Fury’s Kiss (5 page)

“Hey gang,” Nora said, as though there was nothing unusual about me tagging along behind her. “Something smells good in here.” Jackson scowled at us both.

“I like your hair,” Ruby said to me. “You look like Rapunzel.”

Nora smiled as I thanked the girl. “Why don’t you guys finish making the food while I show Tara my garden?” she suggested, leading me out the back door before anyone could object.

The backyard was bigger than the front, with a swing set off to the right and a corrugated metal shed behind it. The left side of the yard was taken up by an impressive garden, leaving a strip of grass in the middle just wide enough for Ruby to play. The garden thrived with a colorful, lively mixture of flowers and vegetables.

“Nice,” I commented as we stepped out into the yard, though I knew my tour was just an excuse to talk away from tiny, curious ears. Or big, pissed-off ones.

“It keeps us in cauliflower, anyway.” Nora led me to the far end of the yard, away from the open kitchen window.

“So,” I said when she stopped. “Furies, huh?”

“Yeah, Furies. God, I have so many questions. Why are you here on Cape Cod, of all places? And why now?”

“You realize I don’t actually know what you’re talking about, right?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Tara, come on. I know what you are. You don’t have to pretend.” She looked me over. “Granted, you do look a little different than I would have expected. Less fangy.”

“Yeah, the thing is…” I took a deep breath. “I
really
don’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever happened to that guy last night, I had no control over it.”

Nora looked at the kitchen window. I followed her gaze and saw Jackson watching us. “Look,” she said, “I haven’t told Jackson what you are yet, but he’s going to have to know. We both lied to the cops for you.”

Now that was welcome news—though I had trouble believing it had been an easy sell to get Jackson to lie to the authorities. But why was Nora so willing to put herself at risk to protect me?

“Why did you do it?” I asked.

“Because I know what you are and why you killed that guy. The signs were all there.”

“Signs? What signs?”

She gave me a look I recognized, having seen it on my mother’s face about a million times growing up. It was a mom thing that meant
I know you know what you did
.

The trouble was, this time I really had no idea. “Humor me?”

“OK.” Nora held up one finger. “First, the guy’s jeans were undone, meaning one of several things. Either he’d been relieving himself when he died, he’d been having a little solo fun in the parking lot, or he was with someone. Since Jackson saw you out there with him, it seemed like a safe bet that
someone
was you. If you had left, he would have just come in to drink with his buddy.”

“Go on.”

She raised another finger. “Second, there were no signs of a struggle. Meaning the guy was killed quickly. And you’re not big enough to take on a man that size without one hell of a scuffle. Unless you’re a black belt or something.” She looked at me and pursed her lips. “Since you’re probably not, and there’s no way you could have fit a gun in the purse you were carrying—”

“Hey,” I interrupted, “who says I’m not a black belt? I could be very lethal, you know.”

It was only after I said it that I remembered being incapable of committing murder was a good thing, especially since I was trying to convince someone that I wasn’t, in fact, a murderer.

Thankfully, Nora ignored me and kept going. “Third, the body just didn’t look like a natural death. I’m no expert, but it was bloated and bluish, like it had been in the water for a while, but it wasn’t decomposed at all. And it couldn’t have been suffocation, because the guy was puffed up to almost twice his normal size.”

I was impressed. She’d gotten a lot of mileage out of that crime scene. “You really know your ways to kill a person.”

She shrugged. “What can I say? I read a lot of true crime.”

“So just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right and I
am
a Fury. What, exactly, would that entail?”

“Well, you know the mythology, right?”

I shook my head. “Let’s just say I don’t.”

“OK, here are the Cliffs Notes. In ancient Greek mythology, the Furies were born when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitals into the ocean. The Furies were formed by drops of his blood.”

I grimaced. So far,
ew
.

Nora continued, “Some sources say the sisters were even older than that, born of Night itself, but everyone agrees that they were goddesses of the underworld. They were associated with the usual underworld stuff—blood, death, serpents, you get the picture. Descriptions of them vary, but it’s pretty widely accepted that they had snakes for hair and they cried tears of blood. Sometimes they had the bodies of animals.”

Lovely. The snaky hair was already familiar—and thank God
that
wasn’t literal—but now I had to wonder if I was going to start growing fur in unsightly places, too?

“They were goddesses of vengeance,” Nora went on, “appearing on behalf of those who summoned them. They were called the Kindly Ones because they never punished anyone who didn’t deserve it, though the punishments were always pretty terrible. And they wouldn’t stop until they were satisfied justice had been done.”

Ruby appeared at the back door and called for us to come inside for pancakes, and my stomach flopped. On the heels of Nora’s talk of snakes and death, lunch suddenly sounded a lot less appetizing. I looked back at the kitchen window where I could see Jackson setting the table, and felt a pang of regret that I wouldn’t have a chance to convince him I wasn’t the lunatic he must have thought I was.

But even if my appetite hadn’t abandoned me, I couldn’t have stayed. If what Nora suspected was true, I was dealing with something huge and I couldn’t afford to be distracted. And worrying about what Jackson Byrne thought of me could be a major distraction if I let it.

I turned to Nora. After lying to the police on my behalf and convincing Jackson to do the same, she deserved what little explanation I could give her.

“Everything you just told me sounds basically insane, but you may be right about what’s happening. The thing is, I appreciate the help, but I don’t know any more than you do about what happened to that guy.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She waved a hand to dismiss my thanks. “For one thing, I’m a single mother to a little girl. And for another…didn’t my last name give you a hint as to why I’m helping you?”

I looked at her blankly.

“Katsaros? It’s Greek.”

Well,
duh
.
But so what? My ancestors were Scottish, but it didn’t mean I believed in the Loch Ness monster. Though I might have to reevaluate that one, all things considered.

“OK. So you’re Greek. What does that have to do with anything?”

“I was practically raised on the old legends. That’s why I was able to recognize what you are. If that body had been found by anybody else in Hawthorne, you’d probably be locked in a cell by now.”

When she put it that way, my knees sagged with relief. “But what does being a single mother have to do with anything?”

“I’m raising a little girl on my own,” Nora pointed out. “It’s my job to protect her from guys like the one you took out. The way things looked when I found the body? I figure he had it coming. One less guy like that in the world is one less thing I have to worry about.”

Huh. Maybe she was the real Fury here. The steel in her voice told me she would take out anyone who tried to hurt her daughter. With her bare hands, if necessary.

Ruby called for us again and I made my excuses. “I should go, but tell Ruby I’m sorry for missing lunch. I’ve got some things I’ve got to figure out, and I don’t want you guys to get mixed up in this any more than you already have been.”

“No problem. And don’t worry about Jackson. He won’t say anything if I ask him not to.”

“What about Lefty?”

Lefty was the manager at Spyder’s and he was known for two things—his love of booze and his dislike of people. His idea of a good time was watching the bar’s security tapes in hopes of catching someone doing something they shouldn’t have. It was a mystery how someone so disagreeable had ever gotten a job serving the public.

Nora grinned. “Turns out there was a glitch with the cameras last night. No footage got recorded.”

I felt tears pricking the corners of my eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time that day. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to make this up to you,” I promised. “Seriously, you didn’t have to do this for me. You hardly know me.”

“I know you well enough to believe you’re a good person who didn’t deserve what happened,” Nora answered. Warmth crept up my neck and face, and I nodded my thanks before turning to go.

I made it a few steps before one last, important question occurred to me and I turned back. “Hey. You don’t know anything about Miller’s friend, do you? He would have come into the bar right after I left. He saw me talking to his buddy.”

Nora frowned, trying to remember. “Actually, I did overhear something about him. The police were looking for him so they could question him. They’d been to the motel where he was staying and asked around, but they were still trying to track him down when I left the station.”

My frown matched Nora’s. So Miller’s friend hadn’t gone to the police to report my contact with his friend the night before—but why hadn’t he? If your buddy turned up dead, wasn’t that one of the first things you’d do? And he had to know by now what had happened to Miller. The news would be all over the Cape.

I had a million questions and no answers, so I said good-bye to Nora and headed back toward the curb out front, intending to rendezvous with the girls and share what I’d learned. But this time I headed around the side of the house instead of going through the kitchen, carefully avoiding the window as I went by. There was no need to antagonize Jackson further.

Or to torture myself with another glimpse of something I couldn’t have.

Chapter 4

As I drove home from Nora’s, I tried to digest what she’d told me. Less than twenty-four hours ago, my biggest problem had been my lack of a love life. Now, I would have given anything to have that kind of problem back.

You would separate yourself from me?
A voice spoke in my head. It startled me so badly I let out a yelp and nearly veered off the road. My tires hit gravel and I had to swallow my heart back down into my chest as I wrenched the wheel to guide the car back onto asphalt. The voice was female, with a sort of reptilian hiss, and I recognized it from the night before. It sounded exactly how you might expect someone to sound if they had red eyes and snakes for hair.

The way you might expect a Fury to sound.

Hello?
I thought, testing the waters.
Who’s there?
I turned the radio off so I could listen more carefully, then hit my turn signal and pulled over at a gas station on my right. I really didn’t want to rear-end someone because I was busy talking to the voices in my head.

The voice didn’t answer.

Hello?
I tried again, but there was still nothing. Freaky-me seemed to be a woman of few words. Not sure what to do next, I stared blankly out the window and tried to think. Though the voice wouldn’t answer me, I was beginning to believe Nora had been right. There
was
something in my head, something that had killed Clinton Miller, and
Fury
seemed to suit it as well as any other word.

The idea of something foreign and inhuman inside me was both terrifying and a relief. On one hand, I felt like Sigourney Weaver in one of those
Alien
movies, harboring some awful, destructive force inside me. But on the other hand, at least it provided an explanation for the things I’d done, for the kiss I’d used to kill Miller. What was that old saying? Better the devil you know than the one you don’t? At least having a name to attach to the voice in my head meant I might be on track to learning more about what was happening to me.

I sat there half-hoping and half-fearing the voice would speak again until I was snapped out of my daze by the sight of a familiar face. Miller’s ill-mannered friend from the night before exited the convenience store attached to the gas station. He put on a pair of sunglasses as he stepped out into the bright afternoon sunlight and checked out a couple of young teenage girls who passed him on their way in.

Pervert
. Not that I was surprised, given the company he’d kept. His buddy had been found dead in a parking lot only that morning, and here he was buying Doritos and a newspaper like nothing happened.

I slouched down in my seat in case he glanced my way, peering up over the dash every few seconds to follow his progress to the pumps. He opened the driver’s side door of a black, jacked-up truck and swung himself into the cab. The engine rumbled to life and I dithered over what to do next. Should I follow or let him go? And if I did follow, what then?

Nora and Jackson wouldn’t implicate me in Clinton Miller’s death, and I’d been reassured that Lefty was no threat. That left the man in the truck as the strongest link between the body and me. Should I follow and confront him in an attempt to find out what he planned to tell the cops? Or should I let him go and hope he wouldn’t mention me?