by Jenn Bennett
A ring.
An engagement ring.
Tiers of rectangular stones surrounded an elongated emerald-cut diamond. A fairly sizable one and damn heavy. The setting was geometric and sleek, very classy and modern. The diamonds alone had to have cost a pretty penny, but it was what lay inside the center stone that made it priceless.
Lon’s halo. Gold-flecked green swirled inside the stone. Demons who could afford it hired a gemplexer, a sort of chemist who could siphon off a bit of halo and trap it inside certain gemstones. It was more than a little expensive and enormously romantic to offer a piece of yourself to someone else.
My throat tightened. Was this Yvonne’s engagement ring? God, if he’d been wearing it all these years, was he holding a torch for her? Or maybe he just kept it because he didn’t want a piece of his halo ending up in a pawn shop. Wanting to believe it was the latter, I slid the ring back where it was, out of my sight. Then I curled up against his side and held on to him as if he were mine.
Late Sunday morning, while Cady and Lon were sleeping in Twentynine Palms, Jupe tried one last code on his dad’s library door. The fingerprint mechanism could be bypassed with a numerical master code, but the system only let you try three wrong codes before locking it down for twenty-four hours. Which was exactly what was happening now—the flashing red lights told him he’d failed again before the keypad shut off.
“Goddammit,” Jupe muttered. “What is the code?”
“Jupiter?”
Crap. The Holidays were already back from church.
“I’m just getting something in the studio,” Jupe called back as he quickly strode down the hallway and popped into his dad’s photography room. He scanned the tables, looking for the “something” he was supposed to be getting as his phone buzzed.
He glanced at the screen. Leticia.
His heart leaped inside his chest. He fumbled with the screen to answer it, nearly dropping the phone in his haste. “Hello,” he said a little too loudly.
“Hey, it’s me,” Leticia’s voice said in his ear.
He nearly melted into the floor. “Hey. What up?”
“You busy?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.” That’s it, nice and smooth. Chicks liked it when you acted reserved. That’s what his friend Jack always said, anyway.
But Leticia didn’t sound all that happy. In fact, she sounded downright pissed. “Look, are you or aren’t you busy? Because I’m about to do you a big favor, but if you don’t have time—”
“I have time, I have time!” he said quickly, then regretted sounding so eager.
She didn’t seem to notice. “My sister is about to drive into La Sirena. Her boyfriend lives there.”
“Okay . . .” Jupe wasn’t sure what that meant, but he really didn’t want to think about Leticia’s sister any more than he had to.
“I’m coming with her,” Leticia finally explained. “Our grandma lives in La Sirena. She used to know the Duvals when she was grandmaster of the lodge before my mom took over. I thought maybe we could get some information from her.”
“Man, I don’t know. I’m already feeling guilty about telling you about Cady. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to bring someone else into this.”
“Look, my grandma is pretty cool. She and my mom don’t get along, so you don’t have to worry about her blabbing anything.”
Jupe thought of his own grandmother, Gramma Rose, who was ten kinds of awesome, so maybe Leticia was right. Maybe he could trust someone else. He certainly wanted to. As much as he hated to admit it, the problem seemed bigger than something he and Leticia could handle alone.
Plus, he really wanted to see Leticia again. Like, r-e-e-eally wanted.
“Okay,” he said, blowing out a long breath. “Let’s do it. Where and when?”
“She lives in the Storybook Retirement Cottages near the Village. The condos across the street from the amusement park, the ones that look like Hobbit houses.”
“Oh, yeah! I know where that is.” And the Holidays wouldn’t say no to driving him there to meet up with Leticia. Come on, a retirement home? How much more unsexy and innocent could that be? Unless you were Jupe, in which case, it was the sexiest thing he’d ever heard in his life, because he’d get to be alone with Leticia. Sort of.
“Meet me at the front gate in forty minutes.”
And he did. The Holidays were totally fine with driving him there, just as he’d suspected. But when he tried to race out of the minivan, they weren’t having it.
“Hello,” Mrs. Holiday said from the passenger seat, rolling down her window to get a look at Leticia. She was wearing her pink hoodie and jeans, but today her dark hair glittered with tiny pins shaped like pink roses. The T-shirt beneath her hoodie was a mildly disturbing cartoon image of a princess slaying a knight while a dragon looked on in approval.
“Jupiter, aren’t you going to introduce us?” Mr. Holiday said from the driver’s seat, leaning next to Mrs. Holiday to peer out the window.
“Oh, uh, yeah. This is Leticia Vega. I met her . . . through Jack,” he lied. “She’s from Morella.” He wiped his sweaty palm on his jeans. “Leticia, this is Mr. and Mrs. Holiday.”
“Nice to meet you,” Leticia said.
Jupe should have stopped there, but he was nervous. “They’re my godparents, and they live in a house on our property. They’re not really man and woman, obviously. It’s a long story. But they’re married. They’re lesbians.”
Oh, God. He was talking way too much again.
But Leticia just lifted a brow at him before saying to them, “That’s cool.”
Mrs. Holiday smirked at him. She knew he was uncomfortable—she always knew. And she loved torturing him. It was practically her hobby. “Well, it’s lovely to meet you, Leticia. We’re headed to the farmer’s market down by the boardwalk. We’ll swing back here in an hour to pick you up, Jupiter. Exactly an hour.” She cut him a look that clearly said that if he wasn’t standing right there, she’d take away his laptop and phone. Again.
“I’ll be here. Later.” He quickly turned his back on them and strode toward the gate with Leticia, wincing when they tooted the horn twice as they drove away. Finally.
They walked through the main gate of the retirement community. She was right; the buildings really did look like overgrown Hobbit houses, with their round windows and sloping green roofs. They’d been there since Jupe could remember and fit in with the fairy-tale vibe of the Village.
“Sorry ’bout all that,” he mumbled.
“Don’t be. They were nice.” She leaned closer and sniffed the air near his face. “Are you wearing cologne?”
“Aftershave.”
“Oh.”
He only really had to shave, like, once a month, but she didn’t need to know that.
“It’s pretty strong.” She reached up and touched the skin near his mouth that he’d nicked with the razor.
“Oww,” he said, but he was too happy that she was touching him to notice the pain all that much. And he wanted to touch her back, but when she caught his eyes wandering to her breasts—which wasn’t his fault, really, because the dragon’s eyes were positioned in exactly the right places—he decided it was probably best to keep his hands above her neck. So he poked one of the rose pins in her hair. “What’s all this?”
“I like to experiment,” she said defensively, jerking her head away from him.
“It looks nice. Kinda different. I like weird things.”
Her face scrunched up, like maybe she was unsure how to take a compliment. So he smiled at her; she loosened up and smiled back. “Thanks. I guess I like weird things, too.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m here with you, aren’t I?” she said with a big grin that made her cheeks plump up prettily.
Jupe’s insides twanged like an out-of-tune guitar string. His own smile slid into something that felt like it was verging on stupid, but he didn’t care. She liked him. He liked her. This was the single greatest day of his
entire life. He couldn’t wait to tell his dad and Cady and his Auntie Adella. And he was even sort of glad the Holidays had seen Leticia, so they could confirm how hot she was in case no one believed him. Maybe he could sneak in a picture for good measure.
“Here’s my grandma’s place. I called her this morning, so she’s expecting us. But I didn’t tell her what we wanted, so let me do the talking.” Leticia lifted a brass knocker shaped like a frog and banged it. Then she rang the doorbell three times. “She doesn’t hear so well.”
After a few more bangs on the door, it finally swung open. A tiny gray-haired woman stood in the doorway. She was sort of round like Leticia, and they had the same big brown eyes. She was dressed in what the Holidays called upscale loungewear, just old-lady sweatpants with a matching pullover top. They didn’t look good on the Holidays, and they didn’t look good on Leticia’s grandmother. But the last time he’d pointed that out, he got bitched out. So he wisely kept his mouth shut.
“Mija,” the old woman said, hugging Leticia tightly. “What a good girl you are to come see your abuelita.”
Leticia pulled back and stepped to the side to introduce him. “This is my Grandma Vega, my dad’s mom. Grandma, this is my friend, Jupe,” she said in a loud voice. “The one I told you about on the phone.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“It’s short for Jupiter,” he said, extending his hand.
Her grandmother accepted it and squinted at him, looking him up and down as she shook. “You didn’t tell me he was a black boy.”
Oh, hell, no. Did she really just say that?
“Excuse me?” he said, snatching his hand back.
Leticia flashed Jupe an embarrassed look. “No one cares about those things anymore, Grandma.”
“I know, I’m too old to understand how the world works,” her grandmother said with heavy sarcasm. She glanced at him. “You a mulatto or just light-skinned?”
“Mulatto?” What was this, nineteenth-century New Orleans? Who the shit said that anymore?
“It’s called biracial, Grandma.”
The old woman shrugged. “I was only curious. What do I care? At least he’s not Salvadoran.” She glanced at Jupe. “You drink juice?”
What was the matter with this woman? Was this a trick question? “Uh, yeah?”
“Then I suppose you can both come on in and sit down.”
As she wandered off to a small kitchen, Leticia grabbed his hand and dragged him into a tiny living room decorated like a beige beach house. Not exactly what he expected from an old magician who used to run an occult order. “You didn’t tell me your grandmother was a racist,” he murmured. “Is she going to call me the N-word, too?”
Leticia looked supremely mortified.
“She’s not racist, she’s just old and opinionated,” she argued weakly. “Okay, well, at least she’s an equal-opportunity racist. She talks trash about white people, too. She even calls my father a pocho because he only uses Spanglish. She claims he’s too American and shames their family back in Ensenada.”
“And why does she hate Salvadorans?”
“Something about a political dispute that’s, like, two hundred years old. I don’t know. But when I was ten, she went to jail for starting a fistfight in a Safeway parking lot with a woman who had an El Salvador flag on her car.”
Jupe restrained a laugh. “Holy shit!”
“Shh,” Leticia said, giggling as she covered her mouth with her hand.
“Santo mierda!” he said, correcting himself in a muffled voice. He’d learned that one from a dubbed Spanish version of Animal House on Univision, and using it now reinforced his suspicion that the things he learned from watching TV had more real-world applications than the crap he learned at school.
“No, no, no!” Leticia whispered. “She hates swearing.”
He peeled her hand off his mouth and grinned down at her, quickly tracing a line down the center of her palm with his finger. Jesus, her skin was soft. When she didn’t pull away, he traced it again. “You have a long life line,” he murmured.
“I do?” she whispered back.
“I can read palms pretty well.” He couldn’t. But a couple of months back, he’d gleaned the basics of palmistry from a 1960s library book and had since been using it as an excuse to touch the hand of every girl in his class. All of that practice had been worth it for this fleeting moment with Leticia. Especially for the way she looked up at him, all breathless and lazy; her lips parted, but no words came out.
Just when it was getting good, shuffling footfalls behind them made him drop her hand like it was a hot potato. Just in time, too. Leticia’s grandmother set a tray down on a shell-covered coffee table and offered them each a can of mango juice with straws. When she leaned over, he saw a pendant around her neck with the same symbol he’d seen on the altar—the real one, not Leticia’s naked sister—at the lodge. A unicursal hexagram.
“Now, what do you want to chat about?” she said, sitting down in a recliner with her own can of juice. They sat across from her on a couch that seemed to suck Jupe’s body down into it.
Leticia kicked off her flats and drew her legs up. “Like I said on the phone, Jupe isn’t a savage. He attended Sophic Mass last week.”
“Who was the acting priestess? Cristina?”
Leticia groaned under her breath. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Why your mama allows that, I’ll never understand. Mark my words, that girl is going to end up in some pornographic film.”
“Grandma!”
“Oversexed girls like her shouldn’t be priestessing. In my day, all the women took turns, young and old. It wasn’t a beauty contest, it was sacred honor. Now Cristina’s talking about fake boobs.”
“Mama told her no.”
“Today maybe. But Cristina will wear her down. Spoiled brat can’t even bother to get out of the car and say hello to me,” she grumbled before narrowing her eyes at Jupe. “If you think my baby granddaughter here is going to get a boob job one day, you can think again.”
Part of Jupe wanted to tell the crazy old woman that Leticia’s boobs were awesome already, but mostly he was just freaking out. His Gramma would go Godzilla on him if he so much as made a joke about chicken breast. “My dad’s a photographer, so I’ve seen a lot of plastic surgery. Natural’s better.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” the old woman said very seriously, raising her juice can in confirmation.
Now Leticia looked freaked out. She quickly changed the subject. “Grandma, I told Jupe that you used to know the Duvals back in the day.”
“The who?”
“Duvals,” Leticia repeated in a louder voice. “You know, the serial killers.”
Her grandmother’s face brightened. “Oh, the Duvals. They weren’t killers.” They were, but Jupe didn’t argue. “That was just talk from savages, trying to destroy our order. The Duvals were celebrities. But I don’t talk about people in the order with outsiders.”
“But this is important.”
“I said no. And you promised me you wouldn’t tell your mama I knew the Duvals, but here you are, telling a—”
“A what?” Jupe said, sudden anger flaring inside his chest.
“Outsider,” she finished sourly.
Leticia and her grandmother immediately began conversing in angry Spanish, the speed of which was way too fast for Jupe’s junior-high Español skills to follow. And the more they fought, the worse he felt for Leticia. She was really trying, but every point she made was quickly Whac-A-Moled down by the old lady.
After weeks of fending off the temptation to use his knack, he made a split-second decision to make an exception. This was important, after all. He was doing this for Cady. And for his future brother or sister. And for Leticia.
Triple hero.
He took a deep breath and interrupted the grandmother-granddaughter throwdown. “Mrs. Vega,” he said in a loud voice, his persuasion turned up as high as he could crank it. “You can trust me, and you
want to help us by answering all our questions about the Duvals.” When he opened his eyes, both females were gaping at him, so he added in a knack-free voice, “Right?”
Grandma Vega’s shoulders relaxed. She looked a little dazed as she said, “You don’t look untrustworthy.”
“I can keep a secret like nobody’s business,” he assured her.
“I suppose there’s no sense in holding on to secrets about the dead, is there? What do you want to know?”
Cha-ching! Pride and victory zinged through him. Well, until he noticed Leticia staring a hole into the side of his face. Crap. Dealing with humans was rough. Not for the first time, he wondered how open Leticia was to the concept of Earthbounds. Cady once told him that some of the people in her order were believers, so maybe she was cool about it. You never could tell. Jupe had the Nox symbol all over his social media, but if Leticia knew what it meant, she hadn’t said anything.
Her grandmother was waiting for an answer, so Jupe put the Earthbound dilemma out of his mind for the moment and said, “So, yeah, umm, how did you meet the Duvals?”
“I first met them when I visited the main lodge down in Florida, back in 1979 for the annual summer solstice ritual. Everyone loved them. They were practically superstars of the occult world. And I met their first child, the boy. I can’t remember his name.”
They had another kid? Cady had a brother? This was brand-new information to Jupe.
“Anyway, he died in the mid-1980s—”
Oh.
“—so he must’ve been around two then. Strange child. I babysat him one afternoon, and he bit me so hard I had to have three stitches on my hand.” She pointed it out, but Jupe couldn’t see any scars.
“Is that the only time you saw them?” he asked.
“Oh, no. It was after the boy died that I saw them next,” she said, leaning back in her chair with her juice can. “Imagine my surprise when I bumped into them at Gifts of the Magi.”
Jupe glanced between Grandma Vega and Leticia.
“A magical supply shop on the highway between Morella and La Sirena,” Leticia explained. “It closed down a few years ago when the owner died.”