Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

  “What?” But the guilt behind that protest was palpable.

  “Maybe because my father abused me?” That would be an understandable reason, anyway, no matter how mistaken it felt.

  “Nobody abused you, baby!” Tamara’s denial sounded honest, which was a mixed relief. But she’d only denied the abuse. The rest…?

  “I can’t tell you the number of noncustodial kidnappings that come across my desk, Mom. Did you do that?”

  “I—No!” Her truth there seemed more cloudy. As if the issue were more complicated than that.

  “Oh my God. Am I even really your daughter?”

  “Of course you are! I carried you for nine months. I was in labor for fourteen hours. I’ve told you about your birth—7:03 a.m., County Hospital in Chicago. You can’t possibly believe—Why are you even asking these things?”

  Faith shut her eyes, shook her head. Some of her mother’s answers sounded true, heartfelt, but some of them were lies, and she couldn’t tell where the line lay. What good did it do to ask the questions when she couldn’t trust even her perception of the answers? This wasn’t why she’d come. This wasn’t accomplishing anything.

  “Why are you acting this way?” demanded Tamara, her hands—smaller hands than Faith’s—fisted. “Why are you looking at me like that? You’re acting as if I’m some kind of criminal. I’m not! I gave you the best life I knew how.”

  That, at least, was the truth. Faith worked to make her voice more gentle. “You said you wanted to talk. Why don’t you tell me what it is you wanted to say?”

  But her mother—surely Tamara really was her mother, even if they didn’t look at all alike—her mother was too upset by now. The shrill edge to her voice showed no sign of softening. “I wanted to ask if you really knew that detective who called. If you really had a date with him. I thought he had to be lying, but clearly I don’t even know my own daughter anymore.”

  That makes two of us. I don’t know my own mother.

  “And the e-mail?” asked Faith.

  Tamara scowled at the floor.

  “You said last night, ‘first the e-mail, now the phone calls.’ You said you had to talk to me before they did. Who are ‘they’?”

  Tamara looked up, blinked, and lied again. Blatantly. Deliberately. “I was upset about the detective’s phone call. I didn’t know what I was saying.”

  And that was that. “Goodbye, Mom.”

  Faith turned and headed for the front door.

  After a pause, her mother came after her. “Baby, no! Stay for dinner. I’m sorry I upset you over nothing—you know how nervous I can get, but it doesn’t mean anything. Let’s have a nice evening together, catch up, maybe you can spend the night in your old room—”

  Faith spun on her. “No!”

  Tamara’s eyes widened.

  “No, Mother. I’m not spending the night in my old room. I stayed there too long already. And I’m not sitting across a dinner table from you making small talk when this, maybe the most important thing in my life—”

  “You’re exaggerating, baby.”

  “Tell me why my father left us!”

  And Tamara said, “I can’t.”

  So Faith left. As she headed down the walk, she heard her mother weeping. She felt as if someone had reached inside her and torn her in half, as if she might never patch those two halves together. Half of her came from a father whose first name she didn’t even know. A man her mother would tell her nothing about except that he was dead. And the other half…

  Was she even Tamara’s daughter? Or was it possible she was one of those children you heard about, snatched out of their baby carriage, stolen from a day care, grabbed off the street?

  She practically ran to the streetcar stop, barely aware that the sun was still out, too upset to care about such mundane safety concerns. Not with her whole identity in tatters.

  If she couldn’t get that information from Tamara, then Faith would have to find it the old-fashioned way. She would try to get a copy of her birth certificate, maybe her mother’s marriage certificate, assuming Tamara and her father had even been married. And maybe…

  Faith climbed onto the streetcar and settled into one of the wooden seats, staring blankly at the mansions and estates and trees that lined St. Charles Avenue, and a name struck her. Deveaux. The old Deveaux villa.

  Whether or not there was any relationship to the French Quarter medium didn’t really matter. What did matter was, Faith had a few resources that “the old-fashioned way” had never included. She might just be able to contact her father, even if he was dead. Because he was dead.

  At least, she could try. If she knew a good enough medium.

  And she was pretty sure she did.

  Celeste Deveaux was a tall, mixed-race woman with caféau-lait skin, wavy black hair and warm brown eyes. When Faith first met her, a year ago, Celeste had been working as a psychic reader. She’d been lousy at it. Only after one of her clients died—shortly after Celeste had promised him a long and happy life—did Celeste eventually come to realize her skills lay in speaking to the dead.

  Since then, she’d gotten such a good reputation that she could afford her own two-room parlor only three blocks off of Jackson Square. The back room, her “reading room,” was used for nothing except her one-on-one séances.

  When she went in for a reading on Saturday afternoon, Faith had expected blue velvet or glittery stars or crystal balls. What she got was tasteful dark paneling, rich carpeting, three upholstered chairs and artistic black-and-white photography of angelic sculptures.

  More importantly, she got a feeling.

  The air in here practically vibrated. Faith had no doubt that something otherworldly happened here on a regular basis, anymore than she’d doubt the sun rose while watching it with her own eyes. Celeste was a legitimate medium.

  So why weren’t her skills kicking in for Faith?

  “Talk to me,” the older woman whispered into the ether, her dark eyes half-closed, unfocused. She swayed in her chair, her hands spread. “This here little girl wants to meet her daddy. She’s got some questions she deserves to have answered.”

  Faith held her breath. She could tell Celeste was in a legitimate trance—her heartbeat had slowed significantly, as had her breathing and something harder to pinpoint…her brain waves? But that was insane. Even a freak couldn’t hear or smell or see brain waves…could she?

  “I’m calling on Faith’s father to come talk with us, now,” insisted Celeste, sounding vaguely annoyed. “No, not you, chère. No, not you either. I’m looking for Faith’s daddy.”

  Finally, Faith had to breathe. It felt like inhaling past a hole in her chest. So much for her brilliant idea.

  Celeste’s heartbeat picked up, returning toward normal. Her own breathing deepened. She opened her dark eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Faith shrugged. “That’s the chance you take with psychic abilities, right? Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t?”

  Unlike her own abilities, which seemed surprisingly consistent, another reason she thought she wasn’t psychic.

  “For me, they usually work better than that.” Celeste stood and offered her brown hand. She wore many rings, some crystal, some silver, some copper, but the one she seemed proudest of was a simple gold wedding band. “I try not to use this room for anything but readings…don’t want to dispel the energy. How about we go out front while we try to figure this out?”

  Faith didn’t take her hand. Between the fight with Roy, having to look at mug shots in the sludge-for-energy police station and the blowup with her mother, and now her disappointment with Celeste’s help, she felt too emotionally vulnerable.

  But she followed to the front room, nevertheless, and sat where Celeste gestured, at a small consulting table.

  “It’s a skill I inherited from my great-grandmother, So-lange,” explained Celeste, getting them some iced tea. “That witch was something—all my cousins and I inherited power from her. She’s the one who first lived
in that house you mentioned, in the Garden District. My folks live there now.”

  “So if it normally works,” said Faith, “why not this time? Can you think of any particular reason you wouldn’t be able to contact my father?”

  “If he weren’t dead, for one,” suggested Celeste jokingly. Considering that Faith didn’t know anything about the man, though, even that was possible. “Or it could be us not having his name. Having a name, or an item that once belonged to him, that really helps.”

  “I’m an item that once belonged to him.” God, but she sounded pitiful.

  “Now none of that! There’s other reasons, too, good reasons. You’re what—twenty-two? That means the man could’ve been dead as many as twenty-three years. Most folks take longer than that to reincarnate, but you never know. If his soul’s busy elsewhere, I doubt even my great-grandmother could’ve found him.”

  Celeste’s reasons made sense, but Faith could only imagine what kind of skeptical spin someone like Roy Chopin would put on them.

  “Wait a minute, there,” challenged Celeste. “What’s with that face? You don’t believe me? I wasn’t going to charge you, girl, but if you start pulling an attitude on me…”

  That, and the scolding expression Celeste wore, was enough to drag a smile out of Faith. “I was just thinking how easy it is for other people who don’t believe to dismiss what you do. Baseball players don’t always hit the ball, do they? And yet they’re still called baseball players. And sometimes a doctor’s patient dies—”

  “Don’t I know it,” agreed Celeste.

  “—but he’s still a doctor. It’s as if some people want to disbelieve.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Celeste took a sip from her tall glass of tea. “Does this ‘some people’ have a name?”

  “He’s just some man I decided not to go out with.”

  “I hope you didn’t pull away just because the poor boy doesn’t believe you’re psychic.”

  “I don’t believe I’m psychic.”

  Celeste considered that, as if weighing several items, then shifted in her chair. “First of all, don’t you make the mistake of tuning out anyone who can’t see what we see. I’ve been there and done that, girl, and it’s no good. My husband, he didn’t believe in my abilities when we started dating, but it was my pride got in the way, not his disbelief. Love’s the real power, not anyone’s ability to read thoughts or speak to the dead or see the future. Love’s the ultimate good.”

  Love? That sounded so…gushy. “This isn’t the same thing. At most, maybe it’s chemistry. Or maybe just masochism. It’s done with, anyway.”

  Celeste folded her arms. “Mmm-hmm.”

  When in doubt, turn the subject back to the other person. “So, did your husband ever change his mind? About your abilities, I mean?”

  “Sure he did, eventually. After we were already engaged. But what’s important is that he believed in me, and I believed in my abilities.”

  “I don’t believe in mine. I mean, I don’t believe they’re psychic. I can feel things, hear things, smell things….”

  “Sweetie, you’re the best natural psychic I know.”

  “This from as bad a reader as you were?”

  “Fake it till you make it, girl.” Celeste’s eyes brightened as she lit on an idea. “In fact—why not let yourself pretend you’re psychic, just for a while? You might be surprised by what falls into place. If you don’t want to out yourself, then let your inner psychic be someone else. Give her a different face. A different name.”

  “Madame Cassandra?” suggested Faith, with a laugh.

  “There you go, M.C.,” agreed Celeste, who’d heard Faith use the name at least once before. “For all you know—”

  The door opened and another client came in from the shimmering August heat. He was a young man. Brown hair. Quiet eyes. Faith looked up at him, strangely drawn, as Celeste finished.

  “—Madame Cassandra could turn out to be one of the most powerful forces in New Orleans.”

  Then Celeste looked up at her visitor—and blanched.

  Faith looked from the man to her friend, then back. There was nothing about him to warrant Celeste’s reaction or Faith’s discomfort. He seemed like the type the words “mild mannered” had been invented for. Sure, she sensed an edge of interest, of expectancy about him, but if this was his first visit to a medium, that would explain it. Right?

  So what was niggling at her? What was she noticing without yet understanding?

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said softly. “I can come back when you’re done.”

  “Get out,” commanded Celeste.

  The client blinked, surprised. His heartbeat began to pick up, a normal reaction to her rudeness and yet…

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Celeste stood, pointed a ringed finger at the man. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Then she swayed, not so much dizzy as…as altered. She’d just gone into an instant trance.

  Watching, probably unable to tell the difference, the man took a deep, unnervingly satisfied breath. His pulse was beginning to race now, speeding with something close to pleasure—

  And then Faith heard it.

  Something strange about his heartbeat. Something that hadn’t been there seconds ago. Something she’d heard before.

  In the bar. In the morgue. In the hotel lobby.

  All that, and a scent she didn’t even want to identify.

  “Your victims,” moaned Celeste, clearly channeling now. “Can’t you sense them, thronging around you? They’re crying for vengeance. They will have it, boy. Don’t you bring that shit into my place of business.”

  Then her eyes snapped open, wide and ferocious. “They’re gonna take you down!”

  The man took a quick step back, clearly startled to realize that Celeste wasn’t the least bit scared.

  Faith, on the other hand—Faith was scared. Even before she recognized what she’d smelled as blood.

  The faintest whiff of week-old blood. Krystal’s blood.

  Even before that, Faith knew.

  She was face-to-face with the killer.

  Chapter 8

  Faith leaped to her feet, sending her chair skittering wildly out behind her. Startled, the killer looked at her—and recognized her. The way his eyes widened, his breath caught, he might as well have announced it.

  Then he spun and raced into the street. And there was no alternative.

  She went after him.

  The streets of the French Quarter were thick with tourists and vendors and performers this early in the evening, when there was still sunlight, but marginally less heat. The killer plowed through them, knocking over a woman in a sundress, pushing a man in a ball cap against a wrought-iron gate. In a flash, he’d vanished around the corner onto Chartres Street.

  Faith dove through the holes he’d created. As she skidded around the corner, she caught sight of him again and ran faster. She also tried to memorize everything she could from the back. Caramel-brown hair. Green shirt. They pounded past a pretzel vendor. Past Toulouse, heading for Jackson Square. Maybe six feet tall, she thought. Wiry build.

  Faith’s feet and her heartbeat created a percussive background to her sprint. But that wasn’t all she heard, and she could definitely recognize him now. That distinctive extra skip in his heartbeat. That scent—

  Past St. Peters. She was already breathing hard, sweating. God, but it was hot out!

  His scent was the same smell she’d first caught in the ceiling of the DeLoup bar, a scent of fear. He didn’t want to be caught. Go figure.

  But if he really had something on him with Krystal’s DNA still present—something like Krystal’s hair, or the murder weapon—Faith would sell years off her life to catch him. When an old man taking a picture stepped inadvertently in front of her and she had to dodge around him, she grunted out a curse for those lost seconds. What she wouldn’t give for superspeed, instead of supersenses!

  The killer shoved past a mime, sent balloons
flying from a balloon-animal clown, and tore through the square. So did Faith, right past the statue of Andrew Jackson on rearing horseback.

  She thought she might be gaining on him. But at the other side, her quarry dove under an open-top horse carriage, right between the front and back wheels. Faith wasn’t quite that foolhardy. She went over the carriage, past a couple who looked to be on a date.

  “Hey!” protested the man.

  “Sorry!” gasped Faith as she launched herself off the other side, landed running and dodged traffic across Decatur. Past that lay a wide bank of stairs up to the levee. Her quarry was already halfway up by the time she hit them. Beyond those, two separate stairways created a vee against the stone wall. The killer took the right set of stairs. Swinging around with the help of the railing, gulping mouthfuls of August air, Faith pummeled after him. She might be in good shape, but she was gasping for breath as she hit the top. There lay Washington Artillery Park and, past that, the Moonwalk overlooking the Mississippi.

  And no killer.

  Following her instincts, Faith hurried across the bricked walking path, her head pivoting in both directions, her keen senses alert. She knew this view pretty well. The iron benches. The old-fashioned lampposts. And beyond the walk, lapping at the levee’s tumble of stone blocks, stretched the wide expanse of the river, exuding its own impersonal power. The Mississippi spread out like a lake, barges and tankers making their slow way along her depths. Just to the south, calliope music danced from one of the riverboats at the Toulouse Street Warf.

  But no killer.

  “Damn!” she exclaimed, and kicked a beer can someone had left lying on the ground. It bounced down the levee and into the river, which wasn’t what she’d meant to happen. “Damn it!”

  Somehow, he’d gotten away.

  Faith got back to Celeste’s just in time to hear her friend say, “One other person. But she left, after he did. She, uh, goes by the name of Cassandra.”