“Bye.” I gritted my teeth in irritation. Somehow my car, spacious moments before, seemed overfull. I wasn’t sure if his scent permeated the very air around me and stole the available oxygen, or if he filled the space with emotions I didn’t care to deal with.
I stared at the road and hoped he would disappear. We were getting close to Jefferson, and I didn’t want to meet Shawna with Chance in tow. Who knew what damage he would do, and I had just landed the job. I had to get rid of him.
Chance is…hard to describe. Hair some shade between brown and red framed eyes so green, they reminded me of beer bottles. No one knew exactly what he was. He wasn’t a vampire, a witch, a siren, a were, or an elf. He was something Other. Maybe an alien. As if the ability to shove power into me akin to eating a bolt of lightning wasn’t daunting enough, when he hung out with me, a silver cord attached us. He claimed the cord meant we were soul mates and that he’d waited his supposedly long life for me. I felt pretty confident he was nuts. “I have a meeting in a couple minutes and self-defense with you later. Can’t you leave me alone until then? You can’t touch me anyway. Remember, the game?”
“I could leave you alone, but it would be dull. Besides, your little protective game has an interesting rule. I can’t touch you, but you can touch me. I have to be close for you to do that when you want.” He tucked a lock of hair behind one of his ears. “Have you ever considered the lyrics to that song?”
I sighed. “I am not going to touch you, and no, I have not considered the lyrics, but I am sure you’re about to tell me why I should have.” He wanted to have some deep, meaningful, conversation before he left me alone, even though I wasn’t going to get it—I never did. I tossed my hair back and then remembered I didn’t have enough to toss. A muscle in my jaw hardened as I remembered that this too was his fault.
He gestured a hand at me, and I licked my lips as I looked at those long fingers. Although logic reminded me I had no interest in him, my libido sometimes had other ideas. Like when it popped a picture in my head of those fingers on my skin, for instance. “You should touch me because you know you want to. Since you’re not ready to admit that, let’s look at the lyrics, pretend your life is a sitcom.”
“First my life is compared to a comic book, now a sitcom. Today is going to be one of those Mondays, isn’t it?” I met his gaze for the first time since he’d poofed into my car. Big mistake.
The cord suddenly appeared between us. It thrummed like a pulse in my chest, and I sucked in a breath at the shock of it. I shut my eyes for a moment and tried to block the feelings out before remembering to watch the road. Through the open cord, I sensed him tremble and collect himself. I stared down the highway ignoring him and the visible connection. He might have been a lot older, but the cord clarified that the unfamiliar feelings affected to him, too. He wasn’t fond of all of them either. I kept my eyes deliberately on the road and waited.
He laughed and pretended that the intimate connection hadn’t happened. “Mia must have compared your life to a comic book.”
“Superman.” I wanted to fill the car with sound to make the moment pass, but I could barely get out the single word past the overwhelming rightness of the connection I tried to deny.
“Okay, back to my point. That song…the lyrics. In life, we often forget that all we have to do is have faith. Faith is the basis of life. If the Crusaders had had faith in their Lord, would they have killed the Muslims?”
“What?” See? Already he lost me.
“The Muslims. The Christians killed the Muslims because they were not Christians. If the Christians had truly had faith, they would have realized that the Lord could have converted their enemies without slaughter. Instead, the void of faith resulted in loss of life. Do you have faith?” His cheerful smile lit up his eyes.
“Are you asking me if I am a Christian?” I still wasn’t sure where his lecture was going.
“What?” His brows furrowed, the smiling façade gone like a cloud had traveled in front of the sun.
“Or are you asking me if I have faith?”
“No! I am saying that faith is powerful. Faith in people is powerful. Do you have faith in those around you? Do you have faith in me?” He tapped his chest as he spoke, and I looked again at his long fingers a moment before focusing back on the road.
“Loads—in the guy who claims to be my soul mate.” I tried to lace my tone with sarcasm, but my throat went dry as I imagined those deft fingers on my skin while his mouth covered mine. I was torn on which I wanted to do more, pull over and rip off his clothes or pull over and hit him until my fists hurt. I leaned toward the latter. Chance always gets a reaction out of me, just not the one he seems to hope for.
“Faith is the glue that holds society together.”
Now he knows it all. Pompous ass. “Okay.” I tried to sound amicable hoping he would drop it and disappear.
“You aren’t getting this.” His tone went flat. A flick of his wrist at my radio and the song start playing again. Now that was cool, since it was live radio, not a CD or XM. Impressed, I nodded to him. He rolled his eyes at me. “Listen to the song.” The order in his tone would have made my hackles rise if I was a dog and had hackles.
Men. I listened. The lyrics still said the same thing. “So you want me to have a little faith in you?”
“That would be nice, yes, but I would like you to have a little faith, period. You don’t really believe in anyone or anything right now. Not even yourself.”
“How in the hell would you know? You just met me!” I tried not to yell at him but I failed miserably. “Is this some wax on, wax off, crap?”
“You just met me, but that doesn’t seem to stop you from making a lot of judgment calls about me.” His expression was dark when I darted another glance his way.
“You’re nuts. I am right about that one.” I bit my lip and turned my eyes back to the road, hoping he would take a hint. He threw up his hands and poofed out again. I had a feeling he would pick up the line of conversation again later, making it a temporary reprieve.
He’d timed his exit well, since I’d arrived in the center of town. I waited through a stop light, then proceeded downtown to park near the Jefferson Diner. Hunched beneath my coat, I dodged past two other patrons to enter the small restaurant. A scan of the room showed Shawna toward the back, a laptop opened on the table in front of her. Braided black hair, some dyed bright red, hung around dark mahogany skin. She reached onto the seat next to her as I approached, sifted through files, and handed me one. “The Harbor Hammer was a mugger in the 1930’s in Ashtabula Harbor.”
I opened the file and fought to catch up. She pulled several eight by ten, black and white pictures of the harbor as it must have looked back in the thirties. I’ve seen similar shots, most of us who lived around there had at some point or another. People in fancy clothes, women in bustles, men in suits and spectacles, walking down streets that looked pretty much as they did today. The Harbor teemed with sailors and tall ships, bustling with enterprise—a far cry from the current rustbelt economy.
Tapping the photos, Shawna sipped her coffee with her free hand and she explained. “In the 1930’s, the Harbor District was an important area. Trade came through, primarily by ships coming in from Lake Erie, and unloaded onto railcars making Ashtabula Harbor a major port. New York, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Cleveland…all of the major cities of the day were easily accessed by rail through Ashtabula Harbor. As a major port of call, the harbor had everything a sailor could want…cat houses, bars, a big city…and a killer. The Harbor Hammer had a good run, too. He took a hammer and hit the drunken sailors in the head then he robbed them. Pretty up front and simple crime. They never caught him. He just stopped hammering after about year, and they assumed he either retired or died.
“Years passed. Then, mysteriously, another Harbor Hammer had a year long run. Once again, never caught. A few years later, another. And then we see the pattern forming. Every leap year there is a Hammer who hangs around for twelve
months and then disappears. Guess what? Local authorities have found two bodies already.”
She pulled out more photographs and laid them on the table in front of me, this time of crime scenes. Okay, when Sculley looked at this kind of stuff, she didn’t toss her cookies, so neither would I. But I wanted to. Ick, is that real blood? Logic suggested yes, but my brain did not want to digest the information.
Wait, I am one of the monsters, and I’m dating a flipping vampire. I was not allowed to be grossed out by a dead body. Who was I kidding? I was so grossed out. I tapped the pictures together neatly and passed them back.
“So, it’s a copycat.” I don’t watch NCIS for nothing.
“No, I don’t think so. It goes back even further than the thirties. I want you to look into it. If I’m right, I might be looking at finding bodies for the next year. So far, I have only two. That means over three hundred more bodies are possible if this continues as it has before. Or you could ask some questions, and I might have a shot at finding a killer. What could it hurt?”
Put that way…”I’ll ask around.” I stifled my excitement. I could really make a difference and help people! Smiling would probably give the wrong impression, so I bit back the emotion and the expression.
“Here are the files I have on it. I don’t know how much any of it will help, since no one has ever caught any of the Hammers but, here.” Shawna passed the folders to me and her eyes flashed gold for a moment. It must have been a trick of the light. I was on the case.
CHAPTER Two
I got in my car and flipped through the folders while I waited for the engine to warm up. I could not believe I had real FBI files. Wow. Okay, enough of my nerd moment. Well, not quite. I called Mia and told her about the files—and the Harbor Hammer. We ran a couple of ideas, but sadly, our best one revolved around barhopping. It had worked last week to solve a couple murders, but it had gotten me in trouble, too. People nearing forty should stay out of bars.
Unfortunately, since the killings had occurred in and around taverns since the nineteen thirties, they probably would not stop happening there just so I could stay away from the bar scene. Perhaps my boycott of bars would have to be temporarily forestalled.
As soon as I told Mia good-bye and hung up, my cell phone gleefully began to play the theme song to Gilligan's Island again. I listened for a moment. You see, even though the readout clearly stated that my mother had called me, I found it difficult to be in a bad mood about it when listening to the cheerful theme song of Gilligan's Island.
Once I had stalled long enough, I flipped the phone open. “Good morning!”
“Janie.” Mother’s tone was not even falsely cheerful.
Laughter like bells and music bubbled audibly in the background. “Are you in Court?”
“Yes.” Apparently, someone else was having a monosyllable Monday.
But she had called me, so she must have had a reason. “How are things, Mom?” I told myself she had called to see how Vickie and I were settling in. Or maybe to give me a lecture on my wardrobe, or maybe…
“You came into power.”
Or maybe the Fairy Council knew I had come into power, and as the Queen of the Fairies, and Goblins, and Elves, and all that crap, she needed to either control me or put a contract out for my death. Good old Mom!
“Yeah, I meant to call.” I twirled a strand of hair around a finger as I spoke. I decided the less I said at that point, the better. My best bet seemed to be to stick with the monosyllable. It was my friend.
“We are going to have to talk about what we’re going to do about this.”
I wanted to choke. Let me explain why. My mother never even felt it necessary to tell me I could come to power, not to mention how to avoid it. She told me there weren't vampires. Had I known vampires actually lived and breathed—well, sort of—I could have at least avoided them when I met them. To top it all off, she never mentioned that the vampires had killed off all the sirens.
Except for me, of course, who she and my father created as some sort of sick, sexual, science experiment. Like, if we mix your siren sperm with my royal fairy egg, I wonder what we’ll get? Oh, look! Yup! A really badass monster! Let’s hide it and never tell it the truth is so it can’t protect itself!
So we weren't going to do anything. As far as I could tell, we had never done anything except share DNA at one very critical point.
However, saying this aloud, since my mother reigns queen of all the weird and strange in daylight, seemed beyond unwise. “Yeah, I have been really busy. You know, the move and the holidays and all.”
She tapped her fingers in irritation. My mom is a champion finger tapper. Creatures a lot bigger and badder than me fear that tapping.
I was not always as circumspect. Besides, I survived adolescence with the woman. I lost a lot of fear as a teenager.
Her impatience echoed through the phone even before she spoke. “I think you will find it wise to make time.”
“Mother, I am not one of your minions.” Always good to throw that in. She forgets sometimes.
“Janie, we have gone through this before. You are my daughter. You have responsibilities to this family.”
“Mom, we are not the mafia. We aren't even Italian. You are Irish. I get the Italian from Dad’s side. Well, more Grecian than Italian, but still, anyway, the whole family thing—”
“Enough. You will come home to Court and we will talk. It is not a request. You will come home, or we will bring you. You will fulfill your responsibilities.” Her voice sounded firm. She had used to use that same voice when she said you will clean your room.
I hadn’t listened then either. As a kid, I’d shoved dirty laundry and magazines under the bed and into the closet. Hell, I still did those things as an adult. I haven't really changed all that much. She knew that.
“Mom, really, what responsibilities could I fulfill? I am not doing any fairy crap for you. I don’t have any fairy skills. Well, I moved a rock once. Besides that, Nada. I am not going up against the vampires for you, so you are not getting anywhere there, either.” I shouldn't have said all that. I had a big mouth. I knew that about myself.
She tapped louder. “Are you or are you not coming to the raft so we can talk?”
I tapped my steering wheel. I caught myself, gritted my teeth, and stopped. “No.”
“Fine. Arrangements will be made.”
“Mom!” I sounded like I had when I was ten, but I couldn't help it. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll find out, young lady.” She hung up on me.
I punched my steering wheel.
Fucking fairy. God damned, fucking, meddling, fucking fairies can never leave me alone.
I apologized to my car, as it had not done anything wrong and looked at my cell phone. It wasn't time for my self-defense lesson yet—another of my monumentally stupid ideas. I was a siren. I could sing the energy from my enemies. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure how any of that really worked.
Sirens, in folklore, sang so beautifully that men would wreck their ships in an attempt to get to them. When sirens sing, men go mad. What folklore did not cover was what was in it for the siren.
What the siren gets out of it is the light.
The brain is run by electricity. Electrical impulses are sent and received and that is what tells the nerves what to do, what makes thought happen. That is life. Sirens feed off that energy.
I feed off that, apparently.
I had begun reading about all of it lately, desperately seeking answers that I’m sure my ancestors shared by simpler means than web surfing. I’d read just about everything, including articles on how epileptics have the equivalent of tiny thunderstorms in their brains, also known as seizures. And that animals can tell when they are going to have a seizure because they can sense the build-up of electricity.
In theory, I could too. When I get hungry, the mental electricity glowed like, say, candle flame glittering around humans. Vampires were brighter—I assumed because
it took more of a charge to keep the dead walking. Or maybe they’d built up more of a charge after being around for so long? I wasn’t sure, and it wasn’t like there were any other sirens around to ask. Chance glowed like a supernova. He had more energy than the sun, and I hadn’t the foggiest why. I did know he would make a fantastic battery.
To get back to my monumentally stupid idea, I agreed to take self-defense lessons from Chance.
Okay, I had a logical reason.
Really.
Since I had become a siren, I picked up unknown abilities and hungers. I didn’t know what to expect and had no one to ask and, as the only known half-fairy, half-siren, no one could have explained my abilities or disabilities anyway. Also, the minute everyone figured out what I had become, lots of people would want to kill me. I needed to be able to defend myself and Vickie.
But I didn't know how.
If I had gone to a regular self-defense instructor, I might have accidentally killed the guy. I already had tally marks from three kills. Apparently, when sirens kill, even if they don't mean to, they get very sensitive tattoo-like marks that resemble stars and moons. I did not like them. I did not want to kill, and I did not want more marks if I could help it. I had to learn to control my hunger while not getting killed or offing others.
Both of these things made Chance an ally. Well, if I could get him off his soul mate kick. He couldn’t be my soul mate, something I’d explained to him in no uncertain terms.
I’m not entirely sure he is a good guy. Also I have a really great boyfriend.
I wanted to be with Vance, and I had a better shot of getting over my purely physical attraction to Chance if he cooperated and we got past all the soul mate nonsense.
My self-defense lesson was supposed to be at one thirty. I looked at my cell phone. At only quarter to eleven, I had time to blow and no way to reach Chance to change the time.
Wait. My cell phone. That was it. I flipped it open to recent calls.
A few nights ago, when Mia had been kidnapped, Chance called me at some ungodly hour of the night. The number had to still be in there.
Odd Melody (Odd Series Book 2) Page 2