Hollywood Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective

by Rachel Graves

  “Oh, like you ever did that.” I called her on her obvious bullshit.

  “Not with Jean-Laurent, but not every lover I’ve known was that amazing.”

  “Sorry I don’t buy that. How many other men have you had? ’Cause I’m betting the list isn’t all that long.” I swallowed the last of my beer, amazed LaRue even let her have other men.

  “You’re assuming only men can be bad in bed.” She went back to her bottle, taking a drink.

  “Uh, you two?” Gina’s voice was quiet, reminding me this was about her, not us.

  “Okay, honest answer. The first time you have sex probably won’t be all that amazing.”

  “There’s the blood,” Jo added.

  “Would you shut up? There probably won’t be any blood, but it will be uncomfortable. Hopefully, the person you’re with will care enough about you to make sure you enjoy it at some point.”

  “What she means is a gentleman never comes first.”

  “Okay, Jo, seriously? Stop helping.” I turned back to Gina. “Why is this even coming up?”

  She looked a little pale, her eyes locked on my beer.

  “Would a beer help?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “But don’t tell Mom.”

  “Oh, I’m thinking Mom doesn’t get to know anything about this conversation.” I opened a bottle for her and pushed it down the counter. “So why?”

  “In high school, after the uh, the thing that happened.” Gina looked from me to Jo.

  I nodded. The thing had been Gina walking in on her best friend being assaulted by a drunken football player. A tussle had ensued with Gina winning thanks to her favorite baseball bat. After he drove away the guy’s truck hit a telephone pole; the would-be rapist hadn’t lived to see morning. “I never got that close to any guy. And now, I’m going to be nineteen soon, and I’m dating older guys so it makes sense that it might come up.”

  She said “older guys” but she meant Jeremy. My temper flared but I couldn’t tell Gina about the threats or the mystery that swirled around him. She’d go from openly chatting to having a fit that I was attacking her boyfriend. I mentally counted to ten. “And you want to be ready, which is commendable, but it’s more important that your first time is with someone who loves you, like a husband.”

  Jo laughed.

  I silenced her with a mean look. “With someone who cares about you like that, not just some guy in a bar, you know?”

  “I know, and that’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, long term relationships. Does it make sense to marry the first guy you sleep with?”

  “I sure didn’t.” Memories of my first love stung. He’d dropped me like a bad habit after I realized I was a witch. “But Mom would tell you yes. Jo?”

  “The first guy I slept with was with his mistress when I almost died having his baby.” Jo shrugged. “Virtue used to be really important, but now I’d said compatibility matters more. Is this guy a good thing long term? Really there’s nothing magical about your first time.”

  Gina frowned at her. “But I want my first time to be special.”

  I stepped in front of Jo – this wasn’t the time for her to turn from optimistic to cynical and pragmatical. Gina needed a push in the right direction, the one that went away from Jeremy. “Well, you can make that happen. It’s your choice.”

  “Lucky you,” Jo put in dryly.

  I gave her a second dirty look.

  “What? Not everyone got a choice. Hell, even this conversation wouldn’t have happened not that long ago. The fact that Gina can go to any pharmacy, pick up the morning after pill, then whenever she has sex, not have to worry about a baby or ruining her life and reputation is an amazing thing. You need to be more grateful.”

  I nodded, ready to agree with her, when Gina spoke up. “Leave her alone. She’s probably just pissed I’ll be getting some when she isn’t.”

  I opened my mouth to correct her but then shut it. Jo raised an eyebrow at me, almost daring me to be honest with my little sister. I wasn’t about to admit Ted was asleep in my bed right now. This conversation was great and all, but her comment reminded me how badly any anti-Jeremy advice I gave would be received. Hopefully we could get to that tomorrow, when Gina wasn’t thinking about my jealousy. “Okay, is that all? Because really, I can give you the footnotes on this one: use a condom every time, pick the right partner, and get the hell out of my living room with your I’m getting some and you aren’t shit.”

  Gina grinned widely, happy to push my buttons. “We’re going to twelve-thirty mass tomorrow, not ten.”

  “Uh-huh and why’s that?”

  “Jeremy’s coming along.”

  I groaned but she just smiled and skipped out the door. After it shut, I grabbed her beer and finished it off.

  “That was fun,” Jo announced.

  “Your idea of fun is twisted.”

  “You already knew that.” She sighed dramatically. “I’m disappointed that you weren’t sweating about her finding Ted. I expected comic hilarity.”

  “Eh, I could play it off. People see what they want to see.”

  “That they do.” She rinsed out her bottle and gently put it in the recycling bin. “Speaking of which, Samuel is sure you only saved him because you want something from him.”

  “He’s wrong.”

  “So I told him, over and over again. But they don’t really listen to me. They’re Jean-Laurent’s dogs, you know?”

  I cringed when she called them dogs. I understood it, but I didn’t particularly like it.

  “Anyway, want to go out tonight?” Jo asked what she’d probably meant to ask an hour ago.

  “Nah, I’m going to stay in, get some sleep.”

  She snorted. “Or just plain get some. Would it bother you if I followed her?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Good, it might be distracting.”

  I raised my beer in the universal true that salute.

  “Have fun.” She nodded toward the bedroom.

  “Will do. Have a good night, yourself.”

  “Oh wait, one more thing.” Her hand stopped on the door knob. “I didn’t loan you that necklace for you to leave it by the bed. Just because Samuel’s home doesn’t mean things are all happy shiny. Put it on, okay?”

  “Yes, Mom,” I sighed, doing my best to channel Gina. Jo just laughed and walked out.

  I bolted awake without an obvious reason, stretched out, hit nothing and sat bolt upright. I’d gone to sleep with Ted, curled up next to him. I’d slept through the night in that semi-shared dream state where what he thought, I thought, and vice versa. Now, he was gone.

  Panic started as my heartbeat raced. I glanced at the clock. It was too early for him to have left. Listening as hard as I could for some shadowy OPS serial killer, I reached for my gun.

  It wasn’t there.

  I’d left it on the nightstand, next to Jo’s locket. Magical and mundane safety nets lined up next to each other. It was missing. My heartbeat went up another notch as visions of Jen’s body and what I might find in the living room started. I tried to focus, and remembered something Ted had told me. A torturer’s greatest weapon is fear of the unknown. Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly what he’d said but it was close.

  After a deep breath, I opened the bedroom door.

  My usual sidearm was a .38—a regulator, not a peacemaker. Fifteen in the clip and one in the hole like the old song said. I knew the lines of that smooth black plastic, its lightweight, steady surface. How it felt like a piece of my arm, how it moved, its semi-automatic action helping me to absorb the recoil, had all become second nature. That gun was a piece of me. I’d never expected to see it in Ted’s hands.

  “Good Morning, lover,” I said, instead of asking for an explanation.

  “Sorry to worry you,” he answered, proving once again that he was a touch psychic even if he didn’t always admit it.

  “Can I ask what you’re doing?” Actually, asking was pretty silly. I recognized his ac
tions as soon as the panic faded. He was reloading my clip, one bullet at a time. The ones I had put in place were sitting on the breakfast bar, shiny copper jackets neatly lined up. The ones he was putting in came from a pocket in the coat he’d worn last night.

  “I made coffee.”

  “Uh-huh. I don’t usually use the Glock for that.”

  “Right.” He added the last bullet and looked up at me. “This thing…”

  I waited but he took too long. I went for a cup of coffee and prompted him, “Go on.”

  “This thing that’s coming for us, it makes everyone’s nightmares come true. Jen gets the treatment from her father even though he’s dead. The others—it’s the same way. You wouldn’t know from the reports but if you knew them, they died the way they most feared.”

  I sipped coffee.

  “So when I said last night that there was nothing we could do—”

  “Repeatedly,” I interrupted.

  He acknowledged my truth with a nod. “When I repeatedly said there was nothing we could do, I was lying.”

  He stopped for a second, finishing the clip and putting it in place. He handled the gun softly, almost gently. Slapping the clip in place made me feel safe. The sting of composite and resin in my hand, the smell of gun oil that popped out when you hit it just right—all of that meant security to me. For Ted, though, it looked like the gun was delicate, something he handled with care. “We can protect ourselves from our worst fears.”

  “You mean your worst fear.”

  “Exactly.” He sighted down the weapon. He chambered a round, popped out the clip and put in one last silver bullet. It was dangerous to leave a gun like that but apparently whatever he intended me to shoot was more dangerous. “You know about me. I went back to school shopping at the mall and never got home. I spent three years, those awkward ‘figuring out who you are’ years, with a werewolf gang.”

  He was staring at the gun, entranced in a way that scared me. I touched his hand, and got back nothing. The empty emotion that came over him when he tortured people—a calm he’d probably perfected in those three years when any emotion could get him killed. He’d been ten when they’d first taken him.

  He shifted his gaze from the gun in his hand to my eyes and tried for a smile. It didn’t quite take.

  “My worst fear is simple—I never want to be one of them. I’m afraid of other things—ending up in some mental institute drooling over myself not knowing day from night, you getting hurt, being forced to torture and use the skills OPS taught me on someone I love. But those are just fears. Run-of-the-mill everyday stuff. When it comes to the worst, the true nightmare, it’s always the werewolves.”

  The pain in his eyes was too terrible to take. I took the gun out of his hand and put it down on the counter, then wrapped my arms around him, holding his body tight. He’d put on jeans, but no shirt and in my tank top, our skin touched in one hundred small places. This time I felt his fear, and how it could never be resolved. There was no way to prove this monster wasn’t hiding under the bed. The world held werewolves and as long as any were alive, Ted—Edward, the boy he had been—would always be afraid.

  “It’s okay.” I didn’t have anything better to say.

  “It is.” He nodded, his face moving against my cheek. “Because if you walk into my living room and you see one of them biting me”—his tone changed to something hard and ugly—“infecting me, you’ll shoot it several times with these silver bullets. And when you’re done, you’ll shoot me. That’s why you’ve got two clips.”

  I turned my head from the hug and saw the other clip, my backup, already full and on the counter.

  “It isn’t going to happen,” I promised.

  “It shouldn’t,” he agreed. “Full moon only lasts another few days.”

  It passed between us, unspoken, that there would be another full moon. There would always be another full moon. I leaned away from him, taking the magical bond with me as our skin parted. His eyes were deadly calm, completely serious. He’d thought this through.

  “William can take out a wolf, and he’s living with me. But if he’s not there and you are, that’s how it’s going to go down, okay? First the wolf, then me,” Ted said with a fearful certainty.

  I nodded, because I wasn’t about to agree out loud to kill the man I loved. Then I kissed him, praying to God that it wouldn’t happen.

  24

  Church. Sunday afternoon mass with a priest whose name I should remember but never did. A tall, open building fashioned with warm brown wood arches holding white banners that proclaimed all kinds of joyful decrees. My family sat front and center, eighth pew from the altar, first seats to the aisle. My mind stayed with Ted, wishing I could undo all the harm that had been done to him, searching for a way to solve the problem in front of us.

  Jeremy Steel joined our pew, sitting next to Gina in a suit that looked too expensive for our little congregation. He caused a small stir. A few of the teenage girls gawked. A bold one even tried to sit next to him, no doubt waiting for the moment when we all held hands during the Our Father. But in the end, her brother won out. The boy, somewhere between nine and thirteen, spent a few minutes telling Jeremy how cool his movies were. The kid was slight, with blond hair and a scratch on his nose, gawky. I wondered if that was how Edward had looked before they’d taken him.

  The names might get mixed up in my head, but they were the same person. Edward had been the boy, just like one who was using the word awesome over and over again three people down from me. Edward had been the OPS agent, the devil that dealt with other devils. Ted was the new man, the life he’d made for himself. But somewhere in that new life, my boyfriend acknowledged Edward had a place. He wanted me to know about those other people he’d been. In our most intimate moments, he wanted to be called Edward. Then this morning, it turned out that his worst fears, the darkest places he could go, were all part of Edward not Ted.

  The first half of mass blurred into background noise while I focused on my own problems. In the second half, shaking hands with people and inadvertently reading them, I heard about their problems: money trouble, sex stuff, fears about family or illness. No one in the building seemed to worry much about werewolves. I definitely didn’t catch any concerns about serial killers. A brush of Jeremy’s hand when he gave me a hymnal brought worry about his job and Gina, but nothing about sacrifices or magical gems.

  I was the abnormal in the sea of normal. The only one not getting any peace at this service designed to give comfort.

  Jeremy skipped communion. I should have, too, no confessional and all that, but the touch of the priest’s hand at communion was worth risking damnation. That touch brought me the peace I’d been searching for. He was just a man, but he deeply believed all things were possible and there was no burden that couldn’t be lifted. That kind of belief was catching. I spent the second half of the mass reading the crowd, looking for it. It came from kids, older people, and the families with new babies. By the time service ended and we headed back to the house for brunch, I felt a thousand times better…

  That is, until I got to the driveway. A shining motorcycle filled the space that normally went to my car. Not a Harley, but something slicker with a pinched-in center like a bug. Actually, a wasp—the kind that could sting you dead. It was sexy, but dangerous in chrome with purple accents. Not what I’d expected Jeremy to drive at all.

  “Do you like it?” Gina grinned up at me.

  “Uh, yeah, it’s a pretty sweet ride.” Two of my best friends from my Army days had blown through town on their own bikes. I’d ridden behind Van Deck, making the town burn with rumors of a lesbian biker gang. Van Deck and her girlfriend didn’t really constitute a gang, but somehow the rumors stuck. I was the town expert on motorcycles.

  “Gina told me you were into bikes.” He kicked the tire, then lightly traced his hand down the seat. “Back in the day we used to call these popsicles.”

  “When was that?” Another piece of old slang? How d
id that fit with what Randall had told me? I itched with the need to bring up who Jeremy used to be, but Gina clung to his arm like it was a life preserver.

  My kid sister looked at me with a frown. “Don’t you want to say something else?”

  “Ummm, what else do you want me to say?” She wasn’t making much sense.

  She frowned at me, doing a great impression of our mother. “Maybe start with a thank you.”

  “Thank you for what?” I looked from her to him, the two of them wearing matching idiot grins, when my eyes fell on the bike again, I got it. “You didn’t?”

  “I did!” Jeremy’s grin practically split his face in half, and Gina squealed.

  “Wow.” I ran my hand over the seat. I’d never actually wanted a motorcycle but then again, no one had ever offered me one. Especially one this nice. My mind flipped back to the desert I’d driven through. How much better would it have been to ride through it? Admittedly, it would be impractical and unsafe. Jo couldn’t have driven me home on the motorcycle. Unless she knew how to ride. I shook my head. No. Not doing this. “Wow. Thank you so much, Jeremy, but—”

  Gina glared at me, her eyes daggers. “Jeremy can afford it, Lizzie, there’s absolutely no good reason for you to turn it down.”

  She practically stamped her foot at me, and she was right. My reasons felt as heavy as smoke, but smoke could still kill someone. “I think I want to say thank you in private.”

  “I get’cha.” Jeremy winked at me and turned to Gina. “Why don’t you go inside? We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Gina went up on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek, then gave me another death glare before she went inside.

  I stepped closer to Jeremy, distancing myself from the way too tempting machine. “Is this a bribe?”

  He spread his hands wide. “It’s a gift. I feel responsible for your car getting wrecked. It’s too late to pay for that, so you get this instead.”

  I winced. I hadn’t expected an honest reply from a stand-up guy. I wanted him to be the villain here, but he kept surprising me. I tilted my head back and let my chin make a short jerk up. “I know about you.”