Alice At Heart (10 page)

9

Often we read the hoary old tale of dangerous sirens luring ships to their doom and men to damnation: The Cyrenes of Homer’s
Odysseus
, beckoning ordinary men and their possessions. The truth, dear readers, is far more sentimental; our kind tends to rescue hapless travelers and take only a small commission in return. It is the travelers who steal from
us
.

—Lilith

When he was eighteen, just before he left Savannah on a Russian freighter, Griffin sailed to Sainte’s Point in the
Sea Princess
, a small ketch his father had built for his mother.

“I’m a man now,” he told Lilith, Mara, and Pearl stiffly. “I came to say I know you-all had something to do with my parents’ deaths. You hated my father and did all you could to ruin him. And when you couldn’t make my mother leave him, you killed them both. Someday I’ll figure out how you did it and I’ll come back.”

He left to search the waters of the world, as if besting the ocean could reveal how it had drowned his family with the Bonavendiers’ help. Now, more than twenty years later, maturity and disappointment had given a cynical cast to him, and he was brutally lost.

“Here to finish off what you and your sisters started when I was a kid?” he asked.

Lilith acknowledged the insult with an arched brow as she entered his bedroom. She carried the box to a small table in one corner, set it there, then returned and seated herself near his bed, settling gracefully on an aged armchair of cracked leather. “No matter what you still believe about the past, I mean you no harm, and neither do my sisters.”

“I’m not in any shape to uphold the Randolph tradition of fighting Bonavendiers right now.” He glanced at the box with a frown but clearly wouldn’t ask.

Lilith gazed at him in dismay. He lay against a mountain of pillows on a big four-poster bed of wood and iron, a bed Undiline had shipped here from Scotland during her honeymoon with Porter Randolph. Griffin was well over six feet tall, a commanding presence, even deposed in the antique bed. He had a sailor’s rope-working hands, big-knuckled and coarse. His skin was weathered, and squint lines fanned from the corners of his hooded, long-lashed eyes.

And his hair, his hair. Like anyone of their kind, he must keep it trimmed almost daily or risk having others notice its extraordinary rate of growth. Undiline had taught him as a child to clip his hair every morning. But he’d let himself go now, and the sight was astonishing. He had hair just one shade lighter than true black—Randolph hair, in color. But thanks to his mother’s heritage, that hair had grown astonishingly in only a few weeks’ time. It now lay in thick, shaggy waves that curled below his shoulders. Even more startling, his facial hair had grown at an equal rate. He had a luxurious black beard halfway down his stomach.

He looked like a wild animal. From that mane of black hair and beard, his eyes burned like dark jewels, the burnt-brown color of fertile garden loam, the essence of earth.
Remind him of his true nature. Quickly
.

Lilith leaned forward and touched a long fingertip to the foot of his bed. “You were conceived in this bed nearly forty years ago. Souls are drawn back where they began. You belong here. Take comfort.”

Griffin clenched a fist around a mug he perched on his belly, then lifted the mug to her in salute. “Madam Bonavendier,” he countered with an acidic smile, “You’re lying like a sinner in church.” He drank deeply.

Lilith studied him with quiet distress. He gave off the distinct scent of alcohol; his blue pajama top was stained with spilled liquor, but it was not the liquor affecting him. It was the carbonated water he mixed with it.

A soda, a seltzer, even sparkling wine. All as potent as pure whiskey to someone such as ourselves. No, he’ll never admit that
, Lilith thought.
He hides so much from his heart
.

He set the mug back on the stained pajama top flattened across his belly. “You’re looking at me as if I’m a monster,” he said with a mercurial smile.

“Another day or two without shaving and you’ll sport a grand black beard like Blackbeard the pirate. When the English cornered him, they swore he lit small candles in his beard to make himself a terrifying sight. Will you set yourself on fire to frighten me away, as you’ve chased off all others who care for you?”

“Now, I’ve been called a lot of things, but being called a pirate by a Bonavendier is ironic. Half the ships at the bottom of the Atlantic out there—” he jerked his head toward the island—”went down because your ancestors conveniently manipulated the lighthouse during storms.” He took another drink. “Sinking my parents’ sailboat must have been easy.”

Lilith shut her eyes for a moment.
Ah, Undiline, I know he’s half yours, and his heart is good, but he has been taught such prejudice against our kind.
She stood. “Your father was a proud fool and drove your mother to torment. He and he alone decided to take the
Calm Meridian
out that day. He alone is responsible for what happened. Why have you come back here? To confront the truth? Or to hide from that truth while blaming others?”

His hand trembled visibly as he lifted the thick mug from his belly, brought it to his mouth, then balanced it unevenly on his stomach again, sloshing more bubbling amber liquid on the pajama shirt. The weakness didn’t escape his notice or Lilith’s.

He shoved the mug onto a heavy teak nightstand and lunged forward, grimacing at the effort. “When I was a kid, I believed I saw you and your sisters in the water that day. A hallucination, right? But I’m developing new standards for what’s possible and what’s not. If you-all were out there, what does it tell me? What were you doing? Covering up the evidence?”

“You are asking questions to which you already know the answers. Or you
believe
you know, which is just as powerful. Indulge your rhetoric, Griffin, but keep listening for the truth. Whatever I would tell you right now would fall on deaf ears.”

“In other words, you didn’t admit a thing then, and you won’t now.”

“Listen to your heart. It will tell you the truth.”

“You didn’t come here to give me advice. What do you want from me?”

“I have come to ask you for a favor. You are kin to me after all. Distant kin, but those bonds are important to me. And should be to you.”

He began to laugh. He held out one large, long-fingered arm, his hand palm up, as graceful as a courtier. The movement revealed the sensuously entwined woman and dolphin tattooed on the underside of his forearm. “Madam Bonavendier comes here thirty-odd years too late, not to confess how she and her sisters killed my parents—” he smiled grimly—”But to remind me we’re related and ask me for a favor.”

Lilith walked to the box. She laid a hand on it. “This keepsake box belonged to your mother.” Her gaze bored into him, conjuring the spirit of his mother around him, riveting his attention. She laid a key atop the box. His sardonic smile faded to a shadow. Lilith nodded. “You’ll know when to unlock it.”

He wet his lips, struggled for a moment, then repeated in a low voice, “I said,
What do you want from me
?”

“I want you to watch out your windows for a fellow lost soul. Take care of her when you see her waiting at the docks we share, speak to her kindly if she asks for your help, and don’t frighten her away. Because she fears the land as much as you fear the water.”

“Then I feel sorry for her. And I can’t help her.”

“She is my half-sister. She is a treasure you must reclaim for us all.” Lilith paused. “Her name is Alice Riley.”

He stared at Lilith. What was left of his color drained from his face. After a long, quiet moment, he exhaled. “Alice,” he said.

Lilith took one look at the recognition in his eyes, and her heart made a thready leap.
He’s heard her singing; he’s felt her touch somehow. There is hope. He can hear the songs of his mother’s kind
.

“I’m sure you’ll take care of her as if she holds your heart,” Lilith whispered.

He said nothing, but she knew.

Alice already held it.

Griffin stirred in his bed,
sleeping drunkenly on an afternoon when cool wind whipped the cottage and the old seaside house trembled. The wind seemed to send the timbre of its voice through his skull, relaxing cramped muscles from healing bones, massaging his brain. The sensation became an erotic hum, not a force coming into him but focusing itself
inside
him, blooming low in his belly until he was thrusting and hard, then, suddenly,
singing out
, forming into words, forming into his own urgent voice.

Alice, make him look at you. You saved my life; now I’ll save yours. Make him put down the gun.

Griffin woke with a jerk, sweating, tingling. He shoved himself upright in the darkened bedroom, staring straight ahead, stunned at the words he hadn’t spoken aloud and couldn’t understand, at the thick erection pushing up the material of his pajama bottoms. He felt worried and orgasmic, directing commands at an endangered woman he didn’t know. What she provoked in him was a sensation he’d never experienced before in his life. Another rush of energy surged through his body, and he sank a hand into the jumbled covers as he came, like a lovesick teenager, inside his clothing. And somehow he knew.

Alice Riley had heard him. Wherever she was and whatever had just happened to her, she’d listened.

I froze in a front aisle
of the convenience store with a container of whipped butter in my hands, while a sad young man with dirty blond spitcurls waved a pistol at both me and the Mexican cashier who had befriended me. Her name was Maria.

“Give me your damned money,” he screamed at us.

Maria shrank back. I could not make myself move an inch. I felt doom swirl around us like a pulling current.

Make him look at you, Alice. Make him put down the gun or he’ll shoot.

The deep male voice rose inside my mind out of nowhere, filling me with the vibrations of a low-pitched hum. My spine arched; I gasped as if electrified.
Him. The face in the water. The injured man.
Fingers of sensation webbed my skin and delved inside me. I felt my womb loosen, welcome, and then retract. Moisture spread between my legs, and my knees went weak. Pleasure, at a moment like this. Life.
That voice
.

“Please, don’t hurt us,” Maria begged and began fumbling with the cash register. She knocked over a jar of pennies, and the robber jumped at the crash.

“I’ll kill ya!”

“No, you won’t,” I said. Just like that, in a low voice. The robber swung toward me furiously. Inside, my backbone turned to water and drained into my own feet. Strangely, I was still satiated with the unknown voice, the slick fertility some male stranger had provoked inside my belly.

Make him look at you, Alice,
the voice urged again.
The way I’m looking at you
.

My head came up. I squared my shoulders, tilted my chin just so, feigned grace and patient command. I stared into the robber’s eyes, past the bloodshot whites and wide-open irises, inside the dark, fluid pools of his brain. So much of what we are is water. We change with the tides, we struggle in our own endless seas to transform ourselves into something or someone splendid. I dived beneath his fear and confusion, his paranoia, the currents of drugs and abuse and hopelessness that pushed him away from every shore. I made a mewling sound of sympathy.

Float
, I sang in my mind.
Breathe. Become who you truly are
. I began to hum to him, a silent, erotic, spiritual song.

He wavered. His hand, bearing the pistol, slowly eased to his side. His expression stilled. Without a word he turned unsteadily and walked out the front door. A tiny set of metal windchimes sang in his wake. The sound filled the stunned silence.

“How did you do that?” Maria cried. “You charmed that crazy snake!” She pressed a button behind the counter. The door lock slid into place, alarms began to ring, and the police were summoned by some faceless computer somewhere. Out under the awnings of the gas pumps, the robber wobbled to a halt, sat down on the ledge of a pump, and gazed back toward the store, watching me. He began to cry and dropped his head into his hands. I began to cry
for
him, and my knees went weak.

I was changing. I had left Riley and had begun to turn into someone new, someone even odder and more potent than before. Maybe because I was free of my hateful relatives, other people could see me differently. Or I could see them. And in some cases, hear them.

You did it, Beautiful
.

His voice again, the stranger. I didn’t sense him nearby, or I would have run. But his masculine current vibrated under my skin, and as my womb cooled I recoiled.

All my life men and boys had stared at me oddly, taunted me, ignored me, avoided me. My fantasies of loving and being loved by a man were just phantoms, my sexuality confined to stroking my own body in the lonely nights of my bed. I didn’t trust men this easily and did not want any man inside me, body, mind, or soul, without my explicit permission.

Where are you
? I demanded.
Who are you
?
How do you know me
?
What do you want from me?

No answer. Silence.

Sobbing, Maria ran to me and threw her arms around my shoulders. “You are a hero!”

Not again. Oh, my god. My knees collapsed. I sank down on a stack of canned soft drinks while she continued to hug me and cry.

Griffin stumbled to a window
overlooking the cottage’s front yard, crashing the cast of his injured leg into a table, slamming the cast of his broken forearm against a wall. He gripped the edge of a captain’s desk and looked out over the bay as if it held answers.

All his life he’d had quirky moments of prescient knowledge, and people often commented on his uncanny ability to find rare objects underwater. But he had told them it was because he read, he studied, he was an accomplished if uncredentialed archaeologist and historian. He’d bought his first deep-sea rig and had begun treasure hunting by the time he was twenty-five; by thirty he had a million dollars in the bank and had begun to earn his notorious fame for prying antiquities from the sea. But he regarded his abilities as just trained instincts, like following the stars across the ocean. Nothing like what had been happening recently.