Simply Irresistible (28 page)

Vivian pulled the refrigerator open as Dex headed off down the hall. She had never seen such a full refrigerator before. Everything she could think of seemed to be inside—from different kinds of soda to fresh milk and cheese to yogurt and lunch meats. Cans of Sprite, obviously Dex’s favorite, lined the door.

Chill air seeped out, making her shiver again. She was really cold down here. She’d have to mention it when Dex got back.

She took out two cans, closed the door, and set the cans on the table. Then the oven timer beeped. She shut it off, checked the pizza—which didn’t look half bad—and decided to let it cook for a few more minutes.

Dex staggered in with two of the boxes. He dumped them on the dining room table. “I’ll get the other one when we’re ready.”

Vivian nodded. She found some dishes, put them on the table as well, and added napkins. Then the timer beeped again.

This time Dex took the pizza out, set it on top of the stove, and used a pizza cutter to make wedges. Vivian took two and went to the table.

Aunt Eugenia’s handwriting was all over the outside of the boxes. The florid style made Vivian’s eyes fill with tears. She blinked them back, sat down, and stared at her pizza, no longer hungry.

Dex put a hand on the back of her neck. “Eat, sweetheart. You’ll feel better.”

Vivian’s feminist friends in L.A. would hate it if they heard him call her sweetheart, but on his lips, the endearment sounded natural. She smiled at him and took a bite of pizza to satisfy both of them, and her stomach growled in response.

She would be able to eat after all.

Dex took his place across from her, and while he ate, dug into the first box. Vivian decided to wait to examine hers until she’d finished her dinner. She had a hunch she’d need her strength as the days went on, and eating regularly was part of that.

“Wow,” Dex said, studying Aunt Eugenia’s notes on a series of yellow legal pads. “She had a vision of her own death shortly after you were born.”

Vivian sighed. She wouldn’t get to wait after all.

“It says here that she knew her magic would fail her,”

Vivian made herself eat both pieces of pizza before talking to Dex. She ate quickly, the pepperoni burning her tongue.

“Do the notes say who was going to kill her?” Vivian asked.

Dex shook his head. “Someone stronger. That was all she knew. And it worried her, because there weren’t many mages stronger than she was.”

Vivian sighed. She pulled open her box. More yellow legal pads filled with Eugenia’s handwriting. And, below them, some mythology books specializing in the “lesser gods.” She had noticed them while searching for the will but hadn’t thought much about them.

But now that she knew about magic, magic systems, and the way that people’s actions turned into myths and legends, she realized how important these books were.

Vivian took one out. It had the dry look of a fifty-year-old college textbook. The brown cover showed Michelangelo’s painting of the three Fates. Vivian stared at it for a moment.

Michelangelo had depicted them as elderly peasant women, heavyset and sad-faced, carrying the burden of their office. They looked nothing like the women Vivian knew. Obviously Michelangelo hadn’t met them.

Aunt Eugenia had marked several pages in the text with Post-It notes. The notes were yellow, and stuck on the sides of the pages. She hadn’t written anything on them. Instead, they all rested below a name in bold-face.

Vivian read the entries. The first said:

All the gods came to the marriage feast of Peleus and Thetis. But one deity had not been invited. Eris or Ate, the goddess of discord, was angered at the oversight.

The second was a quote from Spenser:

Her name was Ate, the mother of debate And all destruction.

The third was a definition:

Eris: Sister of Ares, mother of Strife. The Goddess of Discord, sometimes called the Goddess of Chaos.

Vivian shuddered, and this time the movement had nothing to do with the cold. “Dex,” she said, staring at the page.

“Hmm?” He didn’t look up from the legal pad he was reading.

“I think you should look at this one.” She slid the book over to him, leaving it open to the definition.

Dex frowned, reading it. Then he grabbed one of the other books off the pile and looked at the marked pages.

“Eris, Erika,” Vivian said. “Chaos, K-A-H-S. It could be her.”

“Chaos,” Dex said. “Not Discord. They’re not the same thing. I think the Greeks even had a God of Chaos.”

“They had two Gods of War too, if these books are to be believed,” Vivian said. “Ares, the God of War, and Enyo, the Goddess of War.”

Dex grabbed yet another book. He thumbed through it. “All of these sticky notes underline her name.”

“You think it’s her, don’t you?” Vivian said.

“If it’s her, Viv, we’re in a load of trouble.” He set the book down and looked at her.

“Why?”

“Because the people who are that long-lived, who’ve gone on to become well-known mythic figures, are usually extremely powerful. Some of them have become Powers That Be. The Fates were part of that group. They’ve held power for a long time.”

“But Andrew Vari’s that old. He isn’t that well known,” Vivian said.

“He was punished by the Fates.”

“Maybe this Eris was too.”

“I’d ask them,” Dex said, “but I don’t want to go see them. I might be leading her to them.”

“What about the Interim Fates?”

“They didn’t know who I was,” Dex said. “They barely know who they are.”

Vivian sighed. “Then how will we know?”

“We keep reading,” Dex said, “and hope our guess is wrong.”

Chapter Twenty-one

It had been years since she had driven a car herself, and even then the car hadn’t been a stick shift. But Eris had decided to drive to Dexter Grant’s. She didn’t want to pop in on him, and surprise him in his own home. For all she knew, he might have the place booby-trapped.

She’d heard such rumors about him. He’d taken out some of the more powerful mages in Canada, the ones who had actually used their magic to start crime syndicates in the 1920s and 1930s—back when such things were lucrative. Dexter Grant had kept Canada clean, so to speak, until he saved a friend of two teenage boys and saw his exploits written up in a comic book.

That had been the beginning of the end for him—except when those mages’ friends had tried to get revenge. A number of them had died in mysterious circumstances, circumstances Grant never got into trouble for.

The Fates, apparently, didn’t punish attacks on mages they considered evil. The Fates only punished people who attacked mages considered good. Yet another thing to hold against those three women.

Eris drove Portland’s network of freeways, following the map she had pasted to the inside of the driver’s side window. The car bucked and lurched every now and then, and it had died at two separate stop lights before she remembered to use the clutch when applying the brake.

But it didn’t take her too long to get to Grant’s neighborhood, considering all the driving she’d had to do. He was in one of the suburbs—Tualatin, King City, Tigard—she couldn’t tell the difference. The western suburbs seemed to be exactly the same: modern houses (much too big at 3000 square feet for any normal family) usually painted white, scattered on the hillsides, near shopping malls and shopping malls and, in case there weren’t enough, more shopping malls.

Oh, and traffic lights to match the malls.

She had to turn at one of those traffic lights— and, fortunately, the light had been green, so she hadn’t had to stop—and head down a windy road, past brown office complexes that all looked the same. For a moment she thought she had doubled back somehow, and then she realized that this set of brown buildings that disappeared into the young trees was a slightly darker brown than the ones she had seen earlier. Later construction, because the doors were wider, proclaiming their politically correct handicapped access.

The first thing she would do when she ruled the world was make anyone who uttered a politically correct phrase bathe in boiling lava for a week. In Los Angeles the week before, one man had had the audacity to tell her that the problem she was having with one of her male CEOs was because she was gender-challenged.

It took her a moment to realize that he meant it was because she was a woman.

She had him on her list. When she had a free moment she’d turn him into a rat—a gender-challenged rat who was involved in some university’s breeding experiments.

The brown buildings became country stores, which then became large lots—acres, actually, with older trees. The buildings on these lots looked like farmhouses or modified ranches, with big backyards and garages twice the size of the houses.

The neighborhood seemed very old—for the West Coast, anyway—and somewhat rundown. She wouldn’t have expected Dexter Grant’s home to be here.

But it was, if the address she had was correct. His house was at the end of a long gravel driveway that ran between two large oak trees, the roots sticking up into the road itself. She could barely see the house. It appeared to be another ranch— and one not kept up since it was built.

The door’s paint was peeling and the garage was missing a few slats. But the fence around the backyard looked new, and Eris thought she saw, in the fading light, evidence of a well-tended garden.

So young Mr. Grant understood the importance of appearances as well. That shouldn’t have surprised her.

Eris parked the car in a neighbor’s driveway, several yards down. No one appeared to be home at that house—and hadn’t been for some time, if the knee-high grass and empty windows were any indication.

She doubted anyone would notice her here.

She walked down the street as if she had done so every day of her life, looking at the large oaks on several of the properties, and the for-sale signs on many of them as well. All of the houses had acreage. She supposed Grant’s did too.

If it did, it probably hid his real home, perhaps disguised as that masterful garden in the back and defined by the fence. And if Dexter Grant went to that kind of trouble to hide a house, he probably figured he could keep the Fates there safely as well.

Eris stopped on the edge of the gravel road. Even though it was nearly sundown and shadows had fallen across the grass, she knew that Grant would be able to see her if she wasn’t careful.

First she had to scope this place out, and then she would make her move. She wanted to surprise Grant and his pretty little girlfriend as much as possible. Grant wasn’t as powerful as Eris—not by a long way—but he seemed to use his magic creatively, and sometimes that gave the mage an extra few seconds of surprise.

Kineally herself wasn’t much of a worry. Now that Eris knew Kineally had psychic abilities, Eris knew what to expect from her.

In fact, all Eris wanted from Kineally was her ability to scream.

It was clear that Dexter Grant was already infatuated with the woman—why else would he help the Fates who had forced him away from his life’s goal? Not to mention the fact that he looked at her like he wanted to take her right then and there.

Grant was notoriously softhearted. He saved people he didn’t know. He would do anything for the woman he had fallen in love with.

He would even give up the Fates to save her life.

The remains of the pizza were scattered around them. Dex was on his third Sprite. Vivian had switched to coffee an hour earlier, even though her stomach wasn’t happy about it. Or maybe her stomach was responding to what she was reading.

A stack of notebooks sat before her. The mythology books were off to the side. Dex had looked through them and decided they weren’t useful— at least not at the moment.

All of the legal pads were filled with letters, written to Vivian, from Eugenia. A stack that Dex had put back in one of the boxes explained the magic system that Vivian had learned about earlier that day. Eugenia had started writing the letters when Vivian was a little girl, apparently planning to use them to explain the system to her once her training began.

But the training had never happened. In the later notebooks, Eugenia was quite apologetic about that. She had a sense that time was running out. She had conveyed that sense in her e-mails to Vivian and in several phone calls, but Vivian had pooh-poohed them, apparently thinking Aunt Eugenia would live forever.

At the top of one of the boxes, Dex found a sheet of fax paper, with an airline reservation on it. Aunt Eugenia had planned to spend this very week in Los Angeles. With Vivian.

Apparently, Eugenia felt that since she couldn’t bring the mage-in-training to the Pacific Northwest, she would bring a bit of the Northwest to the mage-in-training. Or something like that.

As Vivian delved into her aunt’s things, her good mood disappeared. Dex didn’t say anything about her mood change, but one of the cats—a white and gold calico—crawled on her lap about fifteen minutes ago.

“Cat therapy,” Dex had said with a smile. “Cats believe if you pet them, you’ll feel better.”

“The added benefit being that they’ll feel better too,” Vivian said, not looking up.

“Exactly.”

She did pet the cat and she did feel better, but the mood didn’t last. Because the documents she and Dex were going through now bothered her the most.

They were about Eris, who was, in fact, Erika O’Connell. Eris had had a number of names over the. years. One of them had been Esme Pompedeau, a piano teacher who lived in the same women’s boardinghouse as Eugenia at the turn of the century. They had become good friends—not because Eugenia had sought Eris out, but because Eris had sought her.

Eugenia thought they had a shared secret and friendship based on dedication to the same principles. It wasn’t until Eugenia caught Eris going through her things that she realized something was wrong.

“I think I found it,” Dex said.

Vivian looked up from the notebook she’d been reading. Her eyes were muzzy. She’d been looking at blue ink on yellow paper for hours. “Found what?”