SEDUCTIVE SUPERNATURALS: 12 Tales of Shapeshifters, Vampires & Sexy Spirits (8 page)

The fire chased me, happily making sport of this run for my life. With each pounding step, I thought of my mother, my brother, my father, my grandmother. Their names alternated in my mind, keeping time with my steps. I raced to the shallow river and splashed across, the wet cold bringing me from shock into the full realization that whether I lived or died depended on what I did next.

Diablo Springs: Chapter Seven

Grandma Beck had done away with the sofa and loveseat that once dominated the front room and replaced them with tables, uncomfortable chairs and a bar. A
bar
.
Grandma Beck, who didn’t even drink wine on holidays. That the bar was dry made the situation no less bizarre, and in the grand scheme of the unending night, it fell low on the list of weird.

Arm around Analise’s shoulders, Gracie moved to one of the tables and took a seat beside her daughter. Tinkerbelle and Juliet flopped on the floor behind them, where they could keep their eyes on everyone. Romeo jumped into Analise’s lap and licked her hand. Smiling, Analise cuddled the little dog and took the comfort he offered.

Eddie pulled out the chair opposite them. Reilly stayed where he was against the wall, arms crossed over that broad chest, long legs braced, brooding tension bunching his shoulders.

The strangers he’d brought with him were upstairs finding their rooms, and their footsteps sounded like an elephant stampede from down below. It felt like an invasion on every level. Gracie hoped by some miracle they’d all disappear in the morning, but the storm outside sounded like it was gaining momentum instead of waning. A dreadful pessimistic voice in her head told her they wouldn’t be departing anytime soon.

“Analise,” Eddie said, leaning forward with his arms on the table. “Let’s go over what happened tonight one more time.”

Analise’s lashes were wet and spiky, and her eyes were shiny from tears. She looked so young and vulnerable that Gracie thought her heart might break. She’d spent her life trying to shelter her daughter from pain and fear, yet here she was, captive to both anyway.

“I told you, I don’t remember,” Analise said in a thick voice.

“Why are you here, honey?” Gracie asked. “Start there.”

Analise bit her lip and looked down. “Brendan brought me here as a surprise. For my birthday.”

“When’s your birthday?” Reilly asked, his deep voice abrupt in the surprised silence.

Analise frowned at him. “Next week,” she said, “But I’m going to be in Orange County for the Newspaper Club convention. We get to go to Disneyland.”

“How old are you?”

His sharp tone confused Analise, but Gracie knew exactly why the demand had such an aggressive edge.

“She’s sixteen, Reilly,” Gracie answered flatly. “Any other questions?”

“Give me a minute.”

Stiffening, Gracie turned away and rubbed Analise’s back. “So you lied to me about staying with Karen,” she said.

Analise nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Why did Brendan think a trip to Diablo Springs would be a good birthday surprise?” Eddie asked.

“He knew I was curious about where my mom came from. Who my dad is.” She glanced at Gracie and quickly away.

Gracie fought the urge to look at Reilly, but the pull was too strong. She didn’t have a clue what he might be thinking. Hell, she didn’t have a clue what
she
was thinking. Reilly snagged her gaze as soon as she lifted it but he didn’t give anything away. His features might have been carved from stone, his eyes from ice.

Tears burned Gracie’s eyes, but she didn’t let them go. She’d known that Analise was curious about where her mother came from, who her absent father might be. Gracie had lied and said there’d been several boys and she’d never known which one was the father. The fabrication of her promiscuity had fit nicely with the truth of how Grandma Beck had shipped her pregnant granddaughter off to live with strangers until the baby was born and then never let her come back home.

All the other questions Analise asked, Gracie managed to answer with as much honesty as she could, sharing the bare minimum, glossing over the rest. She’d never guessed that Analise had kept digging, searching for more. In retrospect, that was a big fail on her part. She should’ve known an overachiever like Analise would never settle for half-truths and lies.

“Analise, I didn’t realize how important it was to you.”

“You didn’t think knowing my dad was so important?” Analise shot back, astonished.

Yeah, Gracie deserved that. “So you came here thinking you’d miraculously find him?”

“I thought Grandma would tell me.”

Grandma Beck wouldn’t have given up that secret under torture. She’d have turned Analise around and sent her home so fast, the kid would have been dizzy.

As for Reilly, well he’d packed up and hit the road before she’d even known she was pregnant and by the time she’d learned his whereabouts . . . Well, she’d been too hurt and betrayed to hunt him down. He’d promised her a future and left her without a word, her life in ruins. At first, her pride wouldn’t let her ask him for anything, not even help with his child. Later, when maturity and distance had given her perspective, there’d been other reasons not to tell him. That didn’t make it right or fair, but few things in Gracie’s life had ever been right or fair.

She glanced at him again. She couldn’t help it. Even after all this time, having him in the same room was like sitting next to a power line. She felt him beneath the skin, a low frequency hum that made her hyperaware and jittery.

He wore a T-shirt that couldn’t hide the thick, corded muscles of his arms and chest. His faded Levi’s hung low on lean hips, drawing her eye down and stirring memories she didn’t want to wake.

A black and white tattoo covered his right forearm, and a series of colorful ones wrapped his left bicep. His hair was just shy of shaved and a five-o’clock shadow darkened his jaw. At eighteen he’d been walking, talking sex appeal. At thirty-five, he was potent enough to make her swoon. He looked older, harder. A lot less boy, a lot more man. But it was working for him.

With a start, she realized he’d been watching her, watching him. A hot blush heated her face and she jerked her attention back to her daughter. Fortunately, Analise wasn’t paying attention to anyone else.

“Did you see your grandmother tonight?” Eddie asked.

Technically, Grandma Beck was Analise’s great-grandmother, but they’d never bothered with the formal title. Besides, Analise had never even met her.

“We didn’t see anyone. It was just starting to get dark when we pulled into town and Brendan wanted to see the springs, so we went straight there. It got dark really fast, though, and I didn’t like it out there, by the springs. It was creepy and I had a bad feeling, but Brendan kept talking about how it used to be. He said he’d read some Web page.” She paused, sucked in a shaky breath. “Some stupid Web page he kept going on about. I said I wanted to go and he got mad. He’d been acting really weird for a few a days because of . . .”

She stopped and shook her head.

“I mean, I think he was stressed about work and that had him uptight.”

“Laying sod stressed him out?”

“
Mom
,” Analise said reproachfully. “Quit being so judgy.”

Inside, Gracie cringed. They’d had this conversation before, but now, in front of Reilly, Gracie realized for the first time how much she sounded like Grandma Beck. She could feel Reilly’s eyes burning into her, but she didn’t look up.

“Go on, Analise,” she said softly.

“We heard something,” Analise said.

“What?” both Eddie and Gracie asked at the same time.

“I don’t know. It sounded like . . . like . . . it was in the hole,” she blurted on a shaky breath.

“The springs?” Eddie said sharply.

Analise swallowed and tears began to slide down her face again. Gracie could feel her daughter trembling and wrapped her arms around her.

“It’s okay. You’re safe, sweetheart.”

“Why is it so hot in here?” Analise asked.

Reilly pushed away from the wall and moved to a thermostat by the old-fashioned swinging doors that led to the kitchen. Gracie hadn’t noticed it before. Now she stared in surprise.

“Grandma Beck put in air-conditioning?” she exclaimed.

Reilly gave her a sardonic look over his shoulder. “Would it make you feel any better if you knew she set it at ninety-five?”

Gracie almost laughed.

“I turned it down earlier.” Reilly paused and frowned at the control. “Who pushed it back up?”

“Sure as hell wasn’t me,” Eddie said, wiping the sweat off his face with a handkerchief.

Reilly adjusted the temperature and they all waited, faces tilted up, for the whoosh of air in the vents and the cool to come. At last it did, tepid but promising some relief. Reilly gave the thermostat a suspicious glance and moved back to where he’d stood against the wall.

“You heard something in the springs,” Eddie prompted. “What did it sound like?”

“Like there was something down there,” Analise said vehemently. “Something that wanted out. Brendan went to look. I told him not to. I was so scared. It was so . . . I told him to come back and then all of a sudden he shouted to run. We got in the truck and started to drive and we saw the lights. We thought it was the town, and we turned, but we couldn’t find the way and . . . and . . .”

She glanced from one face to another, as if expecting someone to be able to fill in the blanks for her. Gracie knew they were all thinking the same thing. Dead Lights.

Technically, it was a nautical term that she’d looked up once in an attempt to understand the reference to the lights everyone in Diablo Springs had seen at one time or another. The closest she could come to an explanation was the floating quality the light behind a port window—shuttered or not—would have when viewed from the shore. Diablo Springs had never been large enough for a boat and there were no shores here—not anymore. The term, however, managed to perfectly represent the fear inspired by the lights that could be seen hovering over the deep dry spring where nothing should ever float again.

“You saw Dead Lights,” Reilly said calmly.

Gracie shot him a disapproving look. Now Analise had a name for her overcharged imagination to build upon.

“Dead Lights are a phenomenon of the dried springs, honey,” Gracie explained. “Probably something to do with the gases trapped under it and the heat.”

Gracie saw relief in her daughter’s eyes at an explanation that she could believe. “I don’t remember anything after that.”

“You never saw your grandma?” Eddie asked.

“No, we never made it here.”

Gracie knew what Eddie would ask next and she stood quickly, hoping to stop him. He’d already told her over the phone where Grandma Beck’s body had been found. Analise didn’t need to hear that. Not now. Not yet.

“I’m going to take Analise upstairs and show her where she’s sleeping. I think she’s had enough for one night.”

Eddie looked at Analise’s drawn features and nodded. “After you’re done, come down. I still need to talk to you.”

Analise set Romeo down with Tinkerbelle and Juliet, and all three dogs followed diligently behind her. Gracie could feel Reilly’s gaze tracking her as she led her daughter to the stairs but she didn’t look back. Looking back never did anyone any good.

At the door to her old bedroom, Gracie hesitated, suddenly afraid of crossing the next threshold. Being back in this town, in the home where she’d grown up . . . seeing it so transformed while trying to cope with the reality that she’d never see her grandma again…it all felt like too much. She’d been gone for half of her life and she felt it down to the bone.

“I have no idea what’s behind this door,” she told Analise with a tight laugh. “She might have burned my bed.”

Analise stared into her face, trying to see all that Gracie wanted to hide. “I don’t get how she could do that to you. Throw you out when you were pregnant. How could she let me grow up and never try to know me?”

The pain in her daughter’s voice tore through Gracie. She’d cried herself to sleep many nights with that question spinning in her head. “It was another time, honey. People were different back then.”

Analise snorted. “It was 1998, Mom. Not that long ago.”

“It’s like dog years in Diablo Springs.”

Analise gave a halfhearted smile. Tinkerbelle and Juliet waited patiently, following the conversation like a tennis match while Romeo pranced around them.

Gracie braced herself as she reached for the doorknob. She doubted her grandma would have turned it into a rented room as she’d done the others. Grandma Beck had strict, if often cryptic, rules about such things. No guests in family quarters was one of them. Most likely she’d stripped the room bare and left it as a stark reminder of all of Gracie’s failings.

With a fake smile for Analise, she opened the door.

Surprise didn’t describe what she felt when she saw inside. Shock was closer, but still not big enough. The room looked exactly as it had when she’d left. Not even dust had moved in to change it. Gracie gripped the door frame, staring at this metaphor for her relationship with Grandma Beck. She’d shut her out while keeping her memory in pristine suspension.

Analise brushed past her with a look of wonder, her fear forgotten for the moment as she stared back in time to her mother’s life as a teenager. Posters of The Backstreet Boys, Hanson, and
Titanic
decorated the walls and a bed with a bright purple comforter butted up to a nightstand in the corner. A picture window overlooked a huge mesquite in the front yard and polka-dot curtains that Grandma Beck had sewn herself framed the glass. Once the sun came up, they would be able to see the ruins from here. Now it was just a dark void in the distance.

A hot pink beanbag chair sat next to a CD player with bright lights and fat knobs for volume and the radio. Gracie had saved her babysitting money for months to buy it. A cracked plastic CD case had been tossed on top. Spice Girls.

Yearbooks and photo albums lined her bookshelves, along with her favorite stories from kindergarten up. She’d always kept her books and she remembered how much she’d missed them after she’d gone. She’d only been able to take what she could fit in her second-hand Volkswagen when Grandma Beck had shown her the door. Everything else she’d left behind. Until she walked through the door at that moment, she hadn’t realized how much of herself that included.