If you’re thinking it would be one of the most beautiful, surreal, and terrifying sights ever, you’d pretty much be right.
Lurine surfaced at the far end of the pool, water streaming over her bare shoulders. Her tail snaked out with nonchalant grace to snag an inflatable lounge chair and drag it into the pool. Nico the satyr watched with obvious approval, the front of his board shorts stirring visibly. “Hmm.” She eyed him. “Nicodemus, why don’t you get us fresh Bellinis and go prune some trees.”
“Yes,
kyria
.” He sounded downcast, but he went.
“Now—” Slinging her arms along the edge of the pool, Lurine flicked her tail toward me, lightning-quick. I barely had time to yelp in surprise before her slick, muscular coils wrapped around my waist, plucking me from my poolside lounge chair and depositing me unceremoniously atop its floating equivalent, where I floundered in an effort to get my balance. At least it gave me the chance to conceal the disconcerting effect Lurine’s stunt had on me—not that she didn’t know anyway. “What’s on your mind, baby girl?”
Two months ago, I’d poured out a tale of woe regarding my crush on Cody and his possible interest in my best friend, Jen. Now, feeling more than a little silly, I updated Lurine on the latest regarding Sinclair.
“A secret twin sister!” she said with relish when I finished. “That’s straight out of a soap opera.”
I smiled reluctantly. “I know. So what do you think?”
Lurine reclined against the wall of the pool, her coils stirring absently, creating eddies. My floating chaise rocked atop them. “You like him?”
I nodded. “I like him. Hell, Mogwai likes him.”
“You could pick a worse judge of character than your cat,” she said in a pragmatic voice. “Cut the young man a little slack, Daisy. You’re only just getting to know each other. People are allowed to have secrets.”
“Secret
twins
?”
“Well, it does happen all the time in soap operas.” Lurine poked my floatie with the tip of her tail, sending me drifting a bit. “The thing is, cupcake, Sinclair might have told you all about his sister tomorrow. But you’ll never know, because he never got the chance, which is why I think you should cut him some slack.”
“What about the whole obeah thing?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not my area of expertise.”
“Does it even work? I mean, how can it?” I was thinking aloud again. “There’s no underworld in Jamaica, is there?”
“Oh, that.” A loop of iridescent coil rose to halt my drift. “Islands have their own rules, especially if they’re blood-soaked.”
“Ew.”
Lurine shrugged. “Where there’s blood and death in abundance, there’s necromancy. And islands are circumscribed by salt water. It concentrates the effect.”
“Well, technically all land is circumscribed by salt water, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, oceans cover something like seventy percent of the earth’s surface, right?”
“Aren’t you the smarty-pants!” A submerged segment of Lurine’s tail gave the underside of my floatie an affectionate bump. “It has to do with scale, Daisy. I’m sure there’s some sort of formula,” she added idly. “Gallons of blood spilled per acre. The gods only know, there was blood and death aplenty throughout the entire West Indies during the centuries when the slave trade was flourishing.”
I shivered in the bright sunlight. “Okay. Enough said.”
“You asked,” Lurine reminded me in a mild tone.
“I did,” I agreed.
Pushing away from the edge, she sank beneath the water to swim the length of the pool and back again. Ensconced in my floating chaise, I rode out the surging waves generated by Lurine’s passage, gazing at the green treetops silhouetted against the bright blue sky and thinking about the terrible fragility of life.
Thirteen
S
omewhat to my surpr
ise, Sinclair wanted to keep our date to go to the Bide-a-Wee Tavern that night. The only difference was that his sister would be joining us.
“You’re sure?” I asked him on the phone.
“Positive,” he assured me. “Emmy’s looking forward to it. It will give you the chance to get to know each other.”
“Does she . . . know about me?” There’s really no delicate way to ask, oh, by the way, does your until-recently-secret twin sister know you’re dating a hell-spawn?
There was a pause. “Emmy’s like me,” he said. “She sees auras. I didn’t want to lie to her. We actually had a good talk today.”
According to Sinclair, most people’s auras were just little shimmers flickering around the edges of their bodies, while mine was a five-alarm fire shot through with veins of gold. If my memory was correct, Emmeline hadn’t shown any sign of surprise at it.
Interesting.
“Daisy?” Sinclair asked. “Are we okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to lie to her, either. And I guess she had to find out sooner or later. Did she freak?”
“She’s curious,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t say freaked. But, um, it wouldn’t hurt for you to keep a lid on—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I cut him off. “I’ll try to make a good first impression. Not like I did with the Mamma Jammers. No funky satyr booty calls, I promise.”
He gave a deep, rich chuckle that made my spine tingle and my tail twitch. “Just between you and me? I kind of liked the funky satyr booty call.”
I smiled. “Pick you up at seven?”
“Why don’t we pick you up?” Sinclair suggested. “Emmy’s got a rental.”
As it transpired, not only did Emmy have a rental car—Emmy had a brand-spanking-new rental convertible that was much, much nicer than my poor ten-year-old Honda Civic. At seven o’clock sharp, she and Sinclair pulled into the alley between my apartment building and the park to pick me up. Oh, and it was also a stick shift, which she drove with reckless aplomb.
I sat in the backseat, my blond hair whipping wildly around my head in the backwash of wind.
“Are you quite all right, Daisy?” Emmeline’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, concern in her gaze. Her close-cropped hair was unaffected. “Shall I put the top up?”
I rummaged in my bag for an elastic band and dragged my hair back into a ruthless ponytail. “Not on my account.”
Sinclair inhaled deeply. “It still smells like summer.”
I poked him in the back of the head. His short dreads were tight yet supple, stirring in the wind. Once a week, he treated them with an organic product containing essential oils, and I always knew because it smelled a lot like fresh rosemary. “I think that’s your salon treatment you’re smelling.”
Reaching behind him, he swatted at my hand. “Natty Dread got to look fine for his ladies, darling.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Emmeline give us both an indulgent smile in the mirror before downshifting. Something about her and her presence here in Pemkowet put me on edge. But since I couldn’t put my finger on it, I resolved to keep my promise and do my best to make a good first impression.
The Bide-a-Wee Tavern is located out in the sticks, a couple miles southeast of town along the rural highway. Frankly, it’s not the venue I would have chosen if I were trying to make a good impression on a first-time visitor to Pemkowet, or at least not a poised visitor oozing style and sophistication. It’s not a dive, but it’s pretty rustic: basic American bar food on the menu, well-worn carpeting and dented wood paneling that were probably installed in the 1970s.
Don’t get me wrong—I love the place. I love the sameness of it, and the fact that it hasn’t changed since I was a kid drinking Shirley Temples with my mom while her boyfriend Trey played bass guitar in the house band, eyes half closed and a beatific smile on his face. Just the memory filled me with tenderness.
That was what I’d wanted to share with Sinclair. But with Emmeline there, I couldn’t help but see it through her eyes, too.
It looked dingy and a little sad. As I’d promised, the place was full, but the clientele was older and overwhelmingly white. The latter’s sort of unavoidable since Pemkowet’s mundane population is fairly racially homogenous, but . . . let’s just say that there were a lot of frumpy middle-aged Midwestern ladies in their finest appliquéd sweatshirts.
“It’s early,” I murmured to Sinclair. “We could probably still get into Lumière.”
Sinclair glanced uncertainly at his sister.
“I think it’s brilliant,” Emmeline said in a firm voice, her British accent emerging in a clipped and authoritative manner. “Very authentic.” She turned to the hostess. “Table for three?”
So we stayed.
At first it was awkward, but eventually, music and food and beer greased the conversational skids. In between numbers, I asked Emmeline questions about herself, about her education at boarding schools and at Oxford. She responded with engaging tales laced with self-deprecating humor, asking me about myself in turn—about growing up in Pemkowet, about how I’d helped Sinclair secure the regularly scheduled appearances by pretty, sparkly fairies that helped popularize his tours.
Here’s what we didn’t talk about: Jamaica, obeah, Sinclair and Emmeline’s mother, and the fact that I was a hell-spawn.
That was okay with me. If she wanted to avoid talking about the various elephants in the room, I wasn’t going to bring them up. Sinclair definitely didn’t seem inclined to do so, and I was taking my cue from him.
“Fascinating,” Emmeline murmured when I’d finished telling the story of our bargain with the Oak King. “I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed riding along on Sinny’s tours today. Well done.”
“Oh, the tour is entirely Sinclair’s doing,” I said honestly. “It was all his idea. I just helped facilitate it.”
She gave me an open, friendly smile. “Well, you’re obviously very good at your job.”
“Thanks.” I smiled back at her and found myself relaxing. “I appreciate it. Half the time, I’m making it up as I go along.”
Emmeline laughed. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
The band wrapped up a Louis Armstrong number and paused to confer among themselves and talk to the staff. From what I could gather, they were trying to convince the woman tending bar to sing a number. Sinclair rapped his knuckles on the table. “Excuse me, ladies, but I’ve got to use the restroom. Back in a minute.”
As he left the table, the bartender acceded to demand and left her station to take the microphone. Her face was lined and weathered before its time, she was a hard-worn fiftysomething in faded jeans, a shapeless T-shirt, and a service apron, but I’d heard her sing before. Reaching for his mute, the trumpet player launched into the unmistakable opening bars of “Stormy Weather.”
“She’s good,” I said to Emmeline. “I know, you wouldn’t think it to look at her. But if you like the blues at all—”
All the warmth had fled from her expression. “I want you to stop seeing my brother.”
I blinked at her. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” Her eyes were as cold and hard as obsidian. “Look at this place. He doesn’t belong here.”
My tail twitched. Onstage, the bartender held the microphone in both hands and sang in a low, raspy, crooning voice that she didn’t know why there was no sun up in the sky. A lot of amateurs emulate whatever singer made the song famous, but not her. She didn’t try to sound like Lena or Etta or Billie; she made it her own. I let the music wash over me, trying to regain my composure and racking my brain to figure out what I’d said or done to offend Sinclair’s sister. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Is this a . . . a cultural issue?”
“Are you asking me if this is about race?” Emmeline’s upper lip curled. “You’re damned right it is. The
human
race.”
She didn’t add, “of which you’re not a member.” She didn’t need to. It was implicit. All that pleasant conversation throughout dinner had been an act. Okay, now my temper was beginning to simmer. I took a slow, deep breath, visualized a pot, and clamped a lid on it. “You knew about that before you came here, didn’t you?”
“Of course I knew!” Emmeline said sharply. “Did you think it wouldn’t get back to our mother as soon as someone in the community found out?” I looked blankly at her. “The
Jamaican
community.”
Belatedly, I remembered that one of the Mamma Jammers was also an immigrant—Roddy, the drummer, whose uncle owned the garage where Sinclair’s dad worked. He must have told someone who told someone who got on the horn to the Right Honorable Mama Palmer to tell her that her estranged son was dating a hell-spawn, whereupon Judge Palmer dispatched dear Emmy to straighten things out.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Frankly, no, it didn’t occur to me. Sinclair hardly ever talks about his mother. And until this morning, I didn’t know
you
existed.”
As verbal slaps go, that was a pretty good one. Emmeline’s head jerked backward, her eyes widening.
“Look, I’m sorry.” Backing off, I went for a conciliatory tone. “Obviously, there are some serious family dynamics going on here that I know nothing about. But Sinclair’s a grown man. He makes his own choices. Also obviously, I can’t do anything about my father, but I’m a good person, or at least I try to be. That’s how
my
mother raised me.” I lowered my voice. “Does my aura say otherwise?”
Her face was impassive. “Not yet.”
“I have
no
intention of claiming my birthright!” That would probably have sounded more convincing if the words hadn’t come out in sort of a hiss.
Emmeline raised her eyebrows. “Not yet.”
I glanced around to check on Sinclair’s whereabouts. He’d gotten sidetracked on his way back to the table, shaking hands with an older couple I didn’t recognize. Summer people, I’d bet. They’d probably taken the grandkids on the tour at some point, probably packed up the rest of the family and sent them home to their wealthy Chicago suburb earlier today. “Is that really what this is all about?”
“No.” She leaned across the table, a cowry shell strung on a gold chain dangling from her throat. “This is about a great many things, none of which I expect you to understand. The path of obeah is a path of balance, a path between light and dark.
You
are one step too far into the darkness.”
I opened my mouth to deny it.