Wicked is the night

by Catherine Mulvany

  “And did it?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe if I’d been able to get into the study, but the mansion was locked up tight. No Marvin around to let me in. I stood there forever just staring up at the house, but I couldn’t even figure out which windows belonged to the study. I tried to calm my mind, hoping some memories would surface, but”—she shrugged—“nothing happened. I’d even taken a mirror along. I thought maybe if I stared at myself in the mirror with the house reflected behind me, I might be able to trigger a psychic flash.”

  “But that didn’t happen,” he guessed.

  “Nothing happened, except I got cold. While I was busy trying to reconnect with my memories, the fog crept in. What was worse, I got lost on the way back here. Everything looks different…sounds different…in the fog.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone on your own. It’s not safe, especially at night. Darkness is the vampire’s friend.”

  “So what was I supposed to do?” she said. “Wake you up and ask you to drive me over to the Smith mansion in the middle of the night on the off chance it might jog my memory?”

  He scowled at her. “Do you really think I was asleep? How could I sleep with you so close and yet so far out of reach?”

  “Trick, I…&rÃck,leedquo; She didn’t know what to say. Yes, she’d closed herself off from him but for good reason. Until she knew for sure that she wasn’t a murderer, a monster capable of killing someone close to her, she wasn’t going to put anyone at risk, least of all Trick.

  “I don’t know what you’re going through, and I won’t pretend that I understand how you feel. I don’t. I only know how I feel.” He tipped her chin up so she was forced to meet his gaze. “I care about you, Nevada. If something happened to you, I…” His jaw tightened. “I’ve lost enough. I won’t lose you, too!” His expression was fierce, his voice harsh.

  Nevada knew he was upset. She could see the turmoil in his expression, in his body language, but she couldn’t let him harbor any false hopes. “You don’t have me to lose, Trick. I’m not a possession. I don’t belong to anyone.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said, his voice ragged with suppressed emotion. “We were destined to be together. Don’t you get that? When you tumbled out of the cab of the logging truck right in front of me, that was fate. We were meant to meet, meant to join, to bond. I know it, and you know it, even if you are too stubborn to admit it. I belong to you and you to me.”

  Join. Bond. How careful he was not to say love.

  And how quick she was to criticize, even though she hadn’t been any more forthcoming herself. But damn it, how could she be when she wasn’t sure if she was the sort of person deserving of love?

  “I don’t…”

  “Feel the same way?” he said, his voice raspy, as if the words were being torn from his throat.

  “I can’t—”

  “Liar.”

  “I haven’t said anything.”

  He stared down at her, his brow knit, his mouth twisted, his nostrils flared. “Our silence can lie as surely as our words.”

  Or it could ring with truth. I love you, she thought. I can’t tell you. For your own good, I can’t tell you, but I love you all the same.

  Trick’s expression softened. Had he somehow heard her unspoken words? “Deny this,” he said. Wrapping his arms around her, he lowered his mouth to hers in a kiss so sweet and tender that it brought tears to her eyes.

  Time lost all meaning. There was only Trick, the clean, spicy scent of him, the warm, hard strength of him, the hot, sweet taste of him. After an eternity, he broke off the kiss, brushed his lips across her cheek, then whispered in her ear. “You can’t deny it, can you?” He leaned back, cupping her chin in one hand. “Don’t bother trying. I can see the truth in your flushed cheeks.” His other hand circled her throat. “Feel it in the thrum of your pulse.”

  “Kiss me again,” she said.

  EIGHTEEN

  Trick woke spooned up against Nevada’s backside, one hand cupping her breast and the other tucked between her legs, all in all, not a bad position to find himself in. Muted daylight—apparently the city was still wrapped in fog—filtered in the unshuttered, and, he suddenly realized, still unscreened window. He’d better remedy that before Rivers noticed. Better dispose of the discarded condoms, too, while he was at it.

  He inched backward, trying to ease himself free without disturbing Nevada. But his strategy didn’t work.

  She muttered something unintelligible, then grabbed his wrists and wrapped his arms around her like a security blanket.

  “Nevada?” he whispered.

  “Ungh,” she said.

  “I’ve got to get up.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “For one thing, I’m starving. It takes a lot of fuel to satisfy a sex fiend like you.”

  She turned over in his arms and gave him an impish smile. “Who says I’m satisfied?”

  “You did,” he said, “with all that gasping and moaning.”

  Her cheeks turned pink. “I gasped and moaned?”

  “Yeah, and I was right there with you.”

  She frowned. “Did I bite your shoulder? I seem to remember…”

  “A little nip. Didn’t even break the skin.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I got carried away.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know the feeling.”

  Someone knocked on the door. “Nevada?” Great-aunt Leticia’s voice.

  “Yes?” Nevada called.

  “May I come in, dear?”

  “No,” Nevada said, scrambling out of bed. “I’m…I’m not dressed.”

  Trick smiled his approval. Nevada undressed was a sight to stir the blood. In fact, he wasn’t sure he needed breakfast after all.

  “I wouldn’t bother you, dear,” Great-aunt Leticia said, “but a man just called for Patrick, a man from McKelvey’s. I put him on hold, but I can’t find Patrick. I looked in his room. I looked everywhere. I thought perhaps you might know where he’s gone.”

  Nevada, who had by this time managed to pull on some clothes, her jeans and his shirt, motioned for Trick to hide.

  He ripped the quilt off the bed with one good jerk, then wrapped it around himself. He considered ducking into the bathroom or the closet, but opted instead to take up a position behind the door where he’d be invisible to anyone peering inside but still be able to hear whatever was said.

  Nevada craË"5%e&rcked the door open a cautious inch or two and peered out. “Maybe Trick took a walk,” she said.

  As Nevada spoke, Trick’s gaze fell on his discarded cross-trainers lying on the rug next to the bed. Oh, shit, he thought, praying that Great-aunt Leticia wouldn’t notice.

  But evidently God was busy elsewhere.

  “Without his shoes?” Great-aunt Leticia said archly.

  Nevada wondered again why Trick’s Great-aunt Leticia had asked them to meet her here in the formal dining room after lunch. If she was going to give them the boot, wouldn’t she just ask them to leave? Though if that were her purpose, she probably would have done it already. The truth was, she hadn’t seemed particularly upset or even surprised to find out Trick had spent the night in Nevada’s room. Maybe this was going to be a safe-sex lecture.

  Rivers propped a large white board against the hutch and set a box of dry-erase markers on the table.

  A safe-sex lecture complete with stick drawings.

  “Will there be anything else, Miss Granger?” Rivers asked.

  “No, thank you, Rivers. You’ve been a huge help already. The white board is his,” she confided to Trick and Nevada. Then as soon as Rivers left, she added with a touch of malicious satisfaction, “He uses it to make lists. Can’t see to use paper and pencil anymore, but he’s too vain to wear reading glasses.” Great-aunt Leticia was looking like a rather pruney Paris Hilton today in jeans, a lavender cashmere sweater, and a blond wig.

  Nevada tried to catch Trick’s eye, but he was reading an email Marcello had just sent to his gmail a
ccount.

  Great-aunt Leticia cleared her throat. “Shall we get started then?”

  “Of course,” Nevada said, “but first, I have a question. What’s the purpose of this meeting?”

  Great-aunt Leticia looked surprised. “Patrick didn’t tell you?”

  “No.” Nevada frowned at Trick, who still had his nose stuck in the printout of Marcello’s email. “He didn’t say a word.”

  Great-aunt Leticia shot him an indulgent look, wasted, as it happened, since he wasn’t looking at her, either. “A man of action, our Patrick. Of words? Not so much.”

  Nevada aimed a kick at his shin but connected instead with a table leg. “Ow,” she said.

  Great-aunt Leticia raised her penciled brows. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s nothing. I stubbed my toe.”

  “Serves you right,” Trick said under his breath.

  “Let’s get started then, shall we?” Great-aunt Leticia said brightly. She reached into the box of markers and pulled one out with a little squeal of delight. “Look! A pink one! I didn’t know they came in pink, did you?” She was too busy making illegible pink scribbles across the top of the white board to notice that no one aËe tn&rnswered. “Okay,” she said. “Three headings. ‘Things We Know,’ ‘Things We Surmise,’ and ‘Things We Don’t Know.’” She did a little more scribbling.

  “What did Marcello have to say?” Nevada asked Trick.

  “Nothing happening in Midas Lake. No sign of Sarge since the day he killed Mr. Spinelli at the marina.”

  “That’s good news.”

  He focused on the papers in his hand. “Um,” he murmured, the ultimate in noncommittal communication.

  “Isn’t it? Good news, I mean.”

  “Um,” he said again, pursing his lips this time.

  “Was that all he said?” she persisted. Because that email he was poring over was two pages long, damn it, and it didn’t take two pages to say ‘nothing’s happening here.’ Even if you were Italian.

  Great-aunt Leticia turned around with a big smile. Her gold crowns sparkled under the light of the crystal chandelier. “Things we know,” she said. “We know two men have been tracking Nevada ever since she escaped from the Appleton Institute.”

  “Two vampires,” Trick said without glancing up.

  “I think the vampire part needs to go under things we surmise,” Great-aunt Leticia said.

  Trick did look up then. “Surmise hell,” he said. “Ethan Faraday and I both watched one turn to dust. The guy took a crossbow bolt through the heart and poof, he was gone.”

  “Under stress, the mind sometimes—”

  “I saw what I saw,” Trick said. “Besides, if they weren’t vampires, then why did they rip out all those people’s throats?”

  “Did you actually see them rip anyone’s throat out?”

  “I saw one of them sink his fangs in Nevada’s neck.”

  Great-aunt Leticia frowned. “Okay, we’ll call them vampires, but I’m going to put a little question mark after it. I mean, maybe there’s a logical explanation.”

  “For some guy turning to dust?” Trick said.

  “All this happened in the dark, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So maybe the man didn’t really turn to dust. Maybe he hid behind something.”

  “I know what I saw,” Trick insisted, “but I’m not going to argue with you. Keep the damn question mark if it makes you feel better.”

  “It’s not about my feelings, Patrick dear. It’s about accuracy.”

  “Fine,” he snapped.

  Nevada wondered if all Great-aunt Leticia’s meetings went this way.

  “We also know that Nevada looks very much Ëookalllike Blanche Smith, a young woman—”

  “Whore,” Trick said. “If we’re interested in accuracy.”

  “Whore,” Great-aunt Leticia corrected herself, adding a few more bright pink hieroglyphics to the white board. “…a young whore, originally from San Francisco, who worked in Midas Lake for our not-so-illustrious ancestor Silas Granger.”

  “We know that Blanche came from a Romanichal family,” Nevada said.

  “And we know that the Smiths who built the mansion on Broadway were said to have Gypsy blood.” Great-aunt Leticia paused. “Maybe that should go on the ‘things we surmise’ section of the board, though. We don’t know for a fact the Smiths had Gypsy blood.”

  “We don’t know for a fact that Blanche had Gypsy blood, either,” Trick said. “Just leave it.”

  “We know Allison Smith, the last of the Smith mansion Smiths, was a clairvoyant,” Great-aunt Leticia said, scribbling some more. “And we know that her daughter, Whitney Snowden, disappeared shortly after her father’s supposed suicide in the study of the Smith mansion.”

  “We know Nevada has psychic flashes,” Trick said. “We also know she had the address of the Smith mansion attached to her file at the Appleton Institute. We know she had a powerful negative response upon entering the study at the Smith mansion. From that, we can surmise that Nevada has some traumatic associations with that room and that she and Whitney are most likely the same person.”

  “What we don’t know is what specific memories I have of my father’s death. We don’t know if I killed him or if it was truly a suicide and finding him dead traumatized me.”

  “Or,” Trick said, “maybe what traumatized you was seeing the murderer’s reflection.”

  “Is there a mirror in the study?” Great-aunt Leticia asked.

  “Yes,” Nevada told her. “A large octagonal one above the fireplace. But…”

  “What?” Trick asked.

  “If I wasn’t the one who killed my father, if I wasn’t sent to the Appleton Institute to be ‘cured,’ if someone else murdered my father and then made it look like a suicide, why didn’t the murderer simply eliminate me, too?”

  “Two deaths in the same family on the same night?” Trick said. “That would have raised a red flag. Even if it had been set up to look like a murder-suicide, the police would have launched an in-depth investigation, and who knows what dirty little secrets might have come to light?”

  “Besides,” Great-aunt Leticia said, fussing with her watchband, “there were already rumors about young Whitney’s mental instability before the night of her father’s so-called suicide. That played right into the murderer’s hands. Whatever wild accusations Whitney might make to the police would be discounted because of her prior history. Plus, if it ever did become known that she’d been sent to the Appleton Institute, who would question that decision?”Ëecicau

  “Especially now,” Nevada said, “with Regina out of the picture.”

  “The evil stepmother disappears under suspicious circumstances,” Great-aunt Leticia muttered, scribbling furiously with her pink marker.

  “Better add a question mark after that,” Trick said, “in the interest of accuracy.”

  Great-aunt Leticia scowled at him. “Why? She disappeared.”

  Trick gave her a superior smile. “No, I was referring to the ‘evil’ part. We don’t know whether or not she was evil.”

  Great-aunt Leticia snorted, but she added the question mark.

  “You know who we haven’t considered yet as our potential villain?” Trick said. “Whitney Snowden’s half brother, Daniel.”

  “And for good reason.” Great-aunt Leticia glared at Trick. “Representative Daniel Snowden is no villain. Good grief! The man’s an environmentalist. He’s come down heavily in favor of protecting the clarkia. I ask you, could a man protect wildflowers on the one hand and participate in villainy on the other? Ridiculous!”

  “But—” Trick started.

  “Ridiculous!” Great-aunt Leticia repeated. Under the “Things We Know” heading, she wrote: Daniel Snowden has an impeccable voting record on environmental issues.

  Trick looked as if he were gearing up for an argument, so Nevada quickly said, “If Regina Snowden was the one who murdered James Snowden, that would explain why she sent tho
se monsters after me when I escaped from the Institute. She must have been afraid I’d remembered everything. And that,” she added slowly, “also might explain why she’s gone into hiding. She’s afraid I’m going to expose her.”

  “So if Sarge and his friend were working for your stepmother, then now that she’s gone missing, you should be safe,” Trick said.

  Daniel, looking suitably somber in black, left the press conference and headed back to his office, where Sarge Collier waited for him. Daniel thought he’d struck the right note, with his brave announcement that, despite Regina’s disappearance, he was still contemplating a run for governor. It had been his beloved stepmother’s dearest wish, he’d told the press, to see him in the governor’s mansion.

  As he entered the outer office, Ms. Grimshaw glanced up, a worried expression on her face. “Sir, there’s a man in your office. I tried to stop him, but he said—”

  “That’s quite all right,” Daniel told her. “I was expecting him.”

  As Daniel walked into his office, Sarge glanced up guiltily, his big hand stuffed in Daniel’s crystal candy jar.

  “Chocopologie truffles by Knipschildt. Two hundred fifty dollars a piece. Two thousand, six hundred dollars a pound. By all means, help yourself.”

  With a sheepish grin, Sarge pulled out a truffle,Ë ou do unwrapped it, and then shoved it into his mouth.

  “Still no sign of my sister?”

  “Zippo,” Sarge mumbled around a mouthful of chocolate. “It’s like she’s disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “She doesn’t remember,” Daniel said.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “If she remembered what happened, she’d have gone to the authorities by now. Ergo, she doesn’t remember.”

  “So…” Sarge frowned. “Does that mean we’re not going to look for her anymore?”

  “We can keep our eyes open, of course, but since she poses no immediate threat, we may as well focus on more important things.”

  “The campaign,” Sarge guessed.

  “Bravo,” Daniel said. “Apparently there’s something to the story about chocolate being brain food.”