Blood Sugar

by Kat Turner

  “Thank you.” Eve popped the final nugget of chewy, vanilla ice cream-covered brownie into her mouth. Rich chocolate lathered in sweet cream coated her taste buds and filled her with bliss anew. Maybe she’d put some logs on the fireplace later. Cuddle up with Jonnie under the old afghan, where they’d fool around. She knocked her knee into his in a random gesture of endearment.

  “Stooooop with the excessive canoodling, I beg of you.” The beginnings of a smile on Meg’s lips hinted that she’d softened a tad. Eve didn’t hold Meg’s initial reaction against her. This was all a hell of a ride.

  Meg played with her empty bowl. “So is it just a sex thing for you?” she asked Jonnie.

  “No. Part of this condition is that my blood goes toxic. I was getting transfusions for a while, and then I got this plant-based remedy in South America that works to manage my problem. But after Eve and I did what we did, I could tell. That it’s the best way to stay viable, to do this.”

  “You two realize that you’re in the ultimate codependent relationship.”

  “Megs, please take off your therapist hat for a second.” Eve mimed removing the hat in question and tipped her invisible cap to Meg.

  Meg sighed and rolled her eyes.

  “What was the big news, anyway?” Eve rose, gathered spoons, and stacked bowls.

  “I don’t even remember. I am utterly bereft.”

  “I’m serious, what is it?” A ripple of anxiety heightened Eve as she sauntered to the kitchen, rinsed tableware, and stuck dishes in dishwasher. Meg, pragmatist extraordinaire, didn’t blow up drama over meaningless nonsense. She’d come by with legitimate news, albeit something that Jonnie’s reveal overshadowed.

  “I don’t know if it’s still a thing for you, but that dead girl’s mom crawled out from under her rock again.” Meg’s voice from the dining room, pitched with disengaged boredom, made it sound like the Lacey matter had faded into non-issue status.

  Eve’s hands shook as she wiped them on a towel. Her skin crawled. Déjà vu gave her the weirds. How creepily apropos that a reference to Susan cropped up the moment she dried her hands on a dish towel, the moment she stood in a space recreating the incident where Jonnie cut his hand. Fate would not allow her to forget what she’d done nor erase the secret she kept.

  Lacey’s presence, a silent specter, rose from its dormant, temporarily forgotten state to loom in her mind. Think of the haunting, and she appears.

  “Still a thing.” Eve injected fake casualness into her voice, relieved it came out sounding normal enough.

  She gathered her bearings and returned to the dining room, where Meg was showing Jonnie something on her phone as she cranked the volume.

  Susan’s unmistakable, wrecked voice ranted, “I got proof. Of some truly abominable actions on the part of these people. They’re doing experimentation, Rick. Making mutants in labs. Splicing genes. I’ve seen ’em with my own two eyes.” A subtle whine of electronic feedback came through the phone as Lacey’s mother’s salacious statements tapered into a dramatic pause. “Makin’ mutant people, too. Monsters, Rick. These goons are doing experiments to make people into monsters. The ultimate genetically modified organism.”

  Horror sizzled under Eve’s breastbone. Heavy with dread, she watched Jonnie and Meg watch the screen.

  “So what you’re saying, what you’re telling me here today, Susan, is that you’ve seen this madness with your own two eyes?” Rick Smith, an infamous household name of a conspiracy theorist, affected shock in his gravely, lower-than-baritone southern drawl.

  Stunned, Eve returned to her seat beside Jonnie. On the screen was Susan, proud as a peacock in a tacky red dress as she sat across the desk of a bloated Rick Smith. Behind the Internet sensation host, a wall of flat screen computer monitors flashed inflammatory web pages accusing various politicians of sordid dealings.

  Smirking like a punk kid who’d gotten away with shoplifting, Susan drummed hot pink talons on the shiny black surface in front of her. “Exactly. And I’m honored to be here today, blowing the whistle on these criminals. They’re gonna pay. For what they did to my girl, my baby.”

  Eve rubbed her face in a futile effort to calm her spinning thoughts. Did Susan think she had the drop on Scarab, with her shed full of Pollyannas? No way was the woman smart enough to double-cross the powerful mega-conglomerate and emerge victorious. Worse, Eve had enabled the bitch’s harebrained scheme with that godforsaken towel.

  “And what do you want out of this, Mrs. Mudd? What would justice for Lacey look like to you?” Smith’s mammoth gut pushed into the edge of the desk as the podcast agitator bent into a deep forward lean.

  Susan sniffed, fluffing her tangerine crown of box-dyed hair as she milked a second pause.

  Jonnie arched a brow at the images on Meg’s phone. “Even in the eighties I never teased it that high.” His quip brought out dry chuckles from Meg and Eve, loosening some of the tension in the room.

  Lacey’s mother turned to a camera, meeting the lens head on. She yelped and wiped an eye, though no actual tears cut tributaries into the heavy foundation slathered on her cheeks. “They damn well better bring me the witch and vampire they got working for them. You heard me right. These people are making vampires, and I have me the proof. And I know they can use their freaks to bring my baby girl back to life. I know it in my bones. That’s my justice, right there.”

  “These are wild accusations, Mrs. Mudd. Big demands.” Smith growled the rejoinder in his famous, menacing voice.

  Susan replied, mostly repeating things she’d already said.

  When the video ended, Meg set her phone on the table. She’d paled to a sickly yellow hue. “I didn’t watch the entire thing before coming here. Eve, what’s happening?”

  “She’s working with them. It’s a long story, but the overview is I went over there to talk about Lacey and found out that Susan is breeding these mutant creatures in her backyard. For Scarab. And I guess she’s cooking up some scheme on how to blackmail them.”

  “Do you figure the witch and the vampire refers to you and me?” Jonnie spoke in a curt, crisp tone. His eyes narrowed. He obviously knew the answer to his own question but wanted to get her side of the story.

  Eve’s stomach clenched around her food. Thick with guilt, she fidgeted with a ceramic coaster on the table. “Highly likely.”

  Shit. All she’d wanted to do was set things right with Lacey and protect her loved ones from harm, but the situation continued to deteriorate.

  “Is there something you aren’t telling me here?” Notes of pain in Jonnie’s voice struck her right in the heart. She’d hurt the man she cared about.

  “Hold up,” Meg interjected before Eve could hazard a reply. “What happened, exactly, when you went over there?”

  Eve screwed her eyes shut and opened them. “I went with Jonnie to Peru to pick up a plant-based blood substitute for him and look for answers on how I could use my magic to fix my mistake. There are people living down there, magical people. My powers started changing while we were there. I met a woman and she took me to the river. We did some sort of ritual.”

  “And what?” Jonnie pressed. “You never told me the whole story on what happened with Taylor. What happened down by the water that had you so scared and wanting to run?”

  “Lacey happened.” Eve’s mouth soured. “I communicated with her, and she made threats. About her familiar, the little squirrel, coming to kill us and my family. She’s attached to me now. I can feel her spirit in my mind. I looked up a spell that I thought I could use to help, and I drove to her parents’ house to see if I could elicit Susan’s participation. But then she showed me these creatures she farms, and I knew it was a lost cause.”

  “I’m worried about you, hon.” Meg chewed a nail. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Eve scrabbled for a kernel of reason. People here cared about her. And she cared about them. Together, they could work through this. “I hate to say it, but I think I need to know what scheme she’s con
cocting here. How she sees us fitting in.”

  Jonnie murmured a pensive sound as he twiddled with a tiny silver cross hanging from his earlobe. “I didn’t buy from the clip that it’s justice she’s after.”

  He was correct. “Yeah. I see now that she and Lacey are very much a team. It’s like Lacey’s lying in wait. Biding her time. I can’t tell.”

  “What if you could get the ghost talking?” Meg offered. “What if there isn’t much she can do while she’s hitching a ride in your head or whatever, but maybe there is something you could do to get information from her.”

  “I don’t think she’s on our side.”

  “Where did you find the spell you intended to use while you were over there?”

  Eve squirmed in her seat. It wasn’t the wisest move to go over to Susan’s armed with nothing but some random incantation she had a spotty at best grasp on. But she’d been saddled with guilt and driven by a misguided desire to fight her battle alone. Driven by fear that Jonnie would leave her if he knew the truth.

  “It’s an old book my mom gave me after I told her what I could do with the spirits. She found it at a yard sale a few years ago. I feel so stupid. I didn’t want to drag you into this.” She looked at Jonnie apologetically.

  “How have I never seen this book?” Meg quirked a brow.

  “It’s not exactly something you break out at parties or in casual conversation.”

  “Considering we have so few resources at our disposal, perhaps we should give it another go. Can we see it?” Jonnie touched her elbow in support.

  “Sure. Hold on a sec.” Eve ran up the staircase and to the room where the ghosts lived. She tugged open the bottom drawer of her bureau and swept the tome into her arms. The heady, earthen scent of its engraved leather cover and old pages brought grounding as she hauled the fat encyclopedia downstairs.

  She plopped it on the table with a thump. Jonnie and Meg’s presences were an unsettling trespass in the presence of the private volume, spectators bearing witness to the most personal of her truths. Her strangest secrets. And she made herself grow accustomed to that feeling, the air-clearing confessional aspect of it all, in preparation for bringing up the towel.

  “Unbelievable.” Recognition and surprise rang in Jonnie’s voice as he ran a finger through the maze of swirls etched into the reddish-brown cover. “Where did you say you found this?”

  “My mom and I picked it up at a yard sale somewhere here in town a while back. Why?”

  Eyes wide with a startled awe, Jonnie cracked the book and flipped thin, translucent, pages. Familiar sketches and text flew past in a flurry of papery flutters. “Unreal. I’ve seen one of these. One exactly like it.”

  “What are the odds?” Meg craned her neck, leaning forward on her elbows to get a better look at the text in Jonnie’s hand.

  “Low, I imagine.” He ran a finger down a page.

  “Where did you see a similar book?” Eve asked.

  “Brian’s wife Helen has one. It’s nearly identical from what I saw of it. She was studying it during the tour, working on something for her yoga and meditation workshops. Wild stuff.”

  “The witch.” Gears in Eve’s head turned.

  “Yep.”

  “So the books must find their way to us somehow. Check this out.” Eve slid the book away from Jonnie and flipped open the front cover. She tapped her finger to the symbol nestled in the lower-left hand corner of the inside flap. An upside-down black triangle with a smaller, also upside-down triangle comprising its tip made for a discreet brand.

  “Does Helen’s have one of these markings?” Eve’s heart rate accelerated. If there were other women with these books, these powers, out there, they might have answers. And no small part of her liked the idea of finding other women like her.

  “I can’t remember.” He squinted at the drawing.

  Shoring up her resolve, Eve patted the spell book. “I want to meet her.”

  “You never showed us the spell you were going to try for Lacey.” Meg rose from the table and took a seat next to Eve. Her brows lifted as she thumbed through pages of magical text.

  Eve divided the paper a third of the way through and flipped until she’d found the spell in question. The black and white drawing showed a woman on her back, levitating. A cloud of dark smoke flowed from her mouth and drifted into the plastic eyes of a teddy bear held by an assistant.

  Jonnie read the description at the top of the page, his eyes darting back and forth over small typed words. “Necromancy, level fifty. Banish Intruders.” He slid Eve a concerned look.

  “Necromancy,” Meg repeated, blinking. “So, like, you have this dead person’s essence in you, this element that isn’t at peace and wants to get up to something. And basically you need to exorcize it before it and its batshit crazy garbage person of a mom stir up some new, worse toxicity.”

  “Yeah. I think that’s what’s going on here, and this power came into its own in Peru. Lacey contacted me, she came up from the earth, and now she’s stuck to me. I was hoping this would help, that Susan would cooperate, but as soon as I stepped foot on that porch, I sensed the energy was all wrong. It’s like Lacey doesn’t want peace. And I’m worried that she’s doing something while she’s stowed away inside of me. Plotting. Gathering her reserves or strength. And now Susan’s changed the game. I don’t know what they’re doing, but I know it isn’t good. I’m so sorry to subject you guys to my bullshit.”

  Eve sagged into her chair, her posture crumpling. Fatigue and regret weighed on her shoulders. She’d dragged innocent people, her dearest friend and the man she loved, into her latest supernatural catastrophe. But it wouldn’t do any good to wallow or flagellate herself. She needed to act.

  “It’s okay, Eve. We’ve got your back on this. You hear?” Jonnie dipped his head down to her eye level and cupped her chin in one hand, capturing her fallen eye contact.

  “He’s right. Ride or die.” Meg pumped a fist in the air.

  Jonnie swiped his phone from back pocket and keyed in a number. After a couple of rings, someone must have answered, because he said, “Helen? Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry I’ve been off the grid. I hope you guys weren’t too worried. Listen. I need your help.”

  Nineteen

  A delicate crust of fresh snow gave way under Jonnie’s boots as he and Eve climbed the front steps of Brian and Helen’s Spanish-style home and came to stand on its wraparound terrace. Low-wattage security lights blinked on, imbuing the darkness with a pleasant yellow glow.

  A few snowflakes drifted through the air, those first sparkling night kisses of a winter coming early to the upper Midwest.

  He popped the collar of his black pea coat and took Eve’s cold hand in both of his, rubbing them together to give her some warmth.

  She blew out a cloud of white vapor. Tucked under her arm, the spell book was as visible and prominent as a third guest.

  “Don’t be nervous.” He rang the doorbell, confident that his friends could help.

  Inside, dogs yapped high-pitched barks while footsteps approached.

  “Thank you. I suppose I’ve never felt comfortable asking people for help. Or bringing new people into my circle.”

  “Why’s that?” He kissed the cool top of Eve’s palm. Though he’d figured as much about her, he’d rather hear her explanation than make assumptions or put words into her mouth. As her comfort with him grew, he enjoyed getting to know her as she showed him her layers.

  “I have these abilities, these strange powers that make me unlike others. Maybe on some level I’ve worried that if I try to bond with people or get close or reach out, they’ll see what’s different about me and run away. Easier to hide those potentially stigmatizing parts than risk being vulnerable.”

  Jonnie considered her thoughtful point, but before he could elicit a supportive response, the door opened to reveal Brian. Two vocal Chihuahuas, barely larger than rats and outfitted in glittery rhinestone collars, bounced at the ankles of his faded jeans. “Come in.
”

  Guiding Eve by the small of her back, Jonnie led the pair into his bandmate and wife’s Minneapolis home, allowing himself a moment to take in a space he hadn’t seen before. A spiced-apple fragrance added to the atmosphere’s hominess. From a den, a shiny baby grand piano captured the eye. Books stocked built-in bookshelves, and sleek modern furniture was arranged in a half-circle. Several acoustic guitars resting in floor stands peppered the living room. A bit crisp for Jonnie’s taste, but elegant nonetheless. “Great place.”

  “Good to see you, mate.” The singer drew Jonnie into a bear hug, deep voice coming out in a rush of relief as he slapped his back. His familiar warmth and scent offered brotherly assurance. “Are you alright? Feeling better?”

  “I am. And I have a lot to tell you.” Jonnie broke out of the hug. “But first, Brian, this is Eve. Eve, Brian.”

  Brian offered his hand in greeting. “Welcome. How do you do?” His voice was polite though not exactly personable. Jonnie hoped the man would relax. Brian didn’t open up or trust easily and was initially aloof toward new people. He hadn’t told Brian about Eve, so the front man no doubt wondered why Jonnie was bringing a new person into the inner circle without warning. Fair enough, but Eve was here to stay, and Brian would have to adapt.

  “I’m good. Thanks for having me. My best friend is a huge fan of yours.” Eve shook Brian’s hand.

  A startled look crossed Brian’s face, disappearing a second after it arrived. His brow arched as the two broke the handshake. “Not you, I take it?”

  Jonnie battled a snicker. Eve hadn’t meant to take the piss out of Brian, but nonetheless, seeing him stumble atop his pedestal was a rare treat.

  “Our singer is an egomaniac,” he said to Eve in a stage whisper. “He can’t fathom that there is anyone on the planet who isn’t a card-carrying member of our fan club.”

  Eve laughed a sporting chuckle. “No, you guys are great from what I’ve heard. It’s on me. I’m the boring person who only listens to classical music.”