I almost choked on my pretzel. First Sam, now Cara? As in Frank’s about to die, Cara?
Frank nodded enthusiastically as I handed half the other pretzel to him and set the rest beside the register. “Thanks, Damian.”
“No, um, no problem.” I held Cara’s gaze a bit longer until she smirked at me. I sighed and turned to Frank. “So, any sales today?”
He nodded and continued chewing.
“Any good sales?”
His eyebrows rose as he smiled—it was a really weird look, like a clown’s head exploding in slow motion. “Did you notice anything missing?” His eyes glanced over to the wood and glass display case for gemstones and crystals.
I rubbed my face. “I’m kind of late here.” My eyes perused the rows of stones anyway, until they settled on a hole. “One of the amber necklaces sold?” It had some of the nicest preserved insects I’d ever seen running through it and I never thought it would go with a price tag in the hundreds. “Damn Frank, that’s almost a month of rent.”
He laughed at me. “Take a closer look at the case.”
“Think big,” Cara said.
“No fucking way.” I stared at the gaping space where the amber pillar with the three prehistoric feathers used to be.
“I gave them a little break on price with Cara’s approval, but it was only a few hundred off.”
The pillar Frank had picked out the day before for two thousand dollars sold for more than double its cost. I worked my jaw a bit, but no sound came out. We’re talking
months
of rent. I continued staring at the blank space.
“Miss Hu bought it. She came in a couple days ago and wanted a unique amber piece.” Frank shrugged and I caught his grin as I finally tore my eyes away from our suddenly profitable display case.
I pointed my finger at Frank and said, “You, sir, are my new buyer.”
Frank smiled and Cara laughed.
“Go get some lunch, Frank,” Cara said.
“I have to get to the wedding, and I need Frank to look after the shop.”
“This will only take a few minutes,” she said as she turned her head to Frank. “Go get some lunch.”
He nodded and left with a goofy grin plastered to his face. I watched him disappear almost as quickly as my ever-dwindling time frame to get to the wedding. My eyes swept back to Cara and I cocked an eyebrow.
“Boy, come here.”
I glanced around slowly, turning my body toward the front of the shop and then to the register and back to Cara. “Me?”
She looked slightly amused.
I took a step toward her and raised both eyebrows in an unspoken question. I also failed miserably in hiding my grin. Cara was the only person besides Zola ever to call me “boy.”
“I’ve been thinking.” She drummed her fingers on the golden hilt of the dagger in her belt. “I’ve been thinking you may be able to use Fae magic.”
I felt my forehead furrow as I stared at the fairy.
She smiled. “Some basic growth spells for example.” She unsheathed the dagger, twirled it, and dropped it back in the sheath with unnerving precision. “After that stunt you pulled a couple years ago, stitching your sister back together, I think you may be able to do a lot more than you realize.”
My heart tried to crawl out of my face as my pulse hammered. “How umm … how did umm … what makes you say that?” I tried for nonchalant, but I think the squeak in my voice gave me away.
Cara howled in laughter. She pointed her finger at me and grinned. “I’ve heard the
story,
boy. You stitched your sister back together with the flesh and aura of another vampire, but tell me, why would binding two vampires together allow either of them to enter a church?” She shook her head and lowered her arm. “You bound her aura to a fragment of your own and sealed it with a piece of your soul.”
My eyes widened.
“Soularts are quite forbidden, if my memory serves me well.” Cara brushed her silvery hair back behind her shoulders. “I know what you did to save her, but I cannot tell you what it means. I’ve never heard of such a thing before. Using a soulart in such a fashion, it is, unprecedented.”
“I never really thought about it,” I said.
“I would say that surprises me, but …” Cara smiled and shrugged.
“Thanks, Mom, thanks a lot.”
“I’ll never understand how anyone can miss it. Your aura is plainly tied to your sister’s aura. It’s tight enough to remind me of the stick stuck up my husband’s ass.”
I frowned.
She smiled and beat her wings. “There’s something else in there too, but I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“In your husband’s ass?” I asked innocently.
She snorted and waved a hand, dismissing the thought. “You know what I mean.”
I did know what she meant. She meant Dale. Some piece of Dale’s soul or consciousness or something was tied in with the fragments of Sam’s aura and maybe even her soul. I wonder if Cara ever fully realizes what I did, will she think it’s as creepy as I do?
“Oh well,” I said. “At least Sam is alive and kicking, ah, dead and kicking, whatever.”
Cara just blinked and shifted her wings.
“So, do we ever get to meet your mystery husband?”
Cara grinned and then clapped her hands to silence me and get my attention at the same time. “Pay attention now.”
I smiled at her complete change of topic.
“If you were to use Fae magic, for instance, to cause great pain or death, why would that not be part of necromancy?” She waited for an answer, but I just stared at her with my jaw a little slack. “Come now, you’ve learned to pull power for ley lines arts. You’ve even used it to enhance your necromancy, whether you realize it or not. Why not expand the idea a little further?”
“I do what now? I use ley lines during necromancy? I didn’t think-”
She turned to the small pitcher plant I had sitting on the battered brown shelf on the wall and mumbled something. The plant grew by about fifty percent as roots rocked the pot onto an angle and sprang from the top level of soil.
“That can’t be good for it,” I muttered.
“You may have more success with a Rowan or Yew, but the pitcher thrives on death, so I have high hopes.” She smiled and took a deep breath like she was convincing a small child clowns were harmless. Harmless my ass.
“Now you try it,” she said.
“How? It doesn’t have an aura, much less a dead aura. What am I supposed to do with it?”
Cara paused and tapped her fingers on the hilt of her dagger again. Her eyes lit up and she said, “Your shield, you do not use an aura for your shield.”
I glanced at the cash register for no particular reason, then back to Cara. “I do, sometimes if it’s not just a ley line shield, but you’re right. I usually don’t.”
“Think about the effort it takes to form the shield. Speak the incantation out loud and try to draw the line into focus.”
I shrugged and turned to the pitcher plant. “What’s the word?”
“What?”
I grinned. “The incantation?”
“Oh, it’s vadonon arbustum sero.”
One quick nod and I turned my attention back to the plant. I played with the shield incantation a few times, speaking
impadda
and getting a feel for the surging electric blue ley line as it flexed around me and receded. The lines running through Death’s Door were like any other, pulled and affected by the moon, much like the tides. I have no desire to find out what a miscalculation in power would do. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, emptying my focus of everything but the small pitcher plant on my shelf and the line at my fingertips.
“Vadonon arbustum sero.”
I wasn’t really expecting anything to happen, so when the line burned through my aura, the pot disintegrated from an explosion of roots, Cara laughed and took to the air, and the now six-foot tall pitcher plant fell on my head, drenching the floor—I was a bit surprised.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Showtime. I sighed as I got out of Vicky. Traffic had been clear all the way down Highway 40. I was surprised to see I’d made it with time to spare. My drive had included the less-than-safe activity of eyeing the wedding gift in the front seat as if it was going to jump out the window. The rest of the trip had been spent recovering from the shock of using a Fae incantation.
I left the car near the Zoo in Forest Park. It was good to have Vicky back in action. I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride when the first couple to walk by stopped to ask me about her. Glowing compliments done, I headed off to the birdcage.
The Zoo isn’t too terribly close to the Jewel Box, but I hadn’t seen one of my old friends in a while. Humans aren’t the only creatures on this earth able to leave ghosts behind. I remember the dog I helped Frank’s friend with. It was a mastiff, a huge, huge dog. While a mastiff is big, it’s pretty well put to shame by the ghost of a giant panda bear named Happy. Happy was usually hanging around the red pandas or the birdcage. Red pandas were a totally different species, as were the birds, but Happy didn’t seem to mind. Today he came bounding through the birdcage wall and a group of tourists, who all shivered as he passed through them. I laughed as the bear cleared the sidewalk and tried to rub his head on my shoulder. He passed right through me. I drew on a nearby ley line and let it pool in my hand, electric blue energy circling my palm and running out again a moment later. Happy stuck his tongue into the mass of energy and started slurping until his aura filled out enough I could scratch his ears. He always seemed to like that.
When he was alive, I would have been concerned about the bear eating me or slicing me to ribbons, but he had a pretty affectionate disposition as a ghost, having died long before I was born. I got to know him when I was twelve and Zola dragged me to the Zoo. My parents were always perplexed as to why I was terrified of the Zoo, and convinced my master to figure it out on one of the rare occasions she stayed with us. Every time I set foot near the Zoo, the panda would come charging and scare the living hell out of me. Zola, on the other hand, thought it was hilarious. I’m sure the other park patrons wondered how we escaped the asylum as I ran screaming from thin air before Zola finally ordered me to stop and pet it.
“Well, buddy, I gotta go to a wedding. You go scare up some birds, huh?”
He blew a puff of air out of his ghost lungs that blew my hair back. Maybe I was pumping a little
too
much power into his aura. I scratched his ears again and let the power flow away. He turned and trundled back toward the birdcage.
I smiled and headed off in the opposite direction.
***
It didn’t take too long to walk to the Jewel Box. An array of pink and gold and light yellow flowers lined the walk to the front door. The glass and steel pierced the lawn like a gleaming Aztec pyramid. The fifty-foot walls were sparkling clean. Lilies lined the pools in front of the building, the place itself an impressive art deco greenhouse. It’d been renovated in recent years and the trees once towering to the top of the building’s interior were now gone. When I first walked through the doors, it felt empty without them. The thought faded in an instant as I realized how clearly you could see the flora decorating the attraction.
I signed the guestbook and turned around when my gaze caught on one of my regular customers, handing out programs. She was short and pudgy, a strawberry blonde with brilliant green eyes. Her eyes overpowered everything else about her appearance.
“Ashley?” I said.
She looked up and her eyes went wide. “Damian? What the hell, er, heck, are you doing here?” Her hand flew up to her chest. Her fingers paused in the space usually reserved for a pentagram before falling down to her side.
“I was invited.”
“By who?”
“The bride-to-be, as a matter-of-fact.”
“No freaking way. You know Beth?” She shook her head as she spoke. “She’s my cousin.”
So the valley goth girl’s cousin was a Wiccan priestess? I laughed. “That’s funny.”
Ashley scrunched up her eyebrows and said, “Why?”
“Ah,”
because I slept with your cousin?
“because I’ve known Beth since high school.” There, that was a perfectly plausible Saint Louis excuse. The Saint Louis populace has a bizarre and unhealthy obsession with their high schools. It’s just weird.
“Oh,” Ashley said as she nodded and smiled. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around the Double D then.”
“Definitely,” I said as an usher tapped my shoulder and guided me to the bride’s side of the seating area. I continued gawking at the flowers and squared-off levels of glass forming the ceiling above me. The chatter in my vicinity was mind numbing. How many people were crammed into the Jewel Box, I will never know.
I couldn’t remember if we were supposed to stand for the groom or not. No one stood up as he made his appearance ten minutes later, so I stayed planted on my chair. I almost laughed out loud when I realized two of the groomsmen were also Beth’s ex-boyfriends.
A bittersweet melody of love and loss began to whisper from speakers throughout the building. The room stood as Beth entered the aisle on the arm of her short but frighteningly muscled father. She looked happy, like a happy person being eaten by a giant white lace monster.
The guests and I spent a glorious thirty minutes on some of the most uncomfortable folding chairs my ass has ever borne witness to, listening to a pastor who could make a sloth look like a gerbil on crack. It was a little odd being single and watching an old girlfriend get married. It was also pretty funny knowing at least three people in the room, besides the groom, had slept with the bride. I watched the groom and my mind filled with images of his head being removed by a vampire with anger management issues. I couldn’t help but grin.
At the end of eternity, the bride and groom left the stage arm in arm, followed by the groomsmen and bridesmaids and much applause. The ushers led the front rows out behind the supporting cast and eventually made it back to the peasants. I waited patiently through the receiving line.
Beth flashed me a huge smile as I got closer. It looked sincere, which surprised me. Of course, she didn’t know why I actually accepted her invitation. I wondered if Michael had anything to do with our invitations showing up so close to the ceremony. Beth’s eyes wandered down to my shoes and slowly back up. That surprised me too.