Fury’s Kiss (15 page)

I turned away from the window and told myself to let it go. I wasn’t the first woman to be turned down by a man, and I wouldn’t be the last. Right now, I had bigger problems to deal with than my feelings for Jackson Byrne. I went into my room to brush out my hair and change my clothes, and had just finished when Alex’s car pulled into the driveway. I headed outside to greet the girls, and Ruby held out a dripping ice cream cone.

“I got you this,” she said sweetly. “Rachel said you like sorbet.” She struggled a bit with the unfamiliar word but smiled happily as I took the cone she held out. Then she skipped past me to present a similar offering to Jackson and I turned my attention to my roommates.

“Mrs. Hadley stopped by,” I told them, fudging the details slightly, “and she’s somehow involved in all of this.” I paused. “She knew I was a Fury.”

“Mrs. Hadley?” Nora asked.

“Our next-door neighbor,” Rachel filled her in. “And what do you mean, she’s involved in all this? What exactly did she say?”

“Just that she knows I’m a Fury.” I shrugged. “And she said I’d better come over for apple crumble, if you can believe it.”

“Apple crumble?” Nora was now more confused than ever.

“Mrs. Hadley’s way into desserts,” Alex told her, as though that clarified anything.

“I know what Mrs. Hadley’s gonna say,” Ruby announced from the step next to Jackson, where she was busily crunching a sugar cone.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I can’t tell.”

“Why not?”

“It’s the rules,” Ruby said with the air of someone stating the obvious. She dimpled, clearly enjoying her secret, and I looked to Nora for an explanation.

Nora sighed. “We’ve been over this before. As far as I can tell, there’s no rhyme or reason to the rules she says she has to follow. The oracle thing just happens when it happens.”

“You should go visit soon,” Ruby advised, turning her cone to catch the chocolate dripping onto her hand. “Mrs. Hadley’s old.”

“What do you mean?” A chill swept over me. “Is something going to happen to Mrs. Hadley?”

She didn’t answer, oblivious to my concern. I opened my mouth to ask again, then decided to save my breath. Ruby had turned her attention back to her ice cream with single-minded determination and I could see she’d divulged all she was going to.

“I guess I’d better get over there,” I said. “Alex, Rach, are you guys coming too?”

“Can’t.” Alex looked at her watch. “I’m due at the club tonight and I’ve gotta hustle.”

“The club?” Jackson asked from his step. “Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not,” I told him, but Alex, nearly impossible to offend, didn’t mind explaining.

“I’m a dancer.” She demonstrated by extending one leg up nearly parallel to her ear while she balanced on the other. “I’ve got more range when I’m warmed up, though,” she commented when she had both feet back on the ground.

“A dancer,” Jackson repeated.

“You got it, stud.” She turned on the breathy voice she used at work, just to be sure he wouldn’t miss her point.

“She goes by Alexis Diamond,” Rachel offered. “She’s very good.”

“Just to be clear,” Jackson said, “this club is a—”

“A strip club,” I confirmed, narrowing my eyes at him. “Do you have a problem with that?”

He shook his head. “Why would I? It’s nothing to me if your roommate’s a dancer.”

“Yeah, right.” I snorted. “You called me a hooker just because you saw me kiss some guy at a bar, and I’m supposed to believe you’re not judging my roommate, the exotic dancer?”

Nora cleared her throat with a pointed look at Ruby, and I backed down. It wasn’t the time or place for a fight with Jackson, but I was still stung by his rejection.

“I admit that…misunderstanding was my fault,” he said, “but can you blame me? I ran into you in a stranger’s motel room.”

“You didn’t
run into
me,” I muttered, determined to get the last word. “You followed me.”

He raised his hands in a no-harm-no-foul, let’s-all-be-friends gesture that made me want to throttle him. My hair began to twitch, so I unclenched my fists and turned away, grateful for the distraction Alex created as she demonstrated some of her more family-friendly skills for Ruby. She went up on demi-pointe and turned a perfect pirouette before sliding gracefully into a full split on the lawn. It was this flawless technique combined with her more…adult repertoire that made her a crowd favorite at the high-end club where she worked.

“The Xanadu,” Alex said in her breathy showgirl voice, “where pleasure dreams come true.” She parroted the club’s slogan with a perfect, pearly smile, then dropped the act and held out a hand for Rachel to help her up. “High-class clientele, it pays well, and they let me choreograph my own routines.” She shrugged. “What more could I ask for?”

Alex had taken dance lessons for years in exchange for manual labor, mopping floors and cleaning mirrors for Madam Pavlova, Russian émigré and owner of Hawthorne’s foremost—and only—ballet school. Years of dedicated training had given Alex the strong, disciplined body and work ethic that had earned her a spot as the Xanadu’s top earner. In return, the club paid well and gave her a generous allowance for hair, makeup, and costumes. Best of all, it demanded that its patrons show nothing but respect for the women employed there.

Jackson, Nora, and Ruby looked suitably impressed.

“Anyway, I gotta hit the shower,” Alex said. “It’s a long drive to Boston and false eyelashes don’t apply themselves. Rach and Tara, wait up for me tonight, and that’s an order. I’ll be dying to hear what Mrs. Hadley has to say.”

She bent down to toss Ruby up in the air and catch her again with arms strong from performing acrobatic tricks on the pole night after night.

“And I’ll see you in a couple of days,” she told the little girl, swinging her back down to the ground. Ruby giggled as they performed a complicated high-five, obviously perfected while out for ice cream.

“What happens in a couple days?” I asked.

“We’re gonna fire up the horses and let ’em run!” Ruby said, clearly repeating something Alex had said to her earlier. I looked to Nora for a translation.

“Rachel and Alex thought it would be a good idea to test your abilities in a controlled environment,” she filled me in. “Ruby loved the idea, of course.”

“Controlled environment?”

“In keeping with Alecto’s origins,” Rachel said, “we’re going to have our own mini-Olympics. We’ll go to the track at the high school first thing in the morning, before anyone else shows up, and see what you can do.”

Alecto flexed happily, liking the idea of being able to use her abilities without my usual efforts to restrain her. Swirls of orange flashed in my head and I took an involuntary step backward.

Whoa. Did you do that, or am I hallucinating?
I asked the Fury. Alecto’s thoughts had always felt foreign, but this was the first time I’d ‘seen’ them as bursts of color.

It is a sign that we are becoming more integrated with each other,
she answered.
More permanently connected.

She didn’t comment on whether she was pleased with that development, and I felt oddly let down.

“Everything OK?” Nora asked, watching me. I started, then nodded that it was, and she picked up her daughter. “Well, we should get going. Oracle or no oracle, it’s getting late and Ruby’s a bear when she doesn’t get enough sleep.” Ruby showed her disagreement by making a face and shaking her head vehemently.

Jackson stayed silent as good-byes were exchanged, then got on his motorcycle to follow Nora home. He’d parked down the street to avoid detection when he’d sneaked up on us earlier, and I wondered how he’d known where to find us. As I watched him drive away, I turned to see Rachel looking at me with understanding in her eyes.

“Ain’t love grand?” she said, doing her best Humphrey Bogart as she slung an arm around my shoulders. “Now let’s go see what Mrs. Hadley has to say for herself, the canny old bat.”

I had to laugh in spite of myself. At least Alex hadn’t stuck around to see the look on my face. An inveterate meddler, she would have wanted to hear all the juicy details of what had happened with Jackson. Rachel, though, was content to accompany me next door to our neighbor’s house, knowing I would tell all when I was ready.

As we entered the small, modest dwelling, the smell of freshly baked oatmeal cookies assailed us and my stomach rumbled its anticipation. It had gone unsated earlier in favor of other, more illicit pleasures.

“Come in, come in,” Mrs. Hadley urged. She met us at the door, and I suspected she had been watching us through the window all along. “I imagine you have questions for me,” she said, leading us down a hallway, “but first, we’ve got to feed that beast inside of you.”

Alecto bristled at the term, and Mrs. Hadley turned to look back at me as if she could read my mind.

“Now, dear, a beast is just what you are.” She chuckled soothingly, and I realized she was addressing Alecto rather than me. “But that’s not an insult. You’ll see when the others arrive, and you have some company. You won’t feel nearly so testy then.”

“Others?” I asked, but the old woman pretended not to hear me as she bustled down the hallway ahead of us. I looked at Rachel. “Do you think she means other Furies who might be out there somewhere?”

Alecto had hinted as much, implied that she wanted me to find them, but I hadn’t had time to consider that
they
might come in search of
me
.

“I have a few theories,” Rachel said, “but it’s too early to say much. I need more data.”

I sighed. That was one of the worst things about Rachel—it was hopeless to try to get anything out of her before she was ready to tell you. She’d just say something like ‘her hypothesis wasn’t yet supportable’ and go back to whatever she was pondering in that tangled, brilliant mind of hers. She was well suited for her work as a tutor and I thought again, as I often did, that it was too bad test anxiety had kept her from acing the SATs and getting a scholarship to pursue the Ivy League education she’d always dreamed of.

I followed her down the hall to the kitchen, where I stopped short in the doorway and stared. The ceiling was strung with bunches of herbs tied by their stems to a web of multi-colored threads that crisscrossed the room. Shelves holding containers of every imaginable shape and vintage, from retro Coca-Cola bottles filled with a sickly, yellow fluid, to ancient-looking pottery with Hellenistic soldiers marching around their rims lined the walls. The avocado green of the appliances would have been at home in any old lady’s kitchen, but the huge cauldron of sulfurous something-or-other brewing on the electric stove would not. The steam rising above it was a pretty, pleasing purple very much at odds with the foul smell emanating from it.

“Sit down, children, sit down.” Mrs. Hadley waved us into the room and got out a bowl, three teacups and saucers. Into the bowl, she ladled heaping spoonfuls of the stinking purple liquid simmering on the stove, then poured what looked like plain old Earl Grey into the teacups. She placed the whole assortment onto a silver tea tray, added a few spoons, and set it on the table in front of us. She gave a cup of tea to both Rachel and me, setting the other in front of herself, then placed the bowl of purple liquid in front of me.

“Sugar? Cream?” she offered. We both declined, dumbfounded, and she went on to fix her own tea. She passed me a spoon. “Soup before tea, my beastie. Eat up!”

I raised my eyebrows at Rachel and looked down at the so-called soup. Was it safe to eat? She grimaced, telling me that she had no more idea than I did what it was. I took a tentative sip and struggled not to spit it back into the bowl—it tasted pretty much how it smelled. Mrs. Hadley actually cackled, sounding distinctly like the Wicked Witch of the West. Suddenly, I doubted the wisdom of allowing ourselves to be lured into the old witch’s lair, and I tilted my head subtly toward the doorway, telling Rachel to get ready to run. Mrs. Hadley was turning out to be something very different than what she had always seemed, and there was no way I was going to sit there and let the crazy old hag poison me.

Rachel nodded and we pushed back from the table in unison, but Mrs. Hadley’s arm shot out and her tiny, wrinkled hand clamped down on my wrist. She moved with a speed and strength that would have been astonishing in a woman half her size and age, and I saw that she had Rachel in a similar hold on the other side of the table. Judging from the pained look on Rachel’s face, our neighbor was even stronger than I’d realized. I flexed my fingers, testing the woman, and considered fighting back but Alecto transmitted only mild curiosity at what the witch would do next, so I decided to wait and see what would happen.

“Alecto doesn’t think there’s anything to worry about,” I said out loud for Rachel’s benefit. “But you better start talking, Mrs. Hadley. You’re hurting Rachel.”

“Oh dear.” Mrs. Hadley let go. “I do apologize. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.” Rachel rubbed her wrist, massaging the circulation back into her hand and fingers.

“What exactly is going on here?” I asked. I couldn’t decide whether I felt angry, wary, or curious.

“You, dear, are the first of the Furies.” Mrs. Hadley got up to fuss with the teapot again. Settling herself back at the table, she raised a hand to forestall the questions she could see me forming. “Yes, there are others, and no, I don’t know who they are or where you will find them. Though an old lady has her suspicions!” She cackled again and Rachel and I both jumped at the sound.