant memory. Who needs physical intimacy when you have a man who can bare all to you in a whole other way? Sure, the magazines got his golden abs and his beautiful shoulders, but I got the honest golden center and his most intimate memories.
Screw romantic candlelight dinner and vases of roses for Valentine’s Day. I got to play Nancy Drew with my boyfriend with the prospect of saving people’s souls. Let’s see Hallmark make a card for that.
“So I think that book in there is what we’re looking for?”
Claws and Effect Page 6