Retribution (24 page)

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Authors: Jeanne C. Stein

Tags: #Fantasy

BOOK: Retribution
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A Latino housekeeper appears in the doorway. She looks surprised to see that her mistress is not alone. She says something to Sophie in Spanish and Sophie answers. I understand enough to know her housekeeper just announced Turnbull’s arrival. Sophie tells her to open the gate.
Then she turns to me. “It’s time to go.”
She’s not resisting the idea that I want her to come with me. It’s surprising, if she’s the mastermind behind the whole scheme. Still, it’s better than having to drag her kicking and screaming. I keep my eyes on her as she leads the way through a maze of rooms to the front door. If she’s cloaking great power, she’s doing a good job of it.
The limo is right outside the front door. The housekeeper accompanies us, speaking to Sophie in rapid-fire Spanish. I pick up from her expression and the timbre of her voice that she’s afraid for her mistress, mistrustful of the woman with “
ojos salvajes
” who appeared from nowhere and is now taking her away.
Sophie throws me a calculated glance, reads that I understood most of what the woman was saying and replies with a few reassuring words to her before walking down the steps to the car.
The remark about the “wild-eyed” woman, though, goes unchallenged.
Turnbull is standing outside the car, passenger door open. When Sophie slips in ahead of me, he gives me a raised-eyebrow look and asks,
That’s Sophie Deveraux?
Any reason to doubt it?
She’s a lot younger than I imagined. A spell?
Or another satisfied customer.
 
 
IT’S A QUIET RIDE BACK TO CENTENNIAL AIRPORT. I have many questions to ask Sophie, but I don’t want to ask them in front of Turnbull. I don’t trust him.
Turnbull keeps to himself, too. He doesn’t introduce himself to Sophie. Afraid, maybe, that if he does and they meet at some charity function in the future, she’ll remember. I’m sure he’s relieved that he’s not been asked to dispose of a body. The sooner he gets Sophie alive and on that plane, the better.
The silence gives me a chance to study Sophie. There’s something—an unidentifiable quality—about her that’s unusual. Every once in a while, she gets an expression on her face that makes me think she’s listening to—what? Her focus turns inward. If she were vampire, I’d say she was reading Turnbull or me. She’s not vampire. I’m certain of it. I’d have recognized it when I saw her for the first time. She was startled and had no chance to put up psychic defenses.
It’s creepy. Could Sophie Deveraux be psychotic? Does she hear
those
kind of voices?
She knew Tremaine was Burke. She knew about the deaths from the cream. She says she came up with the idea. With her sister.
My hands curl into fists. They itch to get her alone on that plane, to find out what else she knows.
The jet is primed and ready when we pull onto the airstrip. I say good-bye to Turnbull. It doesn’t take long. He’s as glad to be rid of me as he is Sophie. I thank him for helping me find Sophie. I mean it, too. Saved me from hassling with a GPS system on a rental car.
He’s gone before we take off.
He doesn’t ask me back for a visit.
Once aboard, Sophie slips into a seat and belts herself in. She’s neither curious nor impressed by the plane.
Probably has one just like it.
Lawson comes back to greet us. He gives us a weather update and tells us we’ll be on our way in ten minutes.
I wait until we’re airborne and he’s given us the okay to move about the cabin. I tell him we won’t be needing anything and don’t want to be disturbed. Then I unbuckle my seat belt and swivel my seat to face the girl.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Who are you?”
Sophie squares herself in the seat. Resolute blue eyes look into mine. “My name was Sophie Burke. Belinda is my sister.”
“You call yourself Sophie Deveraux. Jonathan Deveraux was vampire. You assumed a new identity, set yourself up as heir to his estate. Why?”
If she really is the bitch Burke’s sister, I expect her answer will have to do with distancing herself from the black-magic witch.
Instead, Sophie smiles. “Black-magic witch. She is that, yes. But that’s not the reason I became Sophie Deveraux.”
I jerk upright in the seat. There’s no mistaking it this time. She does hear voices. She heard mine.
What are you?
What do you think I am?
The voice is masculine, touched with a hint of an accent, like Turnbull’s, faintly southern. It’s coming from
inside
Sophie but it’s not Sophie speaking. Gooseflesh raises icy bumps on my arms.
The memory of another male voice addressing me from a female form plunges me into a nightmare.
Avery. That time it was Avery and the female was Sandra.
Dread roots me to the spot. I’m trapped at twenty thousand feet with something I can’t identify and rising panic. Has Avery done it again? Did he manage to escape from Sandra? Is he here on his own plane to exact revenge?
Who’s Avery? I thought you were the Big Bad.
The voice this time is diffused with curiosity and a hint of humor.
It’s laughing at me.
Not a good idea. Anger replaces panic, cracking the shell of fear paralyzing me and allowing the vampire to break free. The growl and hiss erupt from the dark place determined to protect itself.
I’ll ask you one more time. What are you?
It’s Sophie who answers after a moment’s hesitation. “Sorry, Ms. Strong,” she says with quiet resignation. “I should have told you.” She makes a sweeping gesture with her hand, down the length of her body. “I’m not exactly alone in here. You’ve been talking with my alter ego, Jonathan Deveraux.”
CHAPTER 43
A
VISCERAL RUSH OF ALARM SWALLOWS THE ANGER. A hundred questions pop into my head. The most important, because of Sandra and Avery, raises the hair on the back of my neck. “Did he take you by force? Is he holding you against your will?”
A sad, slow smile touches her lips. “I wish I could answer yes.” She sighs. “But I can’t. I did this to myself.
“How?”
“Curiosity and vanity. A dangerous combination.”
I don’t understand. Is she lying to protect herself? Can this Jonathan Deveraux hurt her the way Avery did Sandra?
Only if I want to hurt myself, too.
I’ve experienced a lot of strange things since becoming vampire. Watching this young girl speak with two distinct voices ranks among the creepiest.
She’s not so young,
Deveraux says with a chuckle.
Go ahead, Sophie, tell Anna the story.
Sophie stands, begins to pace, stops, turns back to me. “It started as an experiment,” she says. “I’m a witch. To support myself I am—I was—a caterer. I worked the supernatural community. It was a good life. I should have been satisfied.”
She comes back and sinks into her seat. “A few months ago, at a birthday party, at Jonathan’s birthday party, there was an accident.”
Not an accident,
Deveraux interjects with a snarl.
Sophie nods. “He’s right. It turned out not to be an accident. His wife killed him—set him on fire with his birthday cake. When I was called in to clean up the—what was left—I got the idea. I’ve always dabbled in cosmetics. Made my own, in fact. It was a dream to start my own business. Thinking about what happened to Jonathan, touching the ash, gave me an idea. Maybe if I used some of his ash, mixed it in a face cream, it might be the breakthrough I was looking for to start a new line.”
“Did you know the ash had any power?”
“No. It was desperation. I was tired of my life. I wanted to be young. Beautiful. I wanted adventure, romance. Things I never had.”
“So how old are you, really?”
She looks away. “Eighty,” she says softly. “Not so old for a witch, but definitely past the midpoint of life.”
“Eighty?” I flash on Burke. “What about your sister then? How old is she?”
“Belinda is ten years older. She’s ninety.”
I shake my head. “No way. You said this happened a few months ago. I saw Burke before that. She looked thirty. How is she doing it?”
Sophie shrugs. “Magic,” she says. “You saw how she worked the glamour that transformed her into Simone Tremaine. She can be any age or look like anyone she wants to. She’s very powerful.”
“So why didn’t you do the same thing?”
“It takes continuous and exhausting effort to maintain a change in physical appearance. I wish to direct my effort to more positive things.” She catches herself. “Or at least I
used
to direct my efforts to positive things.”
“Christ. So you came up with another idea. All this because you couldn’t be content to age gracefully like the rest of the human race.”
A snicker.
This from a vampire who will never age.
I wasn’t speaking to you.
Tough.
I brace for a smart-ass rejoinder. When none comes, I focus again on the girl. “Sophie, so what happened when you mixed the ash in your cream?”
“This.” She glances down. “I awoke one morning to find I’d achieved my dream. A perfect, beautiful twenty-year-old face and body.”
And I found myself trapped in a nightmare—the body of an eighty-year-old virgin living in a hovel who cooked for a living. A teetotaling vegetarian. Could it get any worse?
I can scarcely contain my rage. “But how is this possible? Is it permanent? Does Belinda know what you did?” I jerk around to face Sophie. “No. She can’t. Otherwise, she’d have been setting vampires on fire instead of bleeding them, right?”
Sophie nods, but it’s Deveraux who answers.
We thought it best to keep what happened to Sophie and me quiet. Sophie knew her sister had a dark side.
“A dark side? Is that what you call turning and torturing young girls for their blood? Whose idea was that?”
“It was Jonathan’s idea,” Sophie says. Then she adds quickly, “Not the torturing part. Jonathan realized using ash resulted in absorbing the entire essence of a vampire. He thought if we used just the blood, we might be able to achieve only physical results. It’s blood that makes a vampire immortal, that stops the aging process and achieves physical perfection.”
And it worked.
At that, I do slam my fist against the back of Sophie’s seat.
Shut the fuck up. As a result of it “working” Belinda set up a slaughterhouse.
That was never meant to happen,
Deveraux whines.
Our idea was a blood bank, where vampires would be paid for donations. The problem arose because the effects weren’t permanent and the side effects—
I know all about the side effects. We have three dead women in San Diego because of side effects. I think Belinda is killing off her test subjects to cover her tracks.
I stop, swallow back the anger. “Let’s go back—why did you take the name Deveraux? How did you explain that to Belinda if she didn’t know you were”—I search for the right word—“
harboring
this thing inside you? ”
Thing?
Deveraux’s outrage squeals through.
Shut up. Let Sophie talk.
Sophie doesn’t seem privy to all my conversations with Deveraux. My guess is that she and he communicate, but since she doesn’t have a vampire’s ability to communicate psychically, Deveraux can block what passes between him and me. A mute button he can push when he wants to. Just as well. I can tell Deveraux what an asshole I think he is without fear of offending her.
Deveraux snorts but urges Sophie to answer.
“Deveraux’s wife was gone.”
“Gone?”
Sophie’s eyes slide away. Deveraux doesn’t comment. I imagine “gone” doesn’t mean she ran away or got a divorce. I shake my head and wave a hand at her to get on with the story.
“There was no other heir to his fortune. With the help of a vampire lawyer he’d had on retainer for a hundred years, a name change was arranged and I was presented as Jonathan’s niece, the last of the family line. That way Jonathan could continue to live in the manner to which he was accustomed.”
The last is said with a hint of sarcasm. It makes me smile and Deveraux grunt.
“Belinda didn’t wonder about your newfound wealth?”
“Belinda didn’t care. She was busy trying to figure out how she could get a piece of it.”
“Is that how she got involved in the cream thing?”
When Sophie looks at me, her eyes reflect sadness and regret. “Jonathan and I came up with the idea for the cream. I shared the idea with Belinda. I thought it was something we could do together. She was excited, of course. Especially seeing how it had ‘worked’ on me. She was eager to pursue it. We tested it here in Denver. Just a bit of vampire blood produced remarkable results. The test subjects wanted more. Belinda increased the potency and the results were even more astounding.”

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