While I Googled to my heart’s content, I hoped that Anya would show up again, but she didn’t. At three, I opened the tower and switched on the cameras, and by the time Brett was walking up the path to the Temple at four, I was sweating to see him again.
I opened the door before he had a chance to ring the bell. His smile was just as big and bright as it’d been the night before, as if our misunderstanding hadn’t occurred. “Hey!” I told him, stepping back to let him in. “What’s up?”
He stepped in, beat up brown cowboy boots tapping on the stone floor as he closed the door and locked it. A black T-shirt with an obscure band name flaunted his muscular but lean body. I could feel myself start to salivate over him. Give me fifteen minutes more and I’d likely prostrate myself on the floor, butt in the air like a cat. It’d been some time since I’d last had, ahem, a little fun. “There was an accident right in front of me on the way here! I stopped to see if I could help but the cops waved me off.” We traded keys while he went on. “Of course, if they’d like to wait on the fire department’s power tools rather than utilizing my strength, far be it from me to change their plans.” He rolled his eyes and my knees wobbled at his magnificence.
“So that’s your thing, then? Super-strength?”
Stamping to straighten the bottoms of his jeans, he nodded. “Strength and a psychic ability to find missing things.”
I shuffled my feet, staring at the pointy toes of my boots and digging for something else to say. My social ineptness had hit an all time low with this guy. He broke the silence for me, just a little bit of chagrin on his handsome face.
“You wouldn’t want to get dinner or something, would you? I know we disagreed last night, and maybe I could make it up to you.”
“When?” I said, a little too quickly.
“How about Friday?” The way his mouth moved when he spoke sent shivers down my spine. I was having some inappropriate thoughts about those lips.
“Friday’s good.” I nodded, feeling like one of those bouncy-headed dogs you see in the back windshield of an octogenarian’s car. Remembering Anya, I looked up at him. “Do you know of a girl who may have worked here ten years ago that died?”
Brett was taken aback, dark brows furrowing. “Died? No, I’ve only worked here three years. Last year, we had a girl go missing. A guard. She didn’t tell anyone she was leaving, but that’s not uncommon in people like us.”
I laughed. “So, we’re untrustworthy and unreliable?”
Giving me a sheepish look, he said, “I guess that does sound bad. You know, Jordan’s been here about fifteen years. You should ask him.”
My groan made him laugh, and that made me glow. He swiped a hand through his hair and it fell right back into his eyes. I wondered if it was soft. Pulling out a cell phone, he took my number and smiled at me as I stepped out the door into the frosty, early morning air. The birds were going nuts in the predawn darkness. “Be careful going home,” he murmured, reaching out to touch my arm briefly with his fingertips.
I whistled to myself on the way to the car.
Chapter 4
I was still riding the high of Brett’s presence when I walked into the silent headquarters, greeted by Katherine’s bubbly smile. She was wearing a dress in an awful shade of fuchsia, her pale arms bare and a large gold chain holding a black stone resting against her chest. “Good morning, Vale. How was your evening?”
She was almost too pleasant, the kind of pleasant that made me want to cringe. Like a Stepford wife. “Uneventful.” I signed my keys out and grabbed them from the basket, trying to ignore her unblinking stare. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I told her with a brief wave, and fled.
The Mini was freaking cold. I had every intention of going back to the library after I got home and changed clothes, but between the warmth and silence of my apartment, I was lost. Pulling on some sweats, I dropped into bed and tugged the covers up, promising myself just an hour or two.
My dreams were wild. Brett had a big rock between his hands, threatening to smash the door in at the Temple. Tears were streaming down his face. Jordan was in the office on the phone, telling someone on the other end, “The new girl is next.” I curled myself around Cerridwen’s warm, living leg, and she smiled down at me, stroking her braid. “I have plans for you, daughter,” she said, her voice echoing forcefully off the temple walls.
When I jerked awake at one, I was refreshed, but haunted by my nonsensical subconscious musings. I crawled over Addie, cleaning her personal parts on the other side of the bed, and pulled a pair of yoga pants and a thermal shirt out of my dresser. When I had pulled the shirt over my head and was sliding my feet into my Spongebob slippers, a knock on the front door startled me.
Mrs. McCoy, my elderly neighbor, smiled toothlessly at me when I opened the door. “Hello, dear. How are you settling in?”
I pulled my hair back and secured it with a clip, returning her grin. “Wonderful, thanks for asking. And you?” It was chilly outside, and dark clouds were beginning to build in the distance.
“Oh, I’ve just been cooking all the day long,” she answered, shuffling in her flat, black loafers. Her housedress hung just above her ankles, where dark brown stockings sagged. Her hair was a halo of white around her head, as if she’d popped a finger in a light socket. She was a widow, having lost her husband to cancer only a few years before I moved in. We’d sat and had a chat over tea a day or so after I arrived. I’d liked her immediately, despite the seven cats and the overabundance of lace doilies on every available surface.
“Would you like to come in?” I asked, stepping back to let her through.
“Ah, no, love, I just wanted to drop you some stew. With your hours, I imagine you don’t cook well for yourself.” She held out a large Tupperware container, and I took it from her. It was still warm. If I didn’t know better, I’d think my mother had put her up to it.
“Thank you so much, Mrs. McCoy, that’s very kind of you.”
She waved off my thanks. “Pish posh, love, I can’t eat all that stew by my lonesome.” She indicated the other bowl in her hand. “I’m just going to take this to Bella next door. Have a good day, dear.”
Addie was waiting on the kitchen counter when I said my goodbyes and came back inside. I realized I hadn’t fed her when I got home. “I’m a terrible Mother, I don’t know why you stay with me,” I told her, slopping a can of smelly cat chunks into her bowl. She managed to give me an assenting glare before taking her first dainty bite. I heated up a bowl of the homemade beef stew, trying really hard not to moan at the wonderful smell as it permeated the house. Not only did it smell great, it was delicious. It gave me the kind of warmth and fullness you can’t get anywhere but home cooking. I missed my mom.
It was pouring down rain when I left the house. By the time I walked the ten feet from my front door to the Mini, I was half soaked and shivering. One more thing I needed to remember was a rain coat. My plaid flannel coat wasn’t going to cut it on the wet days, and the wet days outnumbered the dry.
The library was just as quiet as it’d been the day before. Emily smiled in recognition as I stepped up to the counter, peering at me over the tops of her glasses. “Hello, dear. Back for the computers?”
“Yes, if it isn’t any trouble.” She led me down the hall again and logged me in, offering me coffee or tea as I shivered in my damp clothes beside her. I accepted gratefully whatever she could bring, and she clicked off on her sensible heels.
There was another person in the room today, a blonde girl with her back to me, her thick hair swept up in a messy tail at the back of her head. When she didn’t look up from her work, I shrugged and settled in, my to-do list on the table next to the keyboard.
I ran a search for the Temple first, and came up with zilch. No surprise there, seeing as Edward had said it was a big, honking secret. I just didn’t know where to turn for information, and made a mark on my list to scour the office at work. Emily ghosted in and left me a steaming cup of what smelled like c
hamomile tea, gone before I opened my mouth to thank her. I kept it to myself that I don’t care for tea, and took a sip anyway if only for the warmth.
I hit on Anya almost immediately. The same Hilda who wrote the Wild Hunt articles did a piece on Anya’s disappearance. I scanned the words on the screen, noting that Anya Kobori was 25 years old in 2000, when she was reported missing by her roommate, another Ukrainian girl named Bella. She worked in “security” for a local business, and was last seen by her roommate going to work.
She worked my shift.
I ran a hand back through my wild hair; damn it, I forgot to brush it before I walked out of the house looking like Medusa. At least I had my Southern Miss toboggan. Leaning back in my chair, I put my hands behind my head and closed my eyes, rubbing away the tension. I’d never been able to summon ghosts. If they came to me, fine, I worked with what I could to help them move on. It made it hard to converse with a dead girl when she could hardly hold her ether together long enough to tell me her name.
I felt rather than heard when the blonde was beside me. Anya’s grainy photograph from page 4 of the Quicksilver Journal was front and center on the monitor. She did a double take.
“That’s Anya Kobori,” she said, the words rushing out of her as she leaned over me.
I swiveled in my seat, catching her startled blue eyes. It was the same girl I’d run into the day before. I saw the recognition hit her. “Yeah, did you know her?”
“No,” she answered, biting her lower lip. She was a striking girl, her blonde hair shot through with brown and red highlights that shimmered even under fluorescent lights. Her eyes were ice blue beneath perfect golden arcs, and her skin was a healthy tan. I found myself under scrutiny as she sized me up. “Who are you?”
Taken aback, I retorted, “Who are you?”
Suitably abashed, she lowered her eyes. “Sorry, it’s just I’m doing some research myself on that girl. I wondered what connection you may have to her.”
Listening to her speak was like being wrapped in a security blanket. From the cadence of her accent, I placed her from the Northeast, maybe New York or Jersey. The homesickness washed over me, but I did my best to squash it. I instinctively liked her, and if there’s anything Theresa’s taught me it is to trust my intuition, so I decided to go for honesty. “I’ve talked with Anya. Her ghost, I mean.”
“Really? Where?” There was a complete lack of skepticism to her smooth features. She cocked her head like a child waiting for an answer, resting one hand on the desk beside my paperwork. Her nails were bitten, the sparkly blue polish chipping.
I untangled my legs from beneath me and stood, putting out a hand. “My name’s Vale. You are?”
Comprehension dawned, and she burst out laughing, clutching her papers to her chest. “You’re Vale! With that unusual name, you have to be our newbie. I heard you could speak to the dead.” As if noticing my hand hanging in the air, she sobered up and took it in her own. Her fingers were like ice. “I’m Melissa Monroe. I’m a guard, too.” She paused, glancing at the door to the room, and lowered her voice. “I assume you spoke to Anya at the Temple?”
Our hands released as I answered. “Yeah, she came to me night before last. What shift do you work?”
“Actually, I’m on a relief schedule. I work both of Jordan’s off nights, I work Brett’s shift on the two nights he’s off, and I cover one of your off nights. Nikolas covers your other off night. You’ll meet him at your first monthly meeting, he’s a cool guy.” She grinned, shifting the pile of notebooks and papers in her arms. “Hey, you wouldn’t want to go get lunch, would you?”
“I’ve already eaten, but if you pick somewhere with a good cup of coffee, I’m game.” I gathered up my print outs and shoved them in the old, raggedy folder I’d been using. It was still covered in pen drawings of penises and little puppy faces from high school. Real mature, I know.
Myrtle’s Place had obviously been in business for well over a hundred years. I pushed the heavy wooden door, inset with stained glass decorated in half-naked women that would have no business in a cathedral, and had to use my entire body to get inside. I was hit by the smell of stale smoke and liquor, funny considering all the businesses in Quicksilver had adopted a smoking ban in recent years. The interior looked like something out of a bad romance novel. The walls were dark maroon, the bottom half covered in tacky Victorian wallpaper of golden curlicues and green Fleur de Lis. Battered tables and booths carved of dark oak were clustered against the walls and through the open section of the floor, the booth covers and seat bottoms obviously newly upholstered in a rich, tacky gold.
We slid into a booth with a tarnished number 27 on the edge, and I dropped my shoulder bag on the seat beside me. I traced a deep scratch in the overly shiny surface of the table. “This place has…character,” I chuckled. To my left someone had carved “Lacy loves Martin.”
Melissa pushed her ponytail of thick curls back over her shoulder and reached for a menu. “It opened in 1880, I think. Story goes that Myrtle was the mistress of the original owner, a well-to-do landholder. He wanted a place to bring her for their illicit liaisons, and thus the pub was created. There are still bedrooms up those stairs.” She gestured with her head to a spiral staircase almost hidden in shadow behind the bar.
We were silent as we both perused the menu. I saw several different items that were I hungry, would have been well worth investigating.
“How long have you been in Quicksilver?”
“Five years. My parents were killed in a car accident when I was sixteen, so I came to live with my Uncle Remus. He runs the grocer down Main Street.” She dropped her menu and made to scoot out of the booth. “You have to order at the bar. Did you want just a cup of coffee?”
“Yeah, coffee’s good.”
Watching her walk to the bar, I noted her tendency to be light on the feet. She walked as I imagined a ballerina may…deliberate and graceful. She couldn’t have super strength with that kind of grace; her powers were probably mental.
There were only three other patrons in the bar. An elderly couple sat across the room sipping steaming bowls of soup, chatting amicably and exchanging doe-eyed looks that made me think of my Nana and Gramps back home. Theresa’s parents had always been lovey-dovey, like two peas in a pod. On the same wall as the booth in which I lounged, I could just barely see the back of a blonde head a few booths up.
Melissa sat a cup and saucer down before me before taking her seat, a bottle of cider in her hand. “So, Miss Anya decided to show herself to you. You aren’t the first. Rebecca Glory, the second female guard to go missing, has visited me at home.”
I sat up straighter in my seat, ripped nylon crackling beneath me, and gripped the warm mug between both hands. “Second?”
Melissa nodded her head, curls bouncing, as she took a long drink from her bottle. I took a tentative sip of the instant sludge they call coffee in England and made a face. “Five girls. Every two years. They’ve all been guards at the Temple. The press has been writing them off as possible Wild Hunt victims, but the problem is, unlike the other documented attacks, no bodies have been found.” She pulled a yellow three ring binder from her canvas tote and slid it across the table to me.
Anya’s face stared out at me as I opened it. I paged through various statements, both handwritten and printed from the newspaper’s website at the library. Behind all of the documents pertaining to the wispy Eastern European was a cover sheet for Rebecca Glory, a 23 year old from Toronto. Missing exactly two years after Anya. I paged through some more, and came across three more pictures. Cho Ming, a pretty little girl from Hong Kong, only twenty at the time of her disappearance; Francine Delacroix, a 28 year old from Paris, France; and Teena Abasi, a Kenyan exchange student who had been in the midst of gaining her citizenship to England when she went missing exactly two years ago.
“You’ve done some serious homework.”
“Notice a pattern?” Melissa was chomping on a plateful of fried onion rings, gre
ase dripping. I’d never even heard the waiter bring them.
“They all went missing right before Halloween,” I answered, coming to a stop on a page with Brett’s name at the top. It was under the section for Teena. “Have you interviewed everyone who knew these girls?”
She nodded and swallowed before answering. “Except for Jordan, the guy who works before your shift? Every time I attempt to contact him, he blows me off. I’ve spoken to his wife I don’t know how many times. That woman is as meek as a mouse.”
I snorted. “I can’t believe someone would actually marry that jackass.”
Melissa dangled the ring she was about to bite, giving me a conspiratorial grin. “From what I’ve heard, it was an arranged marriage. Jordan’s dad apparently owns half the real estate in town and Missy, that’s his wife, her Mother is some big name in old money. It was a business deal. Jordan’s dad got control of two historical homes and their gardens, and Missy got a husband. According to Brett, she’s not an attractive woman.”
Taking a substantial gulp of my coffee, I chewed that piece of information over for a moment. “That’s definitely interesting. First time I’ve ever heard of an arranged marriage in this day and age.”
Melissa shrugged, her mouth full of onion. I scanned Brett’s statement on Teena. Kept to herself, always on time to work, well dressed, very soft spoken and kind. She was telekinetic. He once came in to work early and found her outside, levitating trees, so her power was substantial. According to passing conversations, she had no family, few friends, and lived alone in a flat over the tailor’s store.
There was a statement from the tailor that read close to Brett’s, minus the powers and temple stuff. Just another sweet girl to whom something terrible had happened.
“None of them have family,” Melissa sighed, dipping her last onion ring into her ketchup. “There was no one to worry about them except Edward Nice and a couple roommates.”
The Temple Page 5