Walking on Sunshine

by Jennifer Stevenson

  I had boasted to Baz that his French stalker would find me. I hoped that were true. Here I stood, among nearly four thousand fans jostling for a sight of the biggest rock star since Madonna, looking for one small Eurotrash stalker.

  I sidled along the back wall, frustrated.

  The music started. Two enormous screens lit up on either side of the stage. Here came the lady herself: slender, agile, her features divinely perfect, her voice assured, her hips moving. I stopped examining the crowd. My mouth fell open.

  Yoni glowed with polished power. Also glory, for she celebrated love and joy, and, even while writhing with the microphone in her hand, she radiated dignity. I didn’t wonder that Baz was putting himself out for her comfort.

  I did wonder if Baz had noticed her divine strength. Yoni sang like a goddess.

  Someone tried to climb up onto the stage. Burly security guards ran forward and shoved him back.

  I remembered my mission.

  If the French stalker girl was present, and if Jake had hidden my navel string—my leash, as he had called it—among her possessions, then I might be able to draw myself to her, like a fish reeling itself in to shore.

  Yoni sang of love everlasting. The crowd around me sorted itself into embracing couples.

  I placed my hands over my navel. We were connected through my leash, the stalker girl and I, even if she didn’t realize it.

  I closed my eyes in concentration.

  Find the one who holds my leash. Amid the noise of the music and the cheering crowd, I pictured my quarry.

  She would be small and bright, an unignorable presence, a cloud of sparkling energy. I had resented that when she hung about the botánica, especially while she watched Jake die. Now I thought she might as well wear a crown blazing with colored lights. I couldn’t miss her, even in a room dominated by Baz’s singer.

  Yoni crooned, When I find you I will never let you go. The couples around me clung to one another. Surely everyone who heard her must be falling in love. A sense of peace and satisfaction overcame me.

  I touched my navel and closed my eyes, feeling for the tug on my leash.

  When I opened my eyes, the song had ended, and I was startled to find a woman in my arms. She snuggled close to me, her face against my chest, her perfumed curls soft on my cheek. My fingers locked together behind her back as we swayed.

  I stiffened and leaped away.

  “Why, hello!” she cried sunnily. “I thought you didn’t like me!”

  I stared slack-jawed, astonished at how close she had come to me without my noticing.

  Then the music started again. Couples reluctantly pulled apart around us. Yoni’s enormous, glowing, divine face appeared on the screen. Soon her magic would resume.

  The thought filled me with panic.

  “Come.” Taking hold of the stalker girl’s wrist, I backed to the door and towed her toward the exit.

  In the corridor I faced her. She was heart-stoppingly pretty: short blue-black curls, bright sapphire eyes, milky skin, kittenish nose, smiling mouth.

  She commanded, “Show me how you did that last night, turning from old to young.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sophie,” she said, and shook her curls impatiently. “Show me.”

  She had my leash. Could I wiggle out of it?

  “What do you mean? It was very dark.”

  She stamped her foot. “Show me!”

  “Not here,” I countered, and led her outdoors onto the plaza facing the lake. The summer’s night air was thick and hot, even near the lake. Faint pink smog from Lake Shore Drive drifted east toward us.

  Sophie pulled free and plopped down on a bench.

  “Now,” she said, “show me how you become old checkers guy and then young scary tattooed guy.”

  I rolled my eyes at the nicknames. “Very well.” Scary, was I?

  I stood facing her. I pictured who I wanted her to see—

  I extended my hand, dark, wrinkled, and heavily veined, my palm worn whiter as if from work.

  The girl Sophie gasped. “Remarkable! Now go back!”

  Obligingly, I returned to myself.

  “And which one is you? Truly?”

  I shrugged. “Who knows what he truly is?”

  She shook her head wisely. “Bon. This will be very useful, I think, if I decide you should impersonate the vicomte for my father.”

  “I—what?” I went cold. “What vicomte?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You and Jake have been taking my family’s money for decades.” She didn’t seem outraged. “It’s good that you knew Jake, because you will need to look and sound like him.” She looked at me sternly. “Papa must never know that Jake has died. He would win without a fight. Whatever you do not know, I can coach you about it, so that you can answer all Papa’s questions correctly.”

  My mouth moved like a fish’s. “Who are you?”

  She dimpled and curtseyed. “I’m Sophie de Turbin. Jake’s cousine.”

  The blood stopped cold and sluggish in my heart. “Impossible.”

  “Silly! Jake was Clarence Gide Sans-Souci de Turbin, le Vicomte Montmorency.”

  She knew—she thought— “Then your father is—”

  “Papa is the current heir to Jake’s vicomté, his title and his property. It would be very bad for my papa to inherit them.” She nodded decisively. “We will stop him.”

  I felt breathless. I had planned to pursue my inheritance, and my inheritance had come stalking me.

  I said, “Did Jake know all this?” Of course he did. That was Jake. Had this girl child come to the U.S. to find me? Baz had reported that her father was here, so that much must be true. But her father believed she was stalking the singer. She’d found Jake, and Jake had told her . . . what? I doubted that she knew much of her father’s plans. Who would trust her in any weighty matter? Jake had done so, but Jake had been mad in his own way. “Wait. Who do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know. What’s your name?”

  “You can call me Clarence,” I said.

  “No, really.”

  I shrugged. “My friends call me Veek.”

  “Veeeek,” she crooned. Her conversation flitted away again, butterfly-brained. “Don’t you love Yoni’s music? She is a great one. She is la sirene whose song cannot be refused.” I started at her use of this name, La Sirene, the vodou name of the queen of the sea.

  She seized my hand. “Let’s dance like we did before.” She began humming Yoni’s song of love everlasting.

  As she pulled me to her, I jerked away. “Don’t you know what I am?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of vodou demon Jake captured, I imagine. Why, what are you?” Her head cocked.

  In frustration I cried, “I’m a scary black vodou demon with tattoos! I am not nice for you to know!”

  She dimpled. “You’re adorable. I don’t think you’re mean at all.” She swaggered her hips against me and twined her arms round my neck.

  She was warm. I felt burning hot.

  “I think,” she said softly, pulling my head down until her lips touched my ear, “you’re gentle and good. Such a good, good boy,” she whispered.

  I couldn’t fight her combination of scent, softness, and trusting kittenish charm. My arms, rigid at my sides, relaxed.

  She rubbed her cheek against mine. “You can touch me, you know.” I let my hands come up to rest lightly on her hips. “So tell me,” she whispered, “what you think you are.”

  “I’m a sex demon,” I blurted.

  She pulled back at that and looked at me, reproachful but kind. “No, you’re not.” Her eyes grew bigger. “Why do I feel like you own me?”

  She was like a small, fragrant freight train—one that runs off the rails, in circles.

  She tossed her head as if shaking off her thought. “Tell me about you and Jake.”

  I turned away from her to look at the acre of prairie, and beyond it the lake, immense and silent and smooth, the gulls asleep on its
bosom like so many floating white smudges, and the stars trying to poke through beyond the lights of the city. Suddenly I was filled again with the pain of Jake’s passing.

  “He was my oldest friend. He stood by me through many troubles, ever since I was fifteen and he was twenty. Of course, he caused many of them. He was a trickster, always up to some game. I was a sober boy,” I admitted.

  Sophie had me there. Such a good boy. I smiled at the memory of my sober boyhood, so much safer and saner than my mad old age, and so much colder and emptier.

  I said, “Jake brought me to love life for the first time. He taught me everything I know. Without him I would never have become drunk, or seduced a woman, or sung a song in a back-country jail at three in the morning. He was immensely generous by nature.” How to explain Samedi? “But he was possessed, how shall I say, by a spirit of mischief.”

  She nodded. “So I perceived. He gave me your leash.”

  I turned cold. I met her intent, sparkling eyes. Here it came. Now I would know what kind of creature had power over me.

  She said, all business, “I will make you a bargain, M’sieur Sex Demon. Help me to defeat my father. In return, when I find it, I’ll give you back your leash.” Her head cocked again.

  I scowled. “What do you know about the vicomté claim?”

  She dismissed that with a shrug. “I’m way ahead of you. And I’m ahead of my papa, as you will see. Why did Jake give the leash to me?”

  “I have no idea,” I snapped.

  “Nice friend.”

  I knew an urge to jump from a high place. “Look, he was the only living person who knew me. Do you know what that means to—?”I stopped. To a man who may end up living forever? “To someone no one ever wanted to know?”

  “How sad! Is it so lonely to be a sex demon?”

  “Is it so lonely to be a child of Montmorency?” I returned.

  A stricken look crossed her face, as if she were remembering that cold nursery, high in the old chateau. My heart jerked. Yes. You do know.

  “Tell me everything,” she said.

  “I’ve lost everyone who ever loved me.” I told myself she was forcing these confidences from me with the power of my leash.

  “And who was it who loved you?”

  My tongue touched my lips. “My nurse when I was very small. My mother, presumably. She died shortly after I was born. Jake. There may have been someone else.”

  “I see.”

  Swallowing jagged truths, I looked down at her. There was no mistaking her dilated eyes, her scent, her soft mouth made into an O.

  She was attracted.

  My pulse leaped.

  I had this one chance to balance the power between us, before she located my leash and learned better how to use it.

  Leaning forward, I pushed the blue-black curls away from her cheek with my forefinger. Her lashes fluttered. She turned her face toward my finger like a baby seeking the nipple.

  I murmured, putting the sex demon into my voice, “Let me buy you a coffee.”

  She blinked slowly and smiled.

  We walked in silence back toward the theater and through the white marble caverns of McCormick Place. She held my hand. It was very pleasant. I knew the questions would start again soon.

  On the escalator, she said, “Tell me more about you.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because you’re so romantic!”

  I sent her a cut-eye. “I?”

  “You. You’re all inked up like a truand, but you wear starched linen and custom-made shoes.”

  She danced sideways off the escalator, holding my hand, her vivid little face hungry for my secrets. That black curl dangled across one blue eye. She’ll eat me, I thought.

  I led her into the hotel bar at the Hyatt and took a booth at the back. We ordered espresso. “Some fruit?” I added.

  “I’m not hungry,” she announced. “Wait here.” She bounced up, snatching her little handbag, and sprang away in the direction of the ladies’ room. Our coffee came. I paid.

  In that moment I heard her scream an angry, chopped-off scream.

  I bolted toward the sound.

  She could not have gone far. I burst round the corner into the corridor to the toilets. Sophie was there, struggling with one man while another was trying to open the back door.

  Her captor wore a brown tee shirt and blue jeans. He hoisted Sophie under the arms and threw her over his shoulder. She bit him on the ear until blood came. He swore.

  Red fury filled me. I nearly tore a mirror off the wall to throw at him. Then my years of training took over.

  The other man, in a hooded blue sweatshirt and jeans, was pushing open the exit door ahead of them, saying over his shoulder, “Get her outside, for God’s sake!”

  They didn’t see me.

  Sophie did. Her eyes widened. “Veek, help!”

  I struggled, too—with myself. I wanted their blood. I paused, frozen, with my hand on that mirror. I looked monstrous, my eyes starting, my jaws full of white fangs like an angry mastiff’s. I took a deep breath and commanded myself to calm.

  The man in the tee shirt was trying to bustle Sophie through the doorway. She made this as hard as possible, bracing her legs on the doorway, scratching, using her elbows, smacking his face with the back of her head.

  In my most educated voice I said, “Have the goodness to unhand my client.”

  Sophie’s captor swung around at the sound of my voice, whacking her head against the doorway. She yelped.

  That broke my calm again. I leaped forward. “Miiiiine!” I roared.

  He dropped her. His companion came back into the building and stopped, looking at me.

  I lifted Sophie to her feet. As I did so, I caused my tattoos to fade and vanish. My heart thundered unpleasantly. I passed one hand across my face, drawing in those fangs that had sprouted so instinctively, imagining an illusion of a pair of studious horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Mademoiselle, you are all right?” I murmured to her, keeping my eyes on the two men.

  “Ow, my head.” She touched it and winced. Then she pushed me away. “I can stand.”

  The man in the brown shirt hissed, “Let’s go!”

  “You’re already on camera, gentlemen,” I said, my voice still hoarse with bloodlust. I nodded toward the corner behind them, as if I could see security cameras in this darkly-shadowed corridor. They looked. I snapped my fingers to draw their attention back to me. “Let us have the meaning of this outrage, if you please.”

  “Yes, let’s,” Sophie said. She appeared undisturbed. “Come on. Tell my attorney M. Castile this, did my father pay you to break my head?”

  They stood sheepishly by the door, but they did not flee.

  I looked at her in surprise. “Surely he would not. I’ll call the police,” I said, taking my phone from my pocket.

  “No!” said the one in a hoodie. “No, we—yeah, he—”

  “Shut up,” said the other. He squared off to us. “He hired us to take her to the airport. Said she would fight. Said, use what methods were necessary, unquote.”

  “M. Castile is before you,” Sophie said coolly. “And he did not see fit to break my head.”

  “Your father hired these men?” I said, truly incredulous.

  “Maybe not.” She shrugged. “Call the police, then.”

  “If this is true,” I said soberly, like a slow-witted but determined functionary of the courts, “then you will not object if I take your photographs.” I held up my phone and did this, while they looked anything but pleased. “You have credentials?”

  The man in brown produced his wallet and showed me a detective license from Louisiana. I photographed this, then the other man’s license.

  “He didn’t say you were meeting with your lawyer,” said the man in brown, putting his wallet away. “We just got here from the airport ourselves.”

  “Did you accomplish your other tasks?” Sophie said sharply.

  Now what? She knew
much more than she had told me. This was exactly like being on one of Jake’s rollercoaster adventures. I maintained the dignified silence of one who knows all but need not tell all.

  The detectives looked at one another. “We talked to the vodou lady in New Orleans. Followed her to Louis Armstrong Airport. She got off the plane all right,” said the man in brown.

  “And then?” Sophie prompted him.

  “Then we lost her,” he mumbled.

  “Ah. I see.” To me she said, “It is so very expensive to hire bad help.”

  “We called your daddy and told him and he sent us to pick you up at the concert before you could, uh, to pick you up. Followed you here. The client din’t say nothing about you was meeting your lawyer there.”

  “That is no excuse for assault, messieurs,” I said severely.

  “Say, if you’re her lawyer, how come you’re French?” asked the quiet man in the hoodie.

  I lifted my brows. “I am not a U.S. attorney,” I said haughtily, as if I would rather be a cockroach. “We’d better call your father,” I said to Sophie.

  A cell phone rang at this moment. The detective in brown took his phone out, looking apprehensive.

  Sophie folded her arms and tapped her foot. “Let us see what excuses they give my bon papa for their behavior!”

  The detective wilted rapidly as he listened. If I stretched my ears—if Sophie would be quiet—

  She tugged at my sleeve and hissed, “They will tell him where we are. We must not stay long. Now do you believe?” she hissed.

  “Hush,” I said.

  “That was well done, with the photographs. I don’t think I will see more of these two, anyway. I am very good at getting my bon papa’s spies fired,” she added gleefully.

  “Will you hush?”

  But the detective had ended his call. The quiet one said, “We fired?” and the other nodded dismally. They blundered out the rear exit.

  “Bon!” Sophie sighed. “We have time for coffee, I think. We have much to discuss.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. Nothing surprised this child. I examined her scalp, but there was no blood. “Very well. Coffee.”

  I bent and picked up her handbag from the floor, and put one hand on the small of her back, gently moving her ahead of me. While her back was turned, I opened the bag, found a comb, pulled a few hairs from it by feel, and thrust them into my trouser pocket. Then I handed her the bag.