The Song of David (9 page)

“I don’t think it works that way,” she said softly.

“Trust me. It does. I’m good with people. But don’t cross me. And don’t cross the people I care about. Or you’ll see my bad side.”

“I’ll remember that,” Amelie said seriously, nodding as if she had been contemplating crossing me only seconds before. The thought of the dainty, blind brunette with the pearly skin and the sweet smile screwing me over was comical.

“You plotting something?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

“I was. But I thought better of it.” She shivered dramatically. “Don’t want to see bad Tag.”

“Bad Tag and Silly Millie.”

“Millie?”

“Doesn’t anyone ever call you Millie for short?”

“No,” she answered frankly.

“Henry and Amelie aren’t names you hear every day. They sound kind of old-fashioned.”

“That’s because we were actually born in the late 1800s, when our names were more popular. We vampires don’t age, you know. And my blindness is just a ruse to make people feel safe.” Her lips twisted in a smirk.

“Is that right?” I drawled, “Well, I’ll be damned. So you and Henry are forever gonna be, what, thirteen and twenty-two?”

“Fifteen. Henry’s fifteen.”

“But you’re actually one hundred and twenty-two?”

“That’s right. We’ll still look this good in another hundred years.” That was a sad thought for Henry, but for Amelie, not so much.

“You’ll outlive us all.”

Amelie’s face fell a smidgeon and her smile slipped. If I hadn’t been looking directly into her face I wouldn’t have seen it. But I did, and I realized Amelie had already outlived someone she cared about.

“Are your parents among the undead too?” I asked lightly, wondering if she would abandon the banter.

“No. My dad isn’t in the picture. Haven’t talked to him in years. My mom died a while back.” She shrugged, the fun completely ruined by reality.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” It was an endearment that I used easily. I’d called more women sweetheart in my life than I could count, but Amelie’s cheeks pinked and her chin dipped almost shyly. People must not call her sweetheart very often. “My dad didn’t handle it very well when I went blind. Two kids with issues was one too many for him, apparently.

“So you take care of Henry . . . by yourself?” I was stunned and tried not to let it show, but she heard it anyway, from the set of her chin and the stiffening of her back.

“Do you really want to know, or are you doubting me?” She turned her face toward me, as if confronting my question head on, and when I stared down at her, I felt a quaking in my chest that was instantly familiar. It was a jumping-off-a-cliff kind of feeling, a heart-swelling, chest-bursting sensation, and I’d stumbled across it a few times in my life.

I felt it when I watched Moses hold his new baby girl for the first time. He and Georgia were so happy, so deserving, and the joy in his face had spilled over and filled my heart with wonder. I felt it two years ago when I came back in the fifth round to win my first big fight. I’ve actually felt it a lot of times over the last few years, seeing Moses at work, seeing people weep at his gift. But the first time that feeling took my breath away was in Venice. It was a year after I’d gotten out of Montlake, eight months since Moses and I had taken off across the globe. I’d been so sad and so lost for so long that I’d gotten used to not feeling anything else. But there, in a little boat in Venice, as I watched the sun set—a fiery, hellish, red ball turning the water and sky into shades of heaven—my eyes had filled up with tears at the violent beauty of it all. In that moment, I realized I wanted to live again. For the first time in a long time, I was glad to be alive.

Looking down into Amelie Anderson’s heart-shaped face, her mouth set in a stubborn line, I had that feeling again. It rushed through me, taking my breath with it.

“I really want to know,” I said, and it came out in a husky whisper.

“We take care of each other,” she said simply. “He helps me with the stuff I have a hard time doing. He even cooks sometimes. I mean, not gourmet, but between the two of us, we get by. I may never truly know if my clothes match, or if the house is actually clean, or if there’s a fly in my soup, but Henry takes as good a care of me as I take of him.”

Right. It was pretty obvious who played parent and who played child. This girl was a surprise a minute.

“Henry and I are a team. You’ve got Tag Team, right? You understand. Everybody contributes something different.”

“Oh yeah?”

“He’s the eyes. I’m the heart. He’s the hands, and I’m the head. That’s what my mom used to say.”

We were silent then, my mind reeling, Henry back to fighting an epic battle with the huge punching bag, and Amelie standing straight and still, listening, as if by doing so she could actually see her brother’s attempt to take down an impossible opponent. What she didn’t know, what she couldn’t have known, was that she’d leveled me. I may have been standing next to her, but I was already falling.

(End of Cassette)

Moses

HE’S THE EYES. I’m the heart. He’s the hands, and I’m the head.
The words rang in my ears. Millie could have been describing me and Tag. I was the eyes and the hands—the artist who could see what others could not, what Tag could not. But he was the leader, the head and the heart, and his head and his heart had provided for my eyes and hands time and time again. Tag was all heart, and sometimes it got him in trouble, it got
us
in trouble, but more often than not, it led us in the right direction. He’d taken care of me. I don’t know if I had taken care of him, though. I hadn’t thought I needed to.

“Why did he leave, Moses? Where did he go? Nobody’s seen him for two weeks. Nobody knows anything. If he was falling for me, like he says, then why did he leave like that?” Millie was close to tears and I had resorted to drawing, my fingers flying over a sketch pad so that I wouldn’t go crazy listening to my best friend saying goodbye.

I’d called Tag’s dad, who called his mom, who in turn called his two younger sisters who were away at school. Millie was right. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had seen or heard from him since he’d left.

“Did he say or do anything that seemed off? Anything that you can think of that might give us a clue where he went?” I asked helplessly. Listening to Tag had filled me with hopelessness. He was clearly telling a love story. And my experience with love led me to believe this story would not end well. Love stories tend to be tragic.

“No. I mean, he had seemed tired, which was unlike him,” Millie answered, interrupting my depressing train of thought. “Tag never seems tired. Have you noticed that? He has more energy than anyone I’ve ever met. But he was tired. He’d been training so hard for the Santos fight. A couple of nights he fell asleep on the couch watching TV with Henry. Once, I woke him up at about midnight because our couch is small and he had to have been uncomfortable. He was disoriented and so out of it that he was slurring his words a little. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was drunk. But he hadn’t had anything to drink. He’s never had so much as a beer the entire time I’ve known him. And he’d been asleep on the couch for three hours.

“I didn’t want him to drive. I told him he was too sleepy to be driving. Even if it was just a few blocks. But he said he was fine. I walked him out to his truck, and he made a joke about the blind leading the blind.” Her voice broke.

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

“No. The last night I saw him he . . . he and I . . .” Millie’s voice trailed off and her cheeks grew suspiciously pink.

Son of a bitch. I didn’t need any further explanation. Once again, I was at a complete loss. I excused myself to call Georgia, and she answered on the first ring, her voice sharp with hope and fear.

“What’s the news?” she said, foregoing a greeting for the obvious. That’s Georgia—take the bull by the horns. It was one of the things I loved most about her, one of the things that had saved us when our own love story took a few tragic turns.

The phrase awakened a memory and instead of answering I said, “Do you know that Tag actually grabbed a bull by the horns once? I saw him do it.”

Georgia was silent for a heartbeat before she pressed me again.

“Moses? What are you talking about, baby? What’s going on with Tag?”

“We were in Spain. In San Sebastian. It’s Basque country, you know. Did you know there are blond Spaniards? I didn’t. I kept seeing blond women and they all reminded me of you. I was in a horrible mood so Tag got this bright idea that we should go to Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls. He said a shot of adrenaline was just what I needed to cheer me up. Pamplona isn’t that far from San Sebastian. Just an hour south by bus. I knew Tag had a death wish. At least he did at Montlake. And I knew he was a little crazy. But he actually waited for the bull to run past him. And then he chased the bull. When the bull turned on him, he grabbed it by its horns and did one of those twist and roll things that cowboys do at rodeos.”

“Steer wrestling?” Georgia still sounded confused, but she was listening.

“Yeah. Steer wrestling. Tag tried to wrestle a bull. The bull won, but Tag got away without a scratch. I still don’t know how. I was screaming so loud I was hoarse for a week. Which was fine. Because I didn’t talk to Tag for two. That son-of-a-bitch. I thought he was going to die.” I stopped talking, emotion choking off my ability to speak. But Georgia heard what I couldn’t say.

“What’s happening, Moses? Where’s Tag?”

“I don’t know, Georgia. But can you come? I need you. And I have a feeling that before this is all over, Millie’s going to need you. There are certain things you can’t talk about with a man. Even if he’s your lover’s best friend. Especially if he’s your lover’s best friend.”

I WAS PARKED in front of Amelie’s house Monday morning, waiting for Henry to leave for school. I’d coaxed the information out of Robin when she came to pick up Henry from the bar, determined to figure out who had bruised up his face. Henry had gone to the bathroom to relieve himself of a bladder full of Sprite, and I’d grilled her. I hadn’t said anything to Millie that night or even at the gym Saturday, but it wasn’t okay to ignore it, and the thought of someone making Henry’s life miserable, of someone putting their hands on him, gave me the itch to hurt people. Bullies and bitches. Hated ‘em. So I took it upon myself to intervene, beyond just teaching him a few moves at the gym.