Money Shot (15 page)

Her words sprayed Yarrow like buckshot, a thousand stinging insults at once. They popped tiny holes in the blackness inside her where she’d buried the pain, the rage, the need. That awful, shameful need.

“You don’t know shit,” Yarrow said coldly as the old hurt bubbled up fresh and hateful inside her. “You know less than shit.”

“I know enough,” Goose said. She stopped running, grabbed Yarrow’s forearm, dragged her to a halt. Yarrow seized the woman’s hand—she meant to throw it off, to tell this woman where she could stuff her self-righteous bullshit, but she lost control.

The instant Goose’s skin hit hers, the freak that lived inside her took over. The freak who fed on the vicious swirl of dark emotion churning in her gut. The freak who not only fed on it but got off on inflicting it on others. She dug her nails into Goose’s palm, stared into those big, ridiculously sincere eyes and didn’t hide a thing.

She let it all loose on her face, everything she usually kept such a careful lid on—the hostility, the jealousy, the rage. The dark, keening love for Einar. The glittery shards of self-hatred and the lies from which that hatred had grown.

Goose snatched her hand back, her face pale, her mouth set with bleak knowledge. Yarrow’s stomach clenched with a mixture of disappointment and satisfaction. She was just as toxic as she’d always been. Toxic enough to nauseate a hardened officer of the law, anyway. No surprises there. The only person ever to look inside her head without disgust was Einar.

“Well, this has been just swell. Let’s not do it ever again,’kay?” Yarrow wiped her hand down her sweats with deliberate disdain. “Gotta run.”

And she sprinted down the street as if the hounds of hell were at her heels. Goose didn’t follow her, and she didn’t look back.

 

GOOSE WATCHED Yarrow race away, leaving her to gather up the shards of her composure.
She thinks I’m disgusted
, Goose thought, her throat aching.
She thinks she’s disgusting
.

She sensed more than saw the rest of the team jogging up the street toward her at a more dogged pace. Einar led the pack, while Rush brought up the rear, encouraging the stragglers. They streamed around her, all heaving lungs and the occasional wheezed curse. Rush pulled up beside her.

“Goose?” he asked, a thrum of concern in his deep voice. “You all right?”

“Yes,” she said. But she wasn’t. Far from it. Yarrow had meant to slap at her, and she’d landed a good one. That harrowing, fast-forward spin through the girl’s bleak emotional landscape had sucker-punched her but good. It had been wretched and familiar all at once, a confusing stew of high passions, self-hatred and fatalism. At a certain point she hadn’t been able to tell, entirely, where Yarrow’s feelings left off and the memories of her own ill-fated sixteenth year began. She knew only that the overlap was huge and painful.

She had to give the girl credit. Maybe it had been a wild punch, but she’d landed it pretty solid. Her little tromp through Goose’s psyche had tripped more land mines than she could have possibly imagined. But the girl had also revealed more than she’d intended. Way more.

Because now Goose didn’t just suspect Yarrow was in love with Einar. Now she knew. And because a love that intense didn’t bloom without at least a little hope, she also knew Einar must have encouraged it on some level. She just didn’t know how. Or why. Or what, if anything, Yarrow had to do with the supernotes she suspected Einar was smuggling into the country in his cute little bumblebee plane.

Which meant Goose was about to take a good, hard run at Einar. No matter what Rush and Lila thought.

 

THE FOLLOWING night, Yarrow loaded up her tray with a couple bowls of soup and a few hunks of bread. She considered spitting in Agent Smiley Face’s barley bean. God knew the bitch deserved it after the crap she’d pulled yesterday. Poking around in her personal life like it was the Secret Service’s business who she was fucking. Jesus.

She debated the idea for a minute then decided against it. Lila would kill her. Yarrow didn’t know if she had hidden cameras or ESP or what, but the old lady was sharp. Way sharper than either of Yarrow’s parents. Or maybe she just paid attention. Which would’ve put her way out ahead of the folks, too, Yarrow thought bitterly.

But if Lila found out she’d defiled the sacred covenant of providing nourishment for a traveler—or whatever bullshit language she used—there would be hell to pay. So no spitting in the soup.

But she wanted to. Damn, she wanted to. If only because she’d happily sell her soul—whatever was left of it anyway—to be the one sitting across from Einar right now, basking in the glow of his eager attention. But she wasn’t, was she? She was the one wearing the apron and schlepping the lovebirds their dinner. Typical.

She wadded up her anger and her hurt like a used napkin and stuffed it down into the dank, black place inside her where she kept the rest of the pain and rage she didn’t know what to do with. She wiped her face clean of anything but cynical detachment, shouldered her tray and headed into the dining room to serve her beloved and her enemy.

GOOSE DIPPED her spoon into the rich, tomatoey broth and smiled up at Yarrow. “It’s delicious,” she said. “Do you and Lila make it?”

Yarrow snorted. “In the microwave.”

Einar shared a look with Goose that said
kids
. “Lila’s more a baker than a cook. She handles the pastries and breads in-house but has a contract with a fantastic little café in Grand Marais for the soups,” he told her. “I fly in a fresh supply for her every week.”

Yarrow made a noise that might’ve been confirmation, might’ve been scorn as she stomped off. Goose watched her go, her concern carefully concealed. She knew how Yarrow felt about Einar, but Einar’s feelings for—and uses for—Yarrow were as yet undetermined.

She considered him carefully, from the sunny tousle of his hair to the assured curve of his smile. Flattery, she decided. She’d start there and see where it took her.

“So, Einar,” she said, lifting a spoonful of soup to her mouth. “What’s kept you on Mishkwa all these years?”

He shot her that weapons-grade smile and said simply, “It’s home.”

“Well, sure. But with your brains, energy, ambition? Not to mention that pretty face?” She blasted him with a smile of her own. “You could go anywhere, do anything. Why limit yourself to—” She broke off, seeking a word that could sum up the jagged, claustrophobic beauty of Mishkwa. “. . . this?”

His smile died and he eyed her as if weighing something. “Can I show you something?” he finally asked.

She set her spoon aside and said, “Absolutely.”

“Back in a few, Yarrow,” he called toward the kitchen.

He held the door for her and in moments they were standing on the wooden pier that shot out from South Harbor into the sluggish, gunmetal waters of Lake Superior.

Like the water, the air was heavy and thick. A full moon curved ripe and fertile as a pregnant belly in the unseasonably warm sky, painting a hazy halo in the night around it. If the damp air didn’t steal her breath, Goose thought, surely the sight of that moon would have.

“That’s why I’m here,” Einar said. He tucked his fingers into the pockets of his jeans and nodded toward the sky. “Her.”

“Her?”

“Our Lady.”

“Our Lady? You mean the moon?” Goose blinked at him in honest surprise. When Rush had said Einar didn’t believe in magic, she’d just assumed . . . “You’re a witch? Or, what, a wizard?”

“Pagan,” he said, laughing. “Or Wiccan, if you like. I don’t think they have actual wizards outside of Oz or Harry Potter movies.”

“Huh,” she said.

“Uh-oh.” His eyes twinkled. “You didn’t know about the coven here?”

“Not till a few days ago,” she said.

“A pity but not a surprise.” He sighed. “Mishkwa Coven is one of the oldest blood-bonded covens in this part of the world, you know.”

“Blood-bonded?”

“It means the leadership is handed down along family lines. No actual bloodletting involved, though I understand why you’d be edgy about that sort of thing after what you and Rush stumbled onto at the Stone Altar.” He met her sharp look with an easy smile. “Lila mentioned it to me. Asked me to, you know, keep an eye out.”

Goose nodded.

“Point is, we’re an ancient coven with a rich tradition, a breathtaking location and a potential tourist attraction in the Stone Altar that rivals Ireland’s Newgrange.” He shook his head at the waste of it. “It’s a shame Lila keeps it so low profile.”

“Her call,” Goose said carefully. “Her being high priestess and all.”

“Her call,” he agreed. “At least until she retires.”

“And when she does? You’d run things differently?”

“I
will
run things differently.” He grinned, boyish and handsome in the moonlight. “We’re blood-bonded, remember? I’m next in line.”

“What about Rush?”

He shrugged. “Rush doesn’t do religion. Even if Lila begged him to take over the coven, even if it was her dying wish, he wouldn’t do it.”

“So it’ll be you, then.” Goose gave him a look she hoped was both speculative and flattering. “What’ll you do first?”

“Renovate the Stone Altar, of course. It’ll require significant structural enhancement before it’s ready for Paganpalooza.”

“Paganpalooza?”

He grinned at her. “Hey, the lunar standstill only happens five times a century. You think I’d let another one squeak by without a party? It’s a damn good thing I’ve got fourteen years to wait, though. It’ll probably take that long to get that old mine shaft up to code.”

He went on in that vein for a few more minutes, with Goose throwing in the occasional encouraging noise to keep him rolling. Lila had been right, she thought as she studied the avarice lighting up his pretty face. He’d turn Mishkwa into a theme park. Probably had plans drawn up and stashed in his desk drawer, just waiting for his aunt to kick the bucket.

Theme parks didn’t come cheap, though. Neither did power. And it might take significantly more power than Einar anticipated to ensure his inheritance. She thought about Rush, who, at that very moment, was tending to that list of complaints she’d accidentally gathered. Stopping at one house for a quick chat about the proper storage of trash barrels, probably sprinkling salt on the unshoveled walks himself. Maybe taking out a few unwelcome garden pests along the way. Einar could be in for some stiff competition if Rush felt like giving it to him.

Goose didn’t like the ugly, complicated picture starting to develop in her mind. So far she had Einar aiming to destroy the pristine, harsh beauty of this island, and financing the effort with money he’d earned funneling supernotes into the United States. And if that weren’t enough to keep her up nights, she still had to figure out where, if anywhere, Yarrow fit into this whole mess.

Because she did. Goose could feel that in her gut, knew it with an absolute certainty she couldn’t explain but believed with every cell in her body. Einar was doing something with—or to—Yarrow, but Goose hadn’t the faintest idea what.

It was going to eat at her, too, the Yarrow question. She’d need to resolve it, one way or the other, before she left Mishkwa. It was outside the scope of her duties, but she couldn’t even think about leaving until she knew the girl was safe.

Then she’d have to think about it. About leaving.

A tiny spark of pain danced through her at the prospect, but she put it away. Focused. Called on the self-control and single-mindedness she’d honed with years of unstinting sweat to dredge up a doubtful nose-wrinkle for the man beside her.

“So you’re gambling your entire future—and I assume your life savings—on an event that happens once every twenty-ish years?”

“Yep.” He tucked his hands into his pockets and turned his face to the night sky.

“I don’t know, Einar. Building your life plan around moonlight seems a little risky.”

“Around your moon, sure. The one you can see from your window back in Minneapolis. But this isn’t that moon.”

Goose squinted upward. “I’m pretty sure it is, actually.”

He shook his head. “Does your moon look like this? Feel like this?” he asked as moonlight bathed his perfect face. “Can’t you sense it, Goose? How close She is here? How full, how ripe? How powerful?”

“And you want that?” Goose asked slowly, blinking at the naked hunger in his eyes as he gazed up at the moon. “Power?”

He shook his head ruefully, the hunger in his face taking on an unwelcome earthiness as he brought his attention back to her. “I want lots of things,” he said, his eyes dropping to her lips. Uh-oh. “Who doesn’t?”

Crap
. She’d known it was dicey, letting him get her alone under a romantic moon. Even puppies had teeth, and she’d just gotten a look at the sort of bite Einar had to offer. It was decidedly more carnal than she’d anticipated. Most men who toyed with teenage girls didn’t have the balls to approach a woman their own age, but Einar didn’t appear to have any problem on that front. So did this mean he
wasn’t
preying on Yarrow’s feelings for him? Or that he just wasn’t your ordinary child molester? She stared at him, frozen by the debate raging in her head.