Fury’s Kiss (17 page)

But the girl hauled me backward another couple of steps and I felt a twinge of irritation. Really, this was starting to get annoying. Alecto swirled orange, agreeing with me.

“You were about to drink that stuff!” The girl was saying something again. Maybe if I paid attention to her for a minute, she would go away and let me get back to the blackness. I forced myself to look at her, though the blackness was so pretty, tumbling and rolling toward us.

Rachel? Was that her name?

“Rachel.” I tried it out loud. Yes, she looked excited, so that must be it. I said it again. “Rachel.” She responded by pulling me even farther from the blackness. Really, this was a bit much, we were practically across the street. How much farther did she want to go?

The girl—Rachel, I reminded myself—lifted her arm and slapped me across the face. My head snapped back, and she did it again.

“Rach? What?” I shook my head to clear it. “Why are you hitting me?” I felt dazed, disoriented. What was going on?

“Oh, thank God. Tara, I was so scared,” Rachel sobbed. Her face was a mess of panic and tears.

I looked around, trying to remember what we were doing on the street in front of Mrs. Hadley’s house. The black gunk seeping out of the house was even darker than the asphalt under our feet, and I squinted at it as it advanced toward us. My mind cleared and I realized that the stuff had already gotten Mrs. Hadley and had been trying to…eat me? I shivered. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but Rachel had saved me from it, whatever it was.

“Come on,” I said, making a decision. I grabbed her hand and ran for our house. I didn’t like to leave Mrs. Hadley behind, but there was nothing we could do for her. And the blackness was spreading fast, as though it meant to cover the whole neighborhood. I didn’t know what good it would do to sit in our house with the curtains drawn, but Mrs. Hadley had sacrificed herself to give us those instructions and I didn’t have any better ideas.

Not stopping even to catch our breath, Rachel and I ran inside and tore through the house, locking doors, closing curtains, and pulling down blinds as fast as we could. We rolled up towels and duct taped them around the door and window frames, until at last we were as sealed in as we could be. Then we called Alex at work and told her not to come home until daylight.

Too shaken up to sleep and afraid to look out the windows, Rachel and I turned on every light in the house while she peppered me with questions about the black ooze that had nearly swallowed me up. I answered as best as I could, but exhaustion was overtaking me and I collapsed on the couch. Even in the face of danger, Rachel’s curiosity was insatiable.

I passed out before I could hear any of her theories; the last thing that registered was the sound of the Ryan Gosling marathon she turned on to keep herself company until I woke up.

Despite the companionship of the television, Rachel must have eventually passed out too, because the next thing I heard was someone pounding on our door.

Chapter 14

Still fuzzy from lack of sleep, I rolled off the couch, reflexes landing me on my feet. Just a week ago, I would have been in a heap on the floor.

“Who is it?” Rachel whispered, eyes wide.

“I don’t know yet. Hang on a second.” I crept silently to the living room window and peered out through a crack in the curtains. There was a police car parked at the curb. I craned my neck to see who was pounding on the front door and recognized one of the two men standing there. “It’s Dewey Randolph, with some other guy. Looks like they’re here on official business.”

Dewey had gone to school with us, a senior when we were freshmen. Popular and good at sports, he’d been a gentle giant, though not terribly academic. He’d gone to college on a football scholarship, but had dropped out and gone to the police academy after tearing a ligament in his knee. Despite reconstructive surgery, Dewey’s once-bright football career ended before it even got off the ground. To his credit, he hadn’t sunken into despair at the unexpected turn his life had taken, but seemed to take genuine pleasure in serving the town as a deputy to his uncle, the chief.

Rachel groaned. “What’s he doing here? I thought Nora said she and Jackson didn’t tell the police anything. And who’s the guy with Dewey?”

“She
didn’t
tell them anything. And I’ve never seen the other guy before. Come see for yourself.”

Rachel joined me at the window and we both gave the guy the once-over. He was good looking in a conservative kind of way, wearing what looked like an expensive suit, though Alex would have known better than I did. Tall and athletically built, he was a quarterback to Dewey’s linebacker, and his immaculate haircut, polished shoes and upright posture screamed authority figure.

“What should we do?” I asked Rachel.

“We could answer the door. It’s not like they don’t know we’re in here.” She had a point. My car
was
right there in the driveway.

Not to mention Dewey had noticed us skulking behind the curtains. He gestured at me to open the door and I signaled
just-a-second
at him, then stepped away from the window and let the curtain fall back into place. Rachel and I raced to tear the duct tape and towels from the door and window frames visible from the entryway, and stuffed them under the couch as Dewey knocked again.

“Everything OK in there, Tara? I need you to open up—police business.”

“Uh, just a second,” I yelled back. “We’re…” I thought quickly. “We’re not decent.”

“Not decent?” Rachel glared at me. “What do you want him to think we’re doing in here?”

Rachel was always especially careful to avoid saying or doing anything that might encourage Dewey’s years-long infatuation with her. Although he was always a perfect gentleman, he pursued her doggedly.

“He’ll never give up if he thinks I’m into…naked yoga or something,” she complained.

Grinning at her, I swung the door wide as she gave voice to the words
naked yoga
. Dewey swallowed audibly, blushing to the tips of his ears, and the man standing next to him grinned back at me and raised his eyebrows.

Interesting. A suit with a sense of humor.

“So that’s like regular yoga?” Dewey started to ask, “But without—”

“No,” Rachel cut him off. “Absolutely not. We are not going there.”

“What can we do for you, Dewey?” I asked before he had a chance to say anything more.

“We’ve got a few questions for you. And some bad news.” He looked apologetic.

My palms started to sweat and I wiped them on my maxi dress. He was on to me, I knew it. Only Dewey would look apologetic when questioning you for murder. But who had tipped him off? Had the curse I put on Priest failed somehow?

Calm yourself,
Alecto growled, sizing Dewey up.
He knows nothing. His questions are
… She searched for the right word.
His questions are routine.

I took a deep breath and surreptitiously wiped my hands on the side of my dress again, now wrinkled and rumpled from having been slept in all night. I hoped Dewey and his friend would attribute my breathlessness to the yoga Rachel and I had supposedly been doing.

“Questions?” Rachel asked. “About what?” She was impressively poised, considering we’d woken up to a police interrogation. Then again, she wasn’t the one who had killed a guy.

“I guess you probably heard that a man died at Spyder’s on Friday night,” Dewey said. “Clinton Miller, a construction worker.”

We nodded.

“Well, Nora Katsaros mentioned you were in earlier that night, so I have to ask you a few questions.”

The man beside him cleared his throat pointedly.

“Oh, yeah,” Dewey remembered his manners with a start. “Tara, Rachel, this is Special Agent Ethan Graves. He’s with the FBI, out of Boston. Ethan has a few questions for you, too.”

Graves shot Dewey an irritated, sidelong glance and I got the feeling he preferred not to be on first name terms with Dewey.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with your investigation,” I said. “There was no one else there when I left the bar.”

“That may be,” Graves put in, “but you could have seen something important and not even realize it. Maybe someone outside, or driving past. If we could have just a few minutes of your time, we’ll be out of here before you know it.” He took a half-step forward, inviting himself in, but Rachel refused to give any ground.

“Tara
said
she didn’t see anything.”

“You said you had bad news?” I wasn’t eager to hear it, but I needed to distract them. Besides, it would be better to just get it over with.

Dewey took off his hat and looked down as he turned it around in his hands. “I’m sorry to tell you that your neighbor, Vera Hadley, passed away last night. Since we had to come out here anyway, I thought it might be easier to hear it from me instead of through the grapevine.”

My hand rose to my throat and I stumbled back a step, floored by guilt. Our neighbor had sacrificed herself to save us, and I hadn’t given a thought to her since being startled out of my exhausted, fitful sleep by Dewey’s knock at our door. It all came back in a rush—Mrs. Hadley’s revelation that she was a witch, her warning about ambrosia.

And that awful blackness.

I looked at Rachel. My thoughts reflected in her eyes. “What happened?” I asked Dewey.

“It was a heart attack as best as we can tell, though the autopsy will confirm it. She managed to call 911, but it was too late by the time we got there.”

“I think I need to sit down.” I turned to make my way back to the living room sofa.

It could have been me. Despite my strength, my speed, my new abilities, Ruby had been right. There were things darker than me.

And I had met one of them last night.

“At least she didn’t suffer long,” I murmured to Rachel, remembering the pleasant, relaxed state the creeping darkness had induced in me. It was a small consolation.

“I’m sorry for the loss,” Dewey said, looking from Rachel to me. “I didn’t realize you were so close.”

“Thank you, Dewey,” Rachel said. “She was a very interesting lady, and a good neighbor.”

Agent Graves cleared his throat tactfully and I got the sense this wasn’t the first time he’d had this type of conversation. “I’m sorry to interrupt at a time like this, but I do have a few questions I need to ask you ladies.”

“I think this can probably wait, can’t it?” Dewey asked. “After all, the guy’s buddy already confessed.”

Graves shot Dewey another look. Despite Rachel’s long-suffering attempts to dissuade Dewey’s pursuit over the years, there were some definite advantages to his infatuation. Like his willingness to override police procedure to save Rachel any distress.

“I wasn’t aware that the Hawthorne police department had brought in help from the mainland,” Rachel said to Dewey, fishing for more information. “Is there some reason this case is of particular interest?”

“Ethan’s been working on the New England Slasher case. It may be that there’s some connection between that and what happened at Spyder’s.”

“Thank you, Deputy Randolph,” Graves ground out, all tact gone now. “I’ll take it from here.” He gave Dewey a shut-up-or-else look, then went on. “As the deputy says, there has been a confession in the death that took place at Spyder’s on Friday night, but there are some questions that remain to be answered. Anything you can recall, no matter how irrelevant it seems, may provide some context.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really don’t think I have anything helpful to add.”

“Don’t worry about it, Tara,” Dewey reassured me. “I know you’ll call if you think of anything.”

A muscle flexed in Graves’ jaw. “Deputy,” he said, his voice carefully controlled, “a word?”

Standing up, he nodded at us politely, then grabbed Dewey by the elbow and hauled him out into the hallway.

“I thought you fixed it so Priest would confess and everyone would believe him,” Rachel whispered fiercely while Graves conferred with Dewey. “Why is this guy asking so many questions?”

“I don’t know!” I whispered back. “That
is
the way it was supposed to work. I’m still figuring all this out, you know.”

“Well, ask Alecto what’s up!”

There is something different about this Agent Graves
, Alecto told me
. He is uncommonly strong of will.

I passed the message on to Rachel. “Alecto says this Graves guy is just hard to brainwash.”

We cut our discussion short when Dewey and Graves rejoined us in the living room.

“Sorry about that,” Graves said. “Just a little jurisdictional issue to sort out.”

Dewey had a hangdog expression on his face and I felt a twinge of embarrassment on his behalf.

“Can I ask how Clinton Miller died?” Rachel asked, as much to clear the air as to get more detail about what I’d done to him. “The newspaper didn’t say much about it.”

“Anoxia,” Graves told her. “Complete hypoxia of the entire body.”

“Meaning…what?” I asked. Rachel had already figured out that much, but maybe he would spill something new if we kept him talking.

Graves answered my question with one of his own. “Do either of you know what lack of oxygen does to the body?”