“Places. Places everyone,” he said in a nasally accented voice that instantly set my teeth on edge. There was something about the man that bothered me right away.
I scanned the faces, looking for the one I wanted to see most.
“Esmeralda, you look delicious in those tights,” the bird faced stage leader said with a practiced snake-like sort of charm.
The pretty blond simpered. “Why, this ol’ thing, Mr. K? I’ve got better.”
His grin widened and avarice shone in his soulless dark gaze. “Then I look forward to seeing them. After rehearsals.”
He wet his lips and I felt an insane and sudden violent need to sock him. I knew this was nothing more than a vision of the past, but I wanted to hurt that man and I wasn’t even a violent kind of guy. I just flat out didn’t like him.
I clenched my one free hand into a fist, wondering at my visceral reaction to a person who was probably long dead by now.
“Stella!” Mr. K called, looking arrogant and impatient as he tapped his immaculately polished loafer on the stage. The taptaptaptap of it set my teeth on edge.
A girl, hidden behind a rack of costumes with pins poking out of her mouth and miles of fabric draped over her shoulders, jerked. Her eyes were dark with heavy bags and bloodshot. Her nut-brown hair was caught up in a messy bun and piled high on her head with bits of it poking up wild about her head. She muttered around the pins in her mouth.
“Mrughph,” she cried as she hastily draped a corset over the edge of the silver rack.
Mr. K who’d either not heard, or hadn’t liked her response yelled, “Dammitalltohell! What’s a man gotta do to get some good G.D. help around here? Stella, so help me God, get your sexy ass out here or you’re fired!”
Stella, clearly frazzled, spit the pins out of her mouth like tiny projectiles, nearly striking an actress doing a fitting a few yards away in the heel.
“Hey! Watch it!” The raven-haired and half naked beauty cried out in a whiny falsetto.
Stella was brushing hair out of her eyes as she raced toward him. “I’m here, I’m here, Mr. Kline. What can I do you for?”
He eyed her, his look cold and affronted. “God, you look a fine mess, Stella. No wonder you’re still single.”
Because I was watching her so closely, I didn’t fail to notice the slight tremor that worked through her hands. Just a flinch of her fingers, but enough to let me know that Stella hadn’t appreciated his chauvinistic words.
Kline, on the other hand was running a finger down the arm of the actress he’d been flirting with earlier. “Stella, there’s been a change in plans. Esmeralda’s got the lead now. You’ll need to take her into alterations and see that Juliet’s gown fits her far trimmer features. Our...previous actress was much...” He mimed broad in the hips and a large stomach before chuckling and saying, “Well, much.”
Esmeralda snickered, grinning like a vicious she-wolf from ear to ear.
Stella gasped. “What’s happened to Annabelle? She’s the lead. I can’t just drop what I’m doing and—”
At the mention of Annabelle, I jerked. Sucking in a sharp breath, I leaned forward on my balls of my feet. The nerve of that bastard to do that to Annabelle, how dare he? God, I’d never hated anything or anyone so much in my life.
A sudden tugging on my hand made me frown. I looked down to see Zinnia clenching tight to my wrist. “Do not for any reason forget that this is just a memory we walk through, Dante. It’s far too dangerous to break the chain. There is no guarantee that either I or my Aunty could find you again.”
Biting down on my molars, I shook my head. “I’m fine.”
I glared up at the stage.
“It’s evident that you’re not,” Zinnia whispered with urgency. “I need you to remain focused right now. Whatever Annabelle means to you, don’t forget that this is for her. Not you.”
I flicked a glance toward her, wanting to tell her that I was fine and she was just seeing ghosts where there were none, but I knew that wasn’t true. Seeing this, witnessing the past and feeling incapable of changing any of it, it was painful for me in a way I’d not expected.
I knew a little of Annabelle’s past, but nothing could have prepared me for it. I knew who Kline was. In my heart, in my soul, I knew who he was and I felt hate. Hate for him. Hate for the agony he’d brought on her. Hate for what I suspected was to come next. She hadn’t deserved it.
“Breathe, Dante. Just breathe. And remember that all of this is simply an echo of the past. Nothing you could do here would alter what happened to her. If you wanna help Annabelle, then calm down and hold the chain intact.”
I might have said something to her, except I saw a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye.
“Do as I’ve said, Stella, or you’ll soon find yourself unemployed too.” Kline hissed the threat.
“How dare you!” I recognized the husky tenor of the female cry behind me and swiftly glanced over my shoulder.
There she was.
Raven-haired. Indigo blue eyes blazing as fire blossomed radiantly in her cheeks. Magnificently alive and glowing with verve.
Annabelle’s eyes were puffy, her nose swollen, evidence of the tears she’d been crying but she’d never looked more beautiful to me. I laid my free hand over my rapidly beating heart and watched with bated breath as she marched with dignified steps down the opposite aisle.
Esmeralda had Kline’s arm clutched in her hands and was hidden halfway behind him. Kline had his chin notched, staring at my Annabelle with scorn and disdain.
“You would give my role to her? She’s a two-bit actress. Why I bet she wouldn’t know Shakespeare from a comic strip even if it reached up and bit her in the—”
“I think I made my position quite clear to you, Ms. Black,” Kline spoke with ice on his tongue. “You’re no longer needed here.”
Annabelle froze, clutching at her stomach with both hands. “But...but, you promised me, Billy. You promised me forever. You...lied to me.”
Tipping his head back, he laughed. “Forever? You? You were never anything but a second rate Bug-Eyed-Betty.”
A gasp-growl rang out, but it came from Zinnia and not the ghosts of Christmas past. Then I heard her mutter, “That low down airtight torpedo!”
I frowned. “What?”
“That rat just called my friend ugly. Let’s just say, you’re not the only who hopes he gets what’s coming to him.”
Zinnia’s anger actually went a ways toward mollifying some of my own.
Stella, who’d been remarkably still until now, gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. Esmeralda and a few of the other actors snickered.
Annabelle sniffed, holding her head high. But I knew her well enough to know his words had bruised her soul. She looked like she’d literally wilted before my eyes, her shoulders were hunched and she was struggling to hang onto her tears. I could see the working of her throat and that it was a battle she was quickly losing.
I wanted to beg her not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. That rat wasn’t worth even one of her precious tears.
“Billy, you—you can’t do this to us.” Annabelle’s arms wrapped like a hug around her middle as she swayed unsteadily on her feet.
He scoffed. “Us, there is no us. Didn’t your mama teach you better than to throw yourself at a man?”
Annabelle gasped, looking as if he’d slapped her and I knew why. If Billy had known her at all he’d have known she’d been raised in an orphanage and that she’d had no parents to call her own. Something that clearly hurt her and judging by the gleam of malice in his eyes, he’d known just that and it was why he’d said it in the first place. Adrenaline rolled through me.
“Course I took what you offered, you dime store floozy. Maybe I thought you were interesting at first, but you turned out to be nothing but a flat tire.”
Esmeralda guffawed. “Nothing but a loser, just like I always knew you were, Anna. Belle.” She spat out her name like it was a foul taste
on her tongue. “Always told you you weren’t good enough.” She cocked her hip out, looking like a contented cat in front of a bowl of cream.
“You...you promised me forever,” Annabelle whispered brokenly as the tears began to spill.
The catty actresses only laughed harder. Kline snorted and turned to the side as he flicked his fingers in a dismissive gesture at her.
“That thing’s not mine. I don’t give a damn what you do, just don’t come sniffing round here no more.”
“Once a whore, always a whore,” Esmeralda sing-songed before turning aside just as Kline had.
A few others stood casting pitying looks down at Annabelle before they too eventually turned aside. The only one who remained was Stella.
A look of deep sorrow had scrawled itself upon her face as she clutched at her ample chest with pale, long fingers.
“Stella!” Kline called. “You’re still on the clock, damn you, and my patience is wearing thin.”
Annabelle, who was now clutching onto the back of a chair to help keep her balance, wore a look of utter devastation as she mumbled so softly to herself that I couldn’t hear it. She was broken. I could read it in every line of her face, see it in the way she curled in on herself. If she’d not been so wrapped up in her own pain and misery, if she’d looked up even once she might have seen the way Stella’s eyes suddenly turned to blocks of ice, and how she’d whirled on her heel, lifting a hand as she muttered something beneath her breath. Might have even seen the dark thread of shimmering gold that suddenly sparked like fire from her fingertips as she aimed an incantation at Kline’s back.
If even one soul had stopped what they were doing and bothered to look up, they might have seen all of that. But everyone ignored Stella. To them, she was nothing more than a background prop on that stage, too insignificant to catch anyone’s notice.
Annabelle sucked in a sharp breath and with a keening cry ran away.
Not in the direction she’d come from earlier, but toward the back exit door. She was headed unerringly in my direction. I froze, caught up in the drama and the spectacle of her terrible memories.
The glittering fire pierced Kline’s back, right between his shoulder blades. He barely even flinched as the serpentine thread of power punched through him. Stella continued to mutter low.
Blue, Hyacinth, and Zinnia side-stepped Annabelle’s mad flight, but I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare at her beautiful face with my heart in my throat, desperately wishing I could hold her. Comfort her in some way.
I smelled her scent of flowers, so familiar to me that I trembled as I breathed her in. I waited for the ice of her passing as she phased through me.
“Dante, move!” Blue cried just as Zinnia tugged on my wrist.
I refused. I wanted her memories. I wanted to feel her in anyway I could.
Annabelle’s shoulder brushed mine and I gasped as we physically collided.
The tangible touch of her, it short-circuited something in my brain. I froze. Every cell in my body suddenly flared to life, and I reacted purely on instinct, grabbing hold of her shoulder and digging my fingers into her harder than I should have.
“Annabelle, I—”
Zinnia cried out, stumbling forward as she’d still refused to let my hand go.
“Oh, gods, I’m...I’m. Forgive me,” Annabelle cried out without looking up and swiftly side-stepped me, running so fast that I’d not even had a moment to consider what it was that’d just happened.
All I knew was my hands felt suddenly empty and my blood like rivers of ice coursing through my veins.
“I felt her,” I mumbled, softly at first, and then I blinked and repeated it. “I felt her. I really felt her. How the heck did I feel her?” I twirled on Zinnia, knowing I must have looked like a madman in that moment, but I didn’t care.
Her eyes were wide.
It was Hyacinth that answered. “The only thing that is real here is us and her.”
“But...but,” I stuttered, “she’s dead. I...I felt her.”
I stared at my hands, body crawling with emotions so overwhelming I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to chase after Annabelle and hold her again, drag her to me and never let her go. I wanted to steal all her kisses and whisper into the shell of her ear that she’d never be alone again. That there were good men out there, men who cared, men who’d never do to her as Kline had done.
“You can’t,” Hyacinth snapped, as if reading my mind. “You must leave her be. She isn’t what we came here for—”
“Like hell she isn’t!” I snapped. “She’s all I came here for. To save her. To help her.”
“And helping her means discovering the source of the haunting. It’s not her, Dante. Don’t you see!” Zinnia cried.
I shook my head, ready to shake her hand off and chase after Annabelle. I knew where she was going. She’d told me all about it. This was when she’d decided to have the abortion, the source of so much pain for her. I could stop it. I could make it so that she never had to suffer such loss.
“Once this circle is broken, once Aunty Cinth and I leave you will be nothing but a ghost in this place. Just like Annabelle is in Blue Moon Bay, except you’ll never be able to even talk to her. She’ll never be able to even see you. You cannot exist here. Not for long, you will fade, Dante. This place is not for you,” Zinnia whispered, clutching at my hand so tight it was like as if by sheer force of will alone she would keep me with her.
“Then who the hell are we here for?”
“If ye’d just look, ye bleeding heart!” Hyacinth snapped. “Then ye’d already know.”
I was about to say something when a sudden loud bang so jarring it rattled the floorboard beneath my feet echoed like cannon all around us.
I jumped, startled by the noise and looked up. Only to spot a swarm of actors crying out as they rushed toward a fallen body sprawled on the floor of the stage. Fire snapped and raged, and electrical sparks burst from a fallen piece of rigging that’d landed square on the center of that small frame with its legs poking straight out in front of it.
There were so many bodies rushing the fallen person, but I knew who it was because of the blood soaking into the once-white spats.
I frowned. Blue gasped.
“Did she...was she—”
“A witch?” Hyacinth whispered, “Aye. T’would seem Stella was most certainly a witch.”
While everyone was busy rushing the fallen Kline, Stella walked steadily down the steps of the stage with a slight expression of a smile on her face. She never looked left or right, she merely walked away, out the front door and was gone. Just like that. Her vengeance exacted and apparently no one the wiser for it.
I swallowed hard, blinking in shock and confusion over it all.
“Why would she do that?” I whispered to no one in particular.
Zinnia shook her head. Hyacinth opened her mouth. But it was my twin who answered.
“Why wouldn’t she? He was a monster.”
I whirled on Blue. “Are you saying he deserved that?”
Her bright blue eyes were full of anger. “You saying he didn’t?”
I thought about the man I’d witnessed; the smarmy, self-righteous, arrogant rat. And I couldn’t find a shred of pity in my heart for his fate.
“What was the point of this? How does this even help her?” I asked, looking down at Zinnia.
“Keep watching,” she said softly.
Surprised that there could still be more, I watched as burly stage hands were finally able to pull the rigging off their small boss. He gasped, coughing and seizing. Esmeralda had placed his head in her lap and was openly sobbing.
Kline’s death wasn’t an easy one, and I wondered if Annabelle ever knew the fate that’d befallen her one time lover.
I didn’t want to watch his death, not even someone as heinous as Kline could make the spectacle any more bearable. I almost looked away, until Zinnia said, “Not yet.”
Frowning deeply, I was
just about to ask why until I saw it.
The issue of black smoke and the vast echo of blood-curdling cries that suddenly rose up in deafening shrieks just to the right of us.
Blue, visibly shaken, sidled closer to Hyacinth’s side. I knew my twin was jarred if she was willing to take comfort from the prickly one. But Hyacinth surprised me yet again when she wrapped an arm around my sister’s trembling shoulder.
“What is this?” I asked as the cries and shrieks grew louder, seeming like they were pouring in from a crack in the earth. I winced as the noise became more and more deafening.
Screens of black fog curled up from the ground, shooting like an angry pillar into the sky. From within the cloud, the cries only seemed to grow louder.
There was no point in asking anymore questions. All I could do was watch in shock as the pillar drew closer and closer to Kline’s fallen form. Kline’s struggles were growing weaker, his skin turning gray; the life was literally being leeched out of him.
No one looked up. No one seemed aware of the dark cloud moving in, sliding first over his feet, then up his thighs.
Kline suddenly stiffened. He was the only one aware of the darkness creeping over him, crying out with more energy than he’d just had as it began to consume him.
“No!” he called. “No! No! NO!”
Esmeralda sobbed. Many of the others looked not at the consuming darkness but at Kline writhing and seizing, clawing at visions of monsters they could not see or hear.
“Illkillher! Shesdead...dead.”
Kline’s final words skated like black ice down my spine. Esmeralda looked up to the crowd with tears and snot running down her face. “What’s he saying? What are you saying, Mr. K? Please, how can I help you? Please!”
Holly, Curses, and Hauntings Page 14