That was crazy.
Shaking my head, I cleaned up the classroom and went to the dressing room. I was too tired today to dance by myself like I did most evenings.
I was changing into my ripped jeans and loose green blouse when my mother came into the dressing room.
“Ready to go home?” she asked.
I gawked at her. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.” She smiled at me. “I’m gonna make dinner for you.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why? Did you invite Artan to my apartment again?”
She scoffed. “Can’t I just want to spend time with my daughter?”
More time than she already had last week? She lost that right when she didn’t let me go to college, forcing me to move away and leave her behind, and then again when I found out she kept so much from me and was still hiding things.
However, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, not the way she always hurt mine.
I opened my mouth to blurt out a lie, when two girls entered the dressing room.
“Hey, Mirella,” Ellie said.
“Hey,” I answered.
Ellie sat by my side to change out of her dancing uniform. Besides Flamenco on Thursdays, Ellie and Tonia were now taking jazz for adults on Tuesdays. “Remember I told you about doing another pizza night? We’re going now. Want to come?”
“Yeah,” Tonia, the other dancer, said. “You should come. It’s the best pizza in all Broken Hill.”
Well, there was my excuse not to go home. I glanced at my mother.
“Have fun,” she said. A weak smile adorned her face as she turned toward the door.
A sick feeling filled my stomach. “Thanks,” I muttered.
“Why did you move to Broken Hill?” Tonia asked after swallowing a big bite of her pizza.
It was indeed the best pizza I had ever had, and the place was nice too. Not too big, cozy, with dim lights, and a heavy, delicious cheese smell. And I was having a good time with Tonia and Ellie. Two other girls from their class couldn’t come and another had already left. So far, they seemed a nice bunch.
Now, how to answer her question. “I was accepted into college here.”
“How about your mother?” Ellie asked. “I’m assuming that lady in the dressing room was your mother …”
“Yeah, she is.” I swallowed hard. “I moved first, and then she got lonely and moved here too,” I lied. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely a lie.
Tonia smiled. “Aw, that’s so sweet.”
While eating, we talked about friends, boys, horrible years in high school, dancing, and partying. Tonia and Ellie were about my age—nineteen and twenty—and they both studied at Broken Hill University too.
“I have a secret. My dream had always been to go to Juilliard,” Tonia revealed. Earlier in the evening, she had told us about her many years of ballet training. The waitress had just brought our bill over. “But I haven’t been consistent in my training since starting college, and I never passed an audition. I get too nervous and can’t stop shaking. It ruins my performance.”
“I had that dream when I was younger and loved ballet,” Ellie said. “But ballet apparently never loved me since I wasn’t that good.” We chuckled. “Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have the money to go to Juilliard. I’m at BHU because I have a scholarship.”
“And you? Don’t you wanna go to Juilliard or some other big dance school?” Tonia asked, bumping her elbow on my arm. We handed our credit cards to the waitress. “You dance so well. I bet you could get in.”
I sighed. I would love to go to Juilliard, but besides the money, I had just moved here. My goal was to finish the dance program some time this century—I would never stay on track in the program taking only two or three classes per semester—then auditions for companies. I would probably be too old to join a company then, but I had to try.
“I don’t have the money either,” I said. “I guess I’ll always be a wannabe dancer-slash-instructor.”
“At least you can work with dance,” Tonia said and I nodded. “My father wants me to be a lawyer, ugh.”
Dance was way too important to me. It made me feel alive, special, and powerful. Each time I danced, I felt like anything was possible. And, besides our similar looks, it was the only thing I had in common with my mother.
The waitress brought our credit cards back, and we walked out into the warm, busy night of downtown Broken Hill.
“It was a fun evening,” Ellie said as we approached her car, which was parked a half block down the street. “I hope you can make it to our weekly dates.” Her smile was genuine and my heart squeezed.
Because of all the moving and trust issues, I had never had a chance to make real friends. Or boyfriends. When things got a little serious, I dumped the guys before they could dump me. Only once I thought I wanted to try and give a guy more time. Then my mother and I moved again and he was left behind.
“Yeah.” I returned her smile. “I think I would like that.”
“Me too,” Tonia agreed. “Well, see you girls next class.”
“Where are you going?” I asked, worried she would wander through the streets alone at night.
“I live a block from here, just around the corner.” She pointed toward it. “Bye, girls.”
“Bye,” Ellie and I said as she disappeared from our sight.
Ellie took her car keys from her purse, and when we were a few feet from it, she clicked the unlocking button. And I halted.
She turned to me. “What’s wrong?”
“Shh.” I put my finger over my mouth and closed my eyes.
A tickling sensation crawled inside my mind, and it didn’t feel natural. I focused on it. The stir intensified and stabbed at the back of my head. A warning. It was my sixth sense, and it was trying to warn me. I took a deep breath and let the conscious walls of my mind slip away. They swarmed out, sensing and recognizing everything around me. There it was—whatever I was supposed to be warned about—across the street.
My eyes shot open, and I glanced to where my senses had guided me.
A dark red Jeep Wrangler with an open top was parked in the spot I had sensed the disturbance coming from.
“Come on,” I whispered, beckoning for Ellie to follow me.
Slowly, we crossed the street and I saw a wide, two-leaf, metal garage door behind the Jeep, placed between two decaying buildings, one leaf half-opened.
Whatever the warning was, it came from behind the gate.
I stepped closer and bumped my nose into a wall.
“Ow.” I retreated a step and stared up at the wall.
“Hi there,” The Wall said. Wearing dark jeans and a loose, white, button-up shirt, The Wall was tall and wide and had thick, dark hair down to his shoulders, several small golden hoops covered his left ear. The sharp angles of The Wall’s tanned face could cut through metal, I was sure, and his dark brown eyes gleamed with amusement. “You should be more careful where you walk.”
I rubbed my nose. “And you should come with blinkers. Or a blaring horn.”
The Wall chuckled loudly. “Sense of humor, interesting.” I frowned, trying to find the thread my senses had followed. It was gone. The Wall leaned down closer. “Are you okay? It didn’t hurt, did it?”
I touched my nose again. “It hurts, but I don’t think it’s broken.”
“Good.” He extended his hand to me. “I’m Theron, by the way.”
I stared at his hand for a moment. I felt it … it tugging for me, deep inside. Something I couldn’t name. I didn’t know how to name. But it was there and it was beckoning for me. Calling me.
Ellie took advantage of that and slipped her hand into Theron’s. “Hi, I’m Ellie, Mirella’s best friend.”
I turned wide eyes at her, but she was too distracted with The Wall. Best friend? We had known each for two weeks.
With a lopsided grin, Theron glanced from Ellie to me and back to Ellie. “Nice to meet you, Ellie.” He pulled his hand back.
Sh
e flipped her hair back and batted her lashes at him. “The pleasure is all mine.”
Oh my God, could she be any more obvious?
I cleared my throat. “Sorry for bothering you, but we should get going.”
Just then, another guy stepped out of the garage, almost as tall and wide as Theron. I grabbed Ellie’s arm and pulled her away before getting a good look at him.
I felt their gazes on us as we crossed the street.
“What are you doing?” Ellie whispered to me as if they were still close to us. “I want to get to know him.”
Chuckling, I opened the passenger door of her car. “He’s a stranger.”
“Well, I could have changed that.”
I didn’t doubt that.
Ellie slipped into the car. I tried not looking back, I really did, but I couldn’t resist. As I lowered myself to get in the car, I glanced over my shoulder at the garage. A tall woman with long dark hair now stood beside Theron and the other guy, and the three of them stared at us as if we had stumbled through their secret and were now running away to tell the entire world.
A chill ran down my spine.
6
Of course, I found my mother at my place when I got home Saturday afternoon from the dance studio.
She had shown up at my apartment more and more over the past few days. Sometimes it was to cook dinner, sometimes it was to cook lunch, sometimes it was to bring groceries, and sometimes it was to clean the place. It was like having a personal maid, and since she wasn’t really trying to talk to me or bothering me, I indulged her. After all, she was feeding me better than I had eaten since I moved out, she was keeping my place clean, and we shared the same blood.
My mother and I had never had an easy relationship. As far as I could remember, she had always been aloof and reserved. I knew she kept stuff from me. I didn’t know anything about my father. Until recently, I had known nothing about her past, her parents. Nothing. Zero. The only thing she had told me when I was younger was that she had trusted my father and got hurt. Too hurt. She kept saying we shouldn’t trust anyone, no men, not even our own family. Had she tried to say I couldn’t trust her?
Well, it worked. I grew to be a suspicious and reserved girl who, at twenty, had never had a best friend, aside from Layla, or a serious boyfriend, besides the occasional hook up.
But I couldn’t say my life with her had been all bad. She had given dance to me. Instead of going to a daycare, I spent my days at dance studios with her, first only watching, then imitating, later learning, and now teaching. And that part filled my whole chest with happiness and hope. I didn’t need anything else right now.
I had just arrived home when my phone vibrated in my pocket. On the screen, I saw Ellie’s name.
A smile spread across my lips. Despite my rather weak efforts to keep my distance from her, Ellie and I had talked or seen each other every day this week. We even had lunch on campus together twice. She was funny, happy, and simply contagious. It was hard not letting her in.
“We’re going clubbing tonight,” she said once I answered.
“We?”
“Yeah, you, me and a couple of my friends from BHU.”
I waved at my mother, who was in the kitchen cooking as usual, and went to my bedroom. “Hmm, I don’t remember agreeing to that.”
“Come on, it will be fun. And I bet my life you’ll love the club.”
I thought it over for a minute. “Why? How is the club?”
“Take my word for it. Come on, Mi. Do you have anything better to do?”
I glanced back to my bedroom’s door. My mother was on the other side, taking over my apartment and still not opening up to me, not even talking properly to me, afraid I would take that as an invitation to ask more questions.
“Okay, I’ll go.” My gaze fell on the white box sitting on top of my dresser. Slowly, I opened it and stared at the beautiful necklace. I ran my fingertip over the flamenco dancer pendant. Then something flared in my chest. A need. A wanting. Hmm. “Can I invite a friend too?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll pick you up at nine.”
“Okay.”
As soon as we disconnected, I put the necklace around my neck and dialed another number.
“Hello?” Phillip answered. I could see the furrow between his brows. He didn’t know my number.
“Hi. It’s me.” I bit my lip, butterflies flying in my chest.
“Whoa, that’s a nice surprise.”
I couldn’t help the smile on my lips. “I’m going out with some friends tonight. Would you like to come?”
“I don’t want you to go out,” my mother said from my bedroom door.
I was almost ready. Just needed a little more mascara, lip gloss, perfume, and done.
“I’m serious, Mirella. I have this feeling.” She put her closed fist over her heart. “It’s not good.”
I turned away from the mirror and stood before her. “Don’t worry. I’m wearing the thingie you gave me. It’s in my bra. Always. Like I promised you it would be.” Even when I had moved out on my own, I felt guilty for even considering not wearing it. So, I wore it. Always.
“I’m glad it is, but that won’t protect you from everything.”
I put a hand on my waist. “And what do I need protection from? Our enemies? And who are they?” My mother averted her eyes, her lips pressed into a tight line. “You never give me answers.”
In front of the mirror again, I applied more lip gloss, made a pose to see if everything was okay. It seemed to be. I had chosen an off-the-shoulder dark green dress that went down to my thighs to some lace pattern that went on for another three inches, long, feather earrings, a few bracelets, and high-heel sandals with straps that wound up to my knees. I was almost tall in them.
Deciding I was done, I grabbed my wristlet and walked past my mother, down the stairs, to wait for Ellie, who should be on her way, at the door.
“Please, understand. It’s my sixth sense.” My mother caught up with me and tried to put herself between the door and me. Wrong move.
I sighed. “I get it about the sixth sense, but mine flares up every now and then and most of the time, it’s nothing. It’s just someone I know getting close.” Her sixth sense was probably acting up because she was worried, and she was always worried. “It’s okay.”
She reached for me. “It’s not okay—”
I jerked back. “Mom, I’m going.”
She pressed her lips into a thin line. “Mirella, what do I have to do to make you reconsider?”
I could think of a lot of things she could say to make me reconsider. She could tell me the truth about our enemies, about her banishment, about my father … there were so many options. But I knew, I just knew that she wouldn’t tell me. Not now.
Movement outside the window caught my attention, and all thoughts of maybe, just maybe, reaching my mother, of letting her reach me, fled my mind. Ellie parked her car in front of the building. My salvation had arrived, the salvation from my mother and from our awkward, tense conversations.
“Goodbye, mother.” I left without looking back.
In the car, while driving us to New Haven, a bigger town forty minutes from Broken Hill, Ellie introduced me to Raul, her classmate from BHU.
“So you’re the gorgeous dancer Ellie told us about,” Raul said, leaning forward. “I can see the gorgeous part.”
“Soon you’ll see the dancer,” Ellie said, stealing a peek through the rearview mirror.
“Honey,” Raul said, breaking his hand before my face. Gay. Totally gay and not afraid of showing it. And the pink ascot around his neck confirmed the suspicion. “We all become great dancers after a few shots of alcohol.”
Ellie cleared her throat. “Mirella and I aren’t twenty-one yet, so you drink and we dance, okay?”
Raul winked at me. “Or perhaps I can buy some drinks and spread them around.”
We laughed. Well, I was already enjoying my night. I hoped it just got better when I met Phillip. He h
ad been able to arrange for his mother to stay with Annie overnight. He sent me a text confirming, and I texted him the name of the place, after asking Ellie.
Twenty minutes later, Ellie parked the car in the club’s parking lot.
From the exterior, it looked like a big black box squeezed between other buildings on a dark street. The only distinguishing feature was the name of the place, right at the top of the building, in cutout steel letters with bright blue backlight. Muévete.
It sounded ... Latin.
It was too good to be true. “Did you bring me to a salsa club?” I asked Ellie, while we walked to the entrance line.
“Not only salsa, Mi.” She smiled at me, looking proud of herself. “They play lots of flamenco and reggaeton, just the way you like.”
I had known her for only a couple of weeks, and she already knew what I liked. It was amazing. Never before had I had someone who found out so much about me in so little time. It was like she really understood me. And it scared me. What if she hurt me? What if I trusted her and she hurt me, humiliated me, left me?
“Come on, honey.” Raul linked his arm with mine and, moving his hips inside his tight leather pants with the beat of the music coming from the club, walked me to the line. “Relax, girl.” He shook my arm. “You’re tense and we’re here to have fun.”
Right. Fun. Could I have fun?
I glanced around. Everyone looked animated, laughing with friends, dancing in the line, talking loudly on their phones. Why couldn’t I be like that too? I could. I could be like that. I could have a good time and I would have a good time.
I took a deep breath and left my doubts for another time. I could worry about Ellie and her friendship later. Right now, I had a party to attend.
A few minutes later, we were inside.
On the dance floor, right in the middle of the club, people danced among dry-ice smoke along with the reggaeton that blared from the giant speakers around the place as if it was the end of the world. Colored beams of light whirled around and four mirror balls on each corner of the dance floor helped with the mood. The bar, a long black counter with high stools, was on the right. There were low tables to the left and leather sofas in the back. A small stage was set up in the front, to our left. Past the bar and beside the sofa area, black stairs led up to a balcony that overlooked the dance floor and most of the other spaces. The balcony was divided by low metal railings, low tables, and sofas in each of these spaces, like VIP zones.
Heart Seeker (The Fire Heart Chronicles Book 1) Page 5