Eye of the Tempest (Jane True)

by Nicole Peeler

  Which meant that I began my long walk to work well rested and feeling good—almost entirely normal. Or as normal as I could feel, given the circumstances.

  Because, once I entered our little village, I saw that things were definitely odd in Rockabill. Nothing a stranger would have picked up on, but I could feel it. It wasn’t all the people about—there was always a lot of foot traffic in Rockabill. Except when it was raining or snowing, people would drive into the town center, but then they’d park to do most of their errands on foot. This was partly due to how small our little village was, but it was also because it was an ideal way to socialize. Everyone would walk around, coffee in hand, chatting about who had done what to whom. In a place like Rockabill, there were no secrets and, except for the tourists, no strangers. Anyone who planted him-or herself here for longer than a single summer was fair game for the outrageously generous acts of kindness, the sometimes cruel gossip, and the ceaseless interest that was life in a very small community.

  And for better or worse, I was a Rockabillian. So the tension that had sprung up while I was sleeping grated at me like nails on a chalkboard. Everyone was walking around like they expected something to jump out at them. Which I supposed was understandable if your friends, loved ones, and neighbors could start yelling weird threats randomly and for no obvious reason.

  Or start writing on the walls, I thought, seeing evidence of badly painted-over graffiti on the outside walls of Tanner’s Bakery; our little supermarket, McKinley’s; the Trough, our diner; as well as some of the sidewalks and benches. Underneath the fresh paint, I could clearly see the words “Rises,” “Death,” and “Come” defacing the brick or shingle sides of our downtown buildings. I wasn’t opposed to things “rising” or “coming,” but having “death” sandwiched between the two words was a bit of a buzz kill.

  It’s not just that everyone’s on edge, I observed, as I walked through our little town center. It’s like they don’t trust themselves.

  It would be pretty weird, however, to discover yourself defacing public property when you’ve never so much as spat on the sidewalk. The whole point of why we were so up in each others’ business is that Rockabill wasn’t San Francisco or Seattle. Rockabill wasn’t known for attracting eccentrics, crazy geniuses, and the simply crazy. Yes, we had our fair share of oddities, but for the most part we were all pretty “normal” people. Every once and a while someone would do something like run off with a tourist, or invest in alpacas, or begin selling paintings of their own vagina on Etsy, but that was rare. Most of us were nice and bourgeois, so to have people in our community acting out like this (and with no memory of how or why) was really terrifying.

  Which explains why everyone is walking on eggshells, I thought, watching as Marge Tanner—returning to her bakery after delivering pastries to Read and Weep for our bakery case—gave Gus Little—who bagged groceries at McKinley’s but was really a stone spirit—a nervous nod. The idea that someone might be nervous around Gus illustrated how badly Rockabill nerves were frayed.

  I’d grown up thinking Gus was mentally a bit slow, when in reality he was sort of like a dryad, only instead of bound to a tree he was bound to a rock somewhere right outside town. Like their namesakes, stone spirits were often unflappable and a bit obtuse, meaning that Gus had never done anything to raise eyebrows in his life. Unless being someone who never raised eyebrows did, indeed, raise eyebrows.

  Things are bad, I realized, grimly, as Marge gave me my own wary greeting, as if to assess whether I’d freak out on her, before stopping to chat. We exchanged some pleasantries about Belize and about the bakery, Giving Gus time to walk into McKinley’s. After I’d said good-bye to Mrs. Tanner, I walked past McKinley’s, glad Gus was inside so I didn’t have to force a conversation with him. Even my knowing his true nature and sharing his supernatural world with him didn’t make socializing with the stone spirit any easier.

  I ducked into the bookstore and was immediately ambushed. “Oof,” was my awesomely articulate response to being shoved, face first, into Grizzie’s surgically enhanced bosoms the second I was through the door.

  “My dahlink,” she purred. “Where have you been all my life? How could you abandon me for Belize?”

  “Ahm thowwy,” I mumbled into her cleavage.

  “Fickle bitch,” she replied, finally releasing me. “Now, tell me everything. And when did you start hanging around with Juan Besonegro?”

  “Um… who?”

  “Juan! The artist! Since when did you guys know each other?”

  “Do you mean An… wan? The big guy?” I asked, finally putting together that Grizzie meant Anyan.

  “Ooooh, is he big? I thought he would be.”

  I blinked at her.

  “Yes,” she said and sighed, disappointed. “The big guy, from the other night. The way you two were looking at each other, I figured you’d know each other’s names, at least. And maybe each other’s ticklish spots.”

  “Yeah, sorry, I do know… Juan. I’m just out of it today…”

  “So, where is his ticklish spot? And can I have a go?” Grizzie asked, raising her hands to scritch her fingernails in the air, a gesture that I found alarming, to say the least.

  “His ticklish spot is right next to your pregnant girlfriend, you slattern,” I replied, backing away from her talons, painted a lurid shade of neon green to match her black wraparound dress with its neon-green-winged lapels, hem, and French cuffs.

  “Ugh, don’t remind me,” Grizzie sighed, mock seriously. “I’m totally ball-and-chained. I’ll be forced to start wearing housecoats. Actually, I would rock a house coat,” Grizzie said, as she struck a dramatic vamp pose with one arm in the air and one foot out to the side, toes pointed.

  “You totally would,” I said, heading toward the back so I could drop off my stuff before starting work. I knew Griz would follow.

  “Seriously, though, how do you know Juan?” she asked, her curiosity obviously very piqued.

  “How do you know Juan?” I countered, trying to figure out what I needed to know of Anyan’s human persona before answering.

  “Who doesn’t know Juan?” Grizzie asked, rolling her eyes and leaning against the doorframe as I set down my bag and jean jacket on the table in the back room. “He’s totally famous, totally mysterious, and a total all-in-one sausagefest.”

  “Classy, Griz,” I said, giggling.

  “What, it’s true!” she replied, poking a fingernail into the side of her long, black French braid to scratch her scalp. “He’s hotter than candy on a stick. Huckleberry, cherry, or lime.”

  “He is definitely hot—” I started to say, before Grizzie interrupted me with some more Juan worship.

  “I mean, he’s not pretty, by any means. Not like Ryu. Whatever happened to Ryu, anyway?” I started to reply, but she didn’t let me. Grizzie was on a roll. “Who cares, he was pretty, but too fancy. Who wants fancy? Our Jane needs someone stable… someone grounded… someone more domestic…”

  I blushed, realizing that Anyan was all of these things. Yes, he was a dangerous-ninja-dog-man, but he was also everything Grizzie was describing.

  “Someone who’ll throw you down on the bed and show you how it’s done… Someone who’ll tie you up and let you know what it is to be a woman… Someone who’ll spank that little—”

  “Grizzie!” I barked, bringing her sexual tirade to a halt, and just in the nick of time. She’d gone all glassy-eyed and drooling.

  “Oh, sorry. I get carried away.”

  “Oh, do you, now?” was my sarcasm-laden response.

  “Anyway, he’s hot and I’ll bet he’ll spank you.”

  My only rejoinder was a throaty whimper, my mouth gone dry.

  “So, you know him how?” Grizzie said, interrupting me before I could plunge too deeply into my own Anyan-spanking fantasy.

  “Um… we met… hiking. He has a cabin in the woods.”

  “You? Hiking?” It was Grizzie’s turn to make free and easy with the sarcasm.
She had a point.

  “It was more… strolling,” I clarified, lying my pants off. “By the beach. You know I like to walk by the beach.”

  “But you’ve been in Belize.”

  Shit! I thought, my brain shuffling away.

  “We met a while ago, while I was strolling. Then we… uh… we saw each other on the plane.”

  “To Belize?” Grizzie asked, clearly not believing me.

  “No, that would be ridiculous, obviously,” I said, although that was totally what I’d been going to say. “On the connecting flight. Back to Eastport.”

  “Ohhhh, okay. And you guys talked? Reconnected? Maybe joined the mile-high club?”

  “We talked. There’s been no… joining, as of yet,” replied Jane True, Ms. Suddenly Shy.

  “Awww, you’re blushing!” Grizzie cried out, excitedly. “You like him! You like Juan!”

  I couldn’t deny it, so I just blushed redder.

  Grizzie stopped giggling. “You really like him,” she said, suddenly serious. “You do, don’t you?”

  I didn’t know it was possible, but I think I managed an even brighter shade of tomato. “Yeah, I like him. But, I mean, it is what it is,” I said. “He’s a lot older than me. And he’s really famous,” I said, knowing that Grizzie thought I meant Anyan was famous as the artist apparently known as Juan Besonegro.

  “So?” Grizzie asked, all combative.

  “So, he’s out of my league,” I started, stopping when Grizzie held up both hands, palms facing outward.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Jane. I saw the way he looks at you. He was staring like he wanted to get right the hell in your league, in front of all of us, at the bar.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I know we’re attracted to each other. And I know it’ll probably go a lot further, and soon. But it’s gotta be different for him. He’s been around, Griz. I’m some girl who fell in love with her high school sweetheart and hasn’t ever left home. I doubt we think the same way about stuff.”

  “What do you mean, ‘think the same way about stuff’?”

  “I mean…” Pausing to gather my thoughts, I turned around so I could half sit, half lean on our break table.

  What did I mean? I realized that I wasn’t entirely sure, so I started talking: “I mean that he’s already lived a lot. He’s probably been in love dozens of times, gone on hundreds of first dates, gotten all dramatic about different people, and then realized he was silly. Eventually, it’s gotta stop, doesn’t it? It all has to get a bit… pointless?” Grizzie made a face, so I pulled back. “Okay, not pointless. But less big, right? I mean, how many times can you fall head over heels in love before you start to wonder if love really exists?”

  “Dude, was there a puddle of cynicism waiting on your wrong side of the bed this morning?” Grizzie asked, her expression clearly horrified. “Life is always big. It’s your life.”

  But what if you’ve lived a hundred lifetimes? I asked silently, thinking of the preternatural calm of the Alfar. Is it still “life,” then? Or something a lot less lively?

  “Take me as an example,” Grizzie was saying. “If you want to talk about life experience, I’ve ratcheted up quite a bit in my time. I’ve done lots of crazy, extreme things. I’ve not only been around the block, but I’ve burned the block down. At least twice.”

  I couldn’t help but agree. Grizzie had lived a very crazy life.

  “And I’m still enjoying life, Jane. Cuz that’s how I choose to be. I think that you’re mistaking certain people—people who have this ‘been there, done that’ attitude to everything—with people who’ve experienced a lot of stuff. They’re not the same thing. I bet the people who walk around acting like they’ve already done everything twice were walking around like that before they did anything. It’s just who they are. People who want to live? They live.”

  Bizarrely enough, the person I thought about as Grizzie finished speaking was Morrigan. She’d convinced everyone she was everything Alfar immortality represented: something cold and detached, like a living zombie.

  But Morrigan fooled us all, I thought, realizing that what Grizzie said had a lot of merit. Yeah, Morrigan was clearly a conniving, evil bitch. But while those weren’t the best character traits, they were definitely a choice she made and they were definitely anything but cold and detached. She’d chosen to live as a cheating, murderous, purist monster, but she’d definitely chosen to live.

  But that doesn’t mean you, Jane True, can compete with all of Anyan’s life experience, my brain cut in, rather rudely. My libido gave it a raspberry, but it was still too caught up in its own spanking fantasy to formulate any kind of real argument against my pessimistic logic.

  “You don’t look convinced,” Grizzie said, frowning.

  “No, I think you’re totally right about what you were saying,” I replied, shaking my head. “I think you’re right about choosing to live versus just living.”

  “But?”

  “But… that doesn’t change the fact that he’s lived a lot. And I haven’t.”

  Grizzie’s wide mouth frowned even more, and she walked toward me until she was perched next to me on the break table, one arm around my waist.

  “Are you saying that you think he’s too good for you, Jane True?”

  My silence was my only answer.

  Grizzie sighed, clearly at a loss. “That’s just… stupid,” she replied, eventually.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Grizzie laughed too, but without a lot of humor.

  “I don’t really know what to say, honey. You know I think you’re amazing and perfect and gorgeous. And I know Juan wants you and he’d be silly to pass up the opportunity you represent. But who knows what another person’s priorities are? Some people still think Tracy was crazy for taking up with me, or that I’m crazy for staying with Tracy.”

  I frowned at her: my turn to protest.

  “I know you’re not one of them,” Griz said, squeezing me closer. “What I’m saying is that people never make any sense. Who knows what the hell they’re thinking half the time. But there was something about you and Juan together that was… comfortable. Sexy and sparky, and all of that… but also comfortable. You look like you fit. Fit for what, I dunno. Maybe just for a few months of jungle sex, maybe for a lengthy future culminating in an old age full of tons of grandkids and a smattering of broken hips. Who knows? But in the meantime, give yourself a fucking break. You’re a catch, for anybody’s net.”

  I strained upward to kiss Grizzie on the cheek. I wasn’t so sure about my being a catch, but she was right about the other stuff: I didn’t know anything about what was going on between Anyan and me, because there was nothing yet to know. I needed to stop worrying about it and let things play out.

  Hopefully with added jungle sex and little or no hip breakage, I thought, wondering for the trillionth time in our friendship at Grizzie’s propensity for terrifying imagery.

  “Enough about me,” I said. “I want to hear all about you, Tracy, and the babies.”

  Grizzie grinned, and her happiness was so dazzling that it made her earlier ball-and-chain jokes all the funnier.

  “Well, Tracy’s being a total cow and pooh-poohing all my baby names. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with Lesbia! It was a perfectly acceptable name to the Romans.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Walking toward Anyan’s that night, I was still giggling over Grizzie and Tracy’s Great Baby Name Debacle. For a girl, Tracy was leaning toward Christie, Loren, and Abigail, while Grizzie was adamant that Lesbia, Sappho, or an unpronounceable Goddess symbol were totally the way to go. It got even worse with boys names. Tracy had suggested Wyatt, James, or Thomas, but Grizzie was gunning for Rock A. Billy or the completely inexplicable choice of Manchego.

  The thing with Grizzie is you could never really be sure when she was serious.

  Manchego’s gotta be a joke, I thought, keeping my focus on the hilarity of the afternoon’s events rather than on the fact that I was walking toward Anyan’s. If I had
stopped to think about it, however, my thoughts might have gone something like this:

  VIRTUE: You’re just going to train with Nell, as usual. Don’t get all crazy.

  LIBIDO: I’ll give Anyan a training!

  VIRTUE: You’ll do no such thing. (A) He is undoubtedly the one who will do the training, both inside and outside of the bedroom. (B) This is the time for magical training. Not the naughty kind!

  LIBIDO: Mmm. Naughty.

  VIRTUE: Focus!

  LIBIDO: I’ll give Anyan a focus!

  VIRTUE: I hate you.

  After that little exchange, both my virtue and my libido quieted. Then I noticed how sweet and crisp the air was scented by the ocean and the first hints of spring. In other words, I was really enjoying the long walk back to Anyan’s when my cell phone rang. I dug it out of my purse, and then frowned when I saw who was calling.

  “Hey, Ryu,” I said, after taking the call.

  “Jane!” Ryu said, practically shouting. “It’s so good to hear your voice!”

  I paused before speaking. In my memory, it had been only a little bit ago that we’d had our final spat outside the Healer’s mansion. But for him, I’d been comatose for a month. During which he’d apparently come and visited me a few times and helped to investigate the humans who had attacked us. In other words, he’d had a month to act as a good friend, rather than the angry ex he’d been after he’d again found me with Anyan.

  “Thank you, Ryu. And thanks for coming to Rockabill and helping out.”

  “Oh, no, it was the least I could do. How are you feeling?”

  “Totally fine. Ridiculously well, actually. Although we’ve still got a lot going on here.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve been talking with Caleb about it. Do you need me up there?”

  The question was a loaded one, if I’d ever heard it.

  “You know what?” I said, carefully. “I don’t think so. But if we do, you know we’ll call you right away.”