Waiting for Magic

by Susan Squires

  That surprised him. She was a photographer? He’d never seen her take a picture. And he never thought of her as having a hobby. “I didn’t know you took pictures.”

  She gave a pained smile. “You weren’t paying attention.”

  Oh. Jane did kind of blend into the background. It occurred to him that Jane was another stray the Tremaines had taken in.

  “Actually, I make a decent living at it. Local art shows, some weddings and anniversary portraits, that sort of thing.”

  She did?

  She gave him a scolding look. “You can’t think I’d sponge off your parents entirely. I already eat most of my meals here.”

  “No,” he said. “Of course not.” Though frankly, he didn’t see why not. The Tremaines liked doing things for people they cared about. And they all cared about Jane.

  She gave another sigh. “So you see my dilemma. Brian wants to convert the old root cellar into a darkroom for me.”

  “Sounds great.” Devin shrugged.

  “It’s too much.” She shook her head. “And.…”

  There was some genuine distress there. “What is it, Jane?” he asked gently. He knew she felt like an outsider in the Tremaine household. No magic. He’d been there. He was still there, even if he had the gene. The entire Tremaine family would kick him out into the street, naked and bloody, if they knew how he felt about Kee.

  She bit her lip and shook her head. He should give her a hug. That’s what girls needed when they looked like Jane looked now. Difficult. Still she wasn’t going to tell him if he didn’t do something. And he knew how damaging secrets could be. Jane shouldn’t have to bear that too. He put his hand over hers. It wasn’t bad. A little awkward, but then he didn’t have any practice. At least it wasn’t the electric pain to his groin he got when he’d pulled Kee out of the water and let her rest on his chest in the cab. “You can tell me,” he said.

  Jane’s brows drew together. She examined his face. “Yes. Yes I can.” She heaved in a breath and he felt it was okay to take his hand away. He wasn’t used to the etiquette of touching and how long was too long—that kind of thing. He hoped it didn’t look like he was aching to end the contact, even though he was. “If I don’t go home to develop my pictures,” she said, “I … I might not want to go home at all.” She shook her head. “I’m an ungrateful daughter.”

  Devin could hardly believe his ears. “She makes your life hell whenever you go home. We all know that, Jane. You make sure she has food. You wash and iron her clothes. You take her to doctor’s appointments when what she really needs is an AA meeting. I bet you pay her bills. You’re a way better daughter than that woman deserves.”

  “But I don’t love her,” Jane said simply. “Not anymore.”

  What could he say to that? “Blood family has claims on you. But nowhere does it say you have to love them. You get to choose whom to love as family.” But he felt so guilty saying that he almost choked on the words. He loved the Tremaines just like Jane did, but he’d betrayed them with a love he couldn’t control.

  She looked up at him, her face dim, her eyes dark in the half-light.

  “Let him give you a darkroom,” Devin said, clearing his throat. “You deserve a life of your own.” That, at least, was true.

  She sighed and set down her drink. It was hardly touched. But Jane never drank very much. “You deserve that too, Devin.” She rose and headed into the dining room. “Coming?”

  “In a minute.”

  But as soon as she was gone, he took the decanter and his glass and headed to his room.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Darkness had fallen. They’d waited all afternoon. That made the old woman crazy. But they dared not try to make contact again. The connection was too valuable to lose by discovery. Jason was not as nervous as usual around the old woman when she was in a snit, perhaps because he wouldn’t be the focus of her wrath. Phil, on the other hand, was about to crap in his pants. His pale hair was stuck to his head, his skin clammy with sweat. He wasn’t a big guy, like Jason, or tall and rangy like Hardwick. Just an ordinary looking schmoe who had started out playing drums in some band and turned out to have the power of Percussion. He could strike anything, using just the power in the air around him. He could hit real hard too.

  “Stop that pacing,” the old woman barked at Phil. He froze as if she’d struck him. Which she would never do. She didn’t have to.

  The doorbell rang. Phil started to shake. But it was just room service. Room service was one reason the old woman loved living in hotels. The other reason was that she could up and move at any time. They paid bills in cash, thanks to Jason. That was probably the only reason he was still around after his previous failures. He’d heard the saying, “I don’t know where the money went. It just seemed to disappear.” Well it did when Jason was around. And casinos had loads of it. Their security systems were useless. He just Cloaked himself, followed them in, picked up some money and included it in his Cloak, and walked out behind them. Never saw him coming. Or leaving.

  They were nearly finished eating when Hardwick’s computer pinged. He walked over and hit a key. You could have cut the silence with a steak knife.

  “All Tremaines present and accounted for,” he said in that deep, Boris Karloff voice of his. The old woman turned to Phil, who looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  “You didn’t even wait to make sure, did you?” she hissed.

  “How, how could I? The car was washed downstream. I saw it sink. And it wasn’t like I could swim out and check. Nobody could have survived that.”

  “But they did. And that means you disobeyed my orders to kill them.” The menace in the old woman’s voice was not diminished by the sweetness of her tone. She motioned to Hardwick and Jason. Jason knew his role. He got up from the suite’s dining room table and moved to Phil’s right. Hardwick came in from the left.

  Phil started to panic in earnest, since he knew what was coming. It wasn’t the first time he’d incurred the old woman’s wrath. Fortunately for him, he didn’t have a corpse in his past she could torment him with, like Jason. So Hardwick was the old woman’s weapon of choice.

  “No,” Phil panted. “I tried. I don’t know how they got out. Not my fault.”

  The old woman was implacable as she cut her blood-red steak and moved the morsel to her mouth. “Trying isn’t good enough.”

  Jason sidled in behind Phil and grabbed his arms, pinned them behind his back. The guy was shaking. He was maybe thirty, lank, dirt-blond hair and wild pale eyes. “I’ll go back.” He was on the verge of blubbering. “I’ll get them for you.”

  “Too late,” the old woman spat. “They’ll be back at their castle with the drawbridge all drawn up where I can’t get to them. And I had a chance for three. Three.” She tossed her fork aside and rose. Jason recognized the anticipatory gleam in her eyes. She loved the suffering.

  Hardwick took out a large, white handkerchief from the breast pocket in his suit. Hardwick always dressed real classy. He shook it out, crumpled it up, and as Phil started to protest, grabbed his jaw and stuffed it in his mouth. That wouldn’t keep Phil from screaming, but it might keep the guests below them from calling in complaints to the management. Tears leaked from Phil’s eyes and trailed down his cheeks into the handkerchief. Hardwick had gone still, gathering his power. Phil started to really jerk at Jason, trying to get away. At a nod from the old woman Hardwick touched Phil’s shoulder.

  Phil screamed.

  *****

  It was after eleven when Kee threw down her brushes and stood back from her painting. Aside from the stack of charcoal drawings, there were six new canvases leaning against her piles around the room, plus the one on her easel. She looked around at them, dazed. She hadn’t slept more than a few hours in the last days. She didn’t quite know how many days that had been right now. The daybed was rumpled and splattered with paint. Come to think of it, she hadn’t had a shower. She raised her arm and sniffed, then wished she hadn’t.

  She blinke
d. Her eyes were dry, scratchy feeling. She’d driven herself night and day, thinking exhaustion her only defense against the feelings she couldn’t seem to vanquish.

  Not sure that was working for her.

  She sighed, her blank stare straying again to the work she’d done. The first two canvases were slashed. Wrong. The first one had no dimensionality. Flat, just like she’d felt that second night as it merged into morning. The second? Too Gaugin-y. Just because he surfed didn’t make him “island boy.” She’d just repeated the same mistakes she always made. They were “good” if you liked imitations. She’d almost slashed her wrists about then. It seemed Devin’s fault she couldn’t paint. His nearness in the house made her constantly aware of her sexuality. She practically throbbed with need for him. How could she paint when she was consumed like that?

  She’d gotten angry, but that hadn’t made her less wet. That’s when she had painted the third one that showed him as a devil. Not the Hieronymus Bosch kind of devil. And not Goya, either. No. He was a devil taking a shower, half concealed by the steam, wavery and dreamlike. His body was lush, the way Devin’s was, his buttocks pale against his tanned and muscled back and thighs, but the dark reddish-gray horns and the tail showed an excruciating detail of rough scales that made them even more real than his body. His back was turned, his blond hair dark with water, an everyday sort of devil who took showers in a modern tiled bathroom, all the more frightening because he existed in the real world, not in some remote hell. Along with discarded clothes on the floor was a bleeding heart, as anatomically correct as she could make it. There was a bite out of the right ventricle.

  Okay. That was a low, emotionally. But it was the first one that wasn’t really an imitation. She’d used her anger and the wet between her legs and put it on the canvas. But she’d known she must dig deeper still, so she had tried again.

  She had thought about who Devin was, other than a luscious sexual tempter. In the next one his face was transfigured by anger. The subject was a younger Devin, much younger. She could practically see his anger at his parents’ death radiating from him. She’d gone back to the Dev she knew when they were children and given him the emotion he had never expressed.

  The next one was Devin in the sunlight, as she had seen in him September. Exactly as she had seen him. You might call it neorealist. She’d painted every translucent water drop, every variegated color in his blond hair, his puckering nipples, the broad, tanned chest and bulging muscle. It would have been the cover of a romance book, a symbol of sexuality only, except for the look in his eyes. Intelligent, inquisitive, as if he were about to ask the viewer a question and might well challenge the answer. That’s where it went beyond neorealism into something that felt like those old portraits from the fifteenth century. Not as good as Rembrandt, of course, but hinting at a full person behind the paint.

  And then there was the one on her easel.

  He was looking up, as if he’d been unexpectedly interrupted. Still leaning over his board, he had his board wax clasped in both hands. It was a hot summer afternoon. His muscles were shiny with sweat. His trunks clung to his loins and outlined his genitals. Light streaked in from the west, a severe, slashing violation. The magenta and delicate orange of the bougainvillea in the background, the pale white-pink roses to one side, and the blue shadows under the fence were supersaturated. It was a day like any other day, but more intense, more dangerous. Devin was sex incarnate, a water god beached for the moment, vulnerable. And there in his eyes, in the cast of his mouth was a sadness that said he knew he was vulnerable. He accepted it, embraced it, offered it to the viewer.

  It was a good painting. She thought it might be more than just competent. The last two, maybe the last three, were the best things she’d done. And she’d accomplished them by not being a good girl. It was if she’d eaten all those styles she’d reproduced so painstakingly over the years, digested them, and mixed them with her own emotions and illicit desires, her own intimate knowledge of Devin, no matter how wrong or terrible that was, and what had come out was the art she’d been struggling to find in herself for more than a decade. Just like Pendragon had said.

  Let that be a lesson to her. Good girls didn’t get what they want. Only when she was true to herself and dug down into her ugly side and her pain could she produce something more than just average. Maybe it took that unflinching look in order to be something more than plain vanilla. Wasn’t that what she’d been all her life? Middle sister, competent artist, nobody’s obsession, even though she wanted more than anything to be talented and special, somebody worthy of a little obsession.

  Was that the difference between Drew and her? Drew was comfortable in her skin, sure of herself. She acted without hesitation on what her true self knew she had to do. Like going after Michael. And when he’d turned out to be difficult, she stayed and saw it through. When her visions made her less than sure of herself, she still stuck to it, and saw it through.

  Kee felt lightheaded. She hadn’t eaten the last meals Mr. Nakamura had brought up. She’d been too consumed in her process. The plates were still stacked, food sandwiched between them, among her discarded oil paint tubes on the rickety table by the door. The whole place smelled like oil paints, turpentine, and day-old Indian food.

  She blinked at the painting on her easel and a funny thing happened. The warmth of the day seemed to come out of the canvas and embrace the room. The harsh light of the studio dissolved into sunlight. She could hear the pounding of the waves against the bluffs below the Breakers. It was like she was standing inside the painting, and it had become real. Devin blinked at her and smiled.

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed. The impression broke. The crowded studio emerged around her again. Kee tottered over to the daybed and sat. She was hallucinating again. This was bad. Time to emerge from her cocoon. She pushed herself up. As she opened the door, she realized how vulnerable she was. Nobody could ever know about these paintings. Yeah, they revealed her soul. And a whole lot more that she never wanted her family to see.

  She grabbed the old-fashioned key from the table with the untouched plates on it, and carefully locked the door after herself. A mournful flute sounded from the music room on the second floor. Lanyon was still up. But she didn’t hear anybody else. She headed down the stairs feeling better. Time for a celebratory drink, just like the bad girl she was, and then a shower. Quiet from their parents’ wing. Drew and Michael had no doubt gone home. Tris and Maggie would have retreated to their apartment over the garage, along with Mr. Nakamura and his daughter. Devin was down on the first floor in the Bay of Pigs. He was probably asleep. In spite of her exhaustion, the ever-present desire ramped up. Bad. She was definitely a bad person. She crept quietly down to the bar in the living room and grabbed a bottle. No mixers for her. She’d always secretly admired those hard-as-nails women in movies who could keep up with any man in the joint. If she wanted to embrace her bad-girl side, she’d better learn to shoot whisky.

  She peered at the bottle. Or tequila, since that was what she happened to grab. She took a shot glass rather than a wineglass or a stubby drinks glass and flopped down on the sofa in the darkness. Devin was probably only fifty feet away. An image of him as she’d painted him in the last canvas stole over her, and she almost went back again into that haze of lust and creation she’d been living in for three days. She poured herself a shot, sloshing it over the top because she really couldn’t see very well in the dark living room. No way was she turning on the light, though. She wasn’t ready to face family. Or Devin. She took a deep breath before she threw back the shot. Oh, my God. She choked and sputtered. That burned. When she got her breath, she decided she’d live and got more determined. She poured herself another shot, more careful this time. She didn’t want the whole couch to smell like tequila.

  This one went down easier. But being so close to Devin was really getting to her. She could hardly sit still. She wanted to rub her mound against the sofa arm, for God’s sake. How was she going to live in
the same house with him when her body reacted like this to his very presence? Torture. She couldn’t leave. There were people out there waiting to kill Tremaines. But she couldn’t stay in the same house with him unless she locked herself in her garret studio all the time. That would take some explaining eventually.

  She tiptoed up to her room, taking the bottle and the shot glass with her. She hoped Tammy’s new rescue dog, sleeping with his mistress in the room next to hers, didn’t wake and start barking. But she appeared to have run the gauntlet successfully even though she clanked the bottle against the door as she turned the knob.

  She ran hot water in the shower. It seemed so long ago that Drew had stripped her and put her in a hot shower. As she stepped in to the steaming torrent, she had to chuckle. Maybe that’s where she’d gotten the idea for her picture of Devin as devil. She was tempted to feel for horns, or crane to see if she had a scaly tail. She, more than Devin, was a devil. He had a heart of gold underneath all that reticence. He was really kind. When they were ten he’d helped her paint the tree house left over from when Kemble and Tris were kids a very becoming magenta and pumpkin to match the bougainvillea, though he called it pink and orange. He’d known they’d get in trouble, but he did it anyway. Even tried to take the blame. He was good with Tammy’s never-ending stream of rescued animals. She bet he was wonderfully tender with that surfer girl.

  That thought tried to rip her apart. The image of Devin kissing his true love, fondling her breasts and stripping naked to.…

  Not going there. She washed briskly, trying to think about paint formulas and name fifteen Dutch artists and any other stupid game she could think of to keep her mind occupied and off Devin. She washed hair, shaved legs and armpits. All that inhaled steam cleaned the turpentine out of her lungs. She was a new woman. She rubbed herself pink and tossed the towel aside. She was a woman who could paint. Well, only one subject, so far. But still.