A Whisker's Breadth, page 9
“No.” Reg waved her hand. “Don’t answer that one. So if she is part siren, then so am I.”
He tilted his head to the side. “That is likely,” he agreed.
“Only likely? I inherited it from her, didn’t I?”
He wobbled his hand back and forth. “Perhaps.”
Maybe because Norma Jean was only part siren, Reg could have inherited the non-siren part. Or maybe, in the less-conventional way immortals produced offspring, Reg might not have inherited anything from Norma Jean. She could have nothing of either of them.
But Reg knew that wasn’t true. She knew what had just happened.
“I guess that… I did inherit some of her siren genes. I don’t want that to be true, and I said it wasn’t, but…”
“Humans do not choose their physical forms.”
It was a basic truth that Reg already knew, but when Harrison said it, it sounded inspired. And it sounded like he forgave her for whatever her physical nature was. Reg felt reassured for the first time. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Or she didn’t exist as something wrong. She was what she had been made.
“No. I didn’t choose to be part siren.”
Harrison nodded his agreement.
“But… I am. And now I don’t know what to do about it.”
“You cannot change what you are.”
“Right. But what can I change or control? I don’t have to… act like a siren, do I?”
“How does a siren not act like a siren? However a siren acts is how a siren is.”
“Umm… yeah, I guess. But this siren doesn’t want to… well… drown men.”
“Ahh.” Harrison nodded wisely. He looked toward the kitchen. “They don’t… taste so good.”
Reg’s startled giggles were so high they were almost ultrasonic. She felt giddy. Maybe a little hysterical. Men didn’t taste good? That was the best reason Harrison could think of not to kill them?
“I meant… I don’t want to kill anything. I just want to live like the other normal humans. No siren nature. No taking men away and trying to drown them. Whether I eat them or not, it’s wrong.”
Harrison nodded sagely. He looked toward the kitchen again.
“Are you hungry?” Reg asked in exasperation.
“Do you have pizza?”
“No, I don’t think so… if I do, it’s probably old and gross.” She really should clean out the fridge sometime before Sarah did. They were Reg’s leftovers, or mostly so, and she should be the one responsible for cleaning up. “You should have seen the restaurant Corvin and I were at tonight. The best ribs you ever tasted!”
“Human ribs?”
“No! No, I’m not talking about eating human ribs. I’m talking about ribs… pork, I guess. We went to Uncle Mike’s, and they have the best ribs you ever tasted.”
“The best?” Harrison repeated.
Reg thought that he must have had ribs sometime in his immortal life. How could he go for hundreds or thousands of years without tasting ribs?
“Yes. You really have to try them—”
She should have known better than to say something like that. Harrison stood up and walked to Reg’s kitchen, where the counters were suddenly covered with barbecue ribs on various platters and plates. Harrison put Starlight down on the island. He put on an Uncle Mike’s bib. Starlight immediately started sniffing the various different plates. He sneezed at the spices on one. Harrison started picking up random ribs to taste, giving little bits to Starlight. He nodded and spoke through mouthfuls of food.
“Yes,” he agreed, “they are much better.”
Reg was afraid to ask what kind of ribs he had eaten in the past. Something prehistoric? Raw? Human? She was glad that he liked Uncle Mike’s ribs, but she wondered how he had produced them. Had he made them out of thin air? Or had he transported them from Uncle Mike’s? Were all of the cooks and waiters staring at empty counters and tables, wondering where the heck all of the ribs had suddenly disappeared to?
“So, can you help me?” she asked Harrison.
He gestured to the bounty on her counter. “Help yourself.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I had enough ribs. I’m not hungry. I meant… can you help me with not acting like a siren? With making sure that I don’t… try to drown anyone?”
“If you do not want to, then do not.”
“It’s not that easy. I didn’t want to tonight, but I was trying to capture Corvin and drag him into the ocean…”
“But you did not.”
“No.”
He made a motion toward her like she had proven his point.
“But I’m worried it might happen in the future. What if I’m too tired to be able to stop myself? What if I… do it in my sleep? Or in a trance? Norma Jean didn’t really know what she was doing, not in the beginning, anyway.”
“Norma Jean is what she is, and Reg Rawlins is not Norma Jean.”
“I know.” Reg huffed in frustration. “I didn’t feel like I was in control. Something else was controlling me. This… hunger from deep down inside.”
“Eat more ribs.”
“It wasn’t that kind of hunger.”
“Then eat something else.”
Reg stopped trying to explain and just watched him and Starlight as they ate the ribs.
Chapter Eighteen
Reg wasn’t sure when she had fallen asleep. She wasn’t sure if Harrison had still been there, and if she had just nodded off or whether he had tucked her in, as he had sometimes before. Starlight lay cuddled up against her, apparently sleeping off his feast of ribs, late into the morning, long past when he usually would have insisted it was time for them to get up. Harrison had probably kept him up visiting.
“Does he make any more sense to you than he does to me?” Reg asked.
Starlight made a noise in his sleep but didn’t open his eyes.
Reg looked around for her phone. It was on her bedside table, plugged into the charging cord. She must have put it there herself. She couldn’t imagine Harrison being aware that phones had to be plugged in.
Reg grabbed it and unplugged it. She had a vague recollection of texting with Corvin. Had she?
She checked her notifications, but rather than seeing a new text from Corvin, she saw a series of voicemail messages and texts from Vivian King.
Reg let out her breath.
In all that had happened the night before, she had completely forgotten about her client’s troubles. She should have followed up with Vivian before going to bed. At least shown that she had heard what happened and felt sympathy for Vivian. Instead, she’d been off on a date, and then talking with her… immortal godfather, if that’s how he wanted her to think of him.
Reg skimmed over the texts and voicemail transcriptions, but she couldn’t concentrate on the words. She would get up-to-speed better by talking to Vivian. She tapped one of the voicemails and tapped again to call back. The phone rang quite a few times and she didn’t think Vivian was going to answer. Then there was a click.
“Reg?”
“Vivian. Hi. Sorry to be so long in getting back to you.”
“Well, I guess you were probably sleeping. Sort of rude of me to think I can have your attention any time I want.”
But the way she said it didn’t make Reg think Vivian was sorry for calling at an inconvenient time. She felt that Reg shouldn’t be sleeping when Vivian needed her.
Reg’s foster families had always tried to get her to sleep on a normal schedule like normal people, insisting that if she were to be part of the real world and to be a productive member of society, she needed to sleep when they said she should.
And Reg never had. Try as she might, she couldn’t get to sleep before the wee hours of the morning, and then her body wanted to sleep until noon. And despite what the many families had preached, that was perfectly okay. Not everybody slept at the same time. People worked night shift. There were plenty of people in Black Sands who stayed up late to make their potions and work their spells. Many of Reg’s clients wanted to do seances, and those always worked better after dark, as close to midnight as possible. They couldn’t expect her to be up again at six if she had been doing seances and readings until three o’clock in the morning.
“I had a late consulting job,” Reg told Vivian. A half-truth. She had been consulting with Harrison, trying to sort out her new problem. Even if he hadn’t come up with a solution for her, that didn’t change the fact that she had been trying to work out her problems with him.
“So… I guess you didn’t hear about what happened.”
Reg feigned ignorance. “What happened?”
“I had… an incident. You remember how when you read the tea leaves for me, you saw those three images…”
“I thought you didn’t think those images meant anything.”
“I didn’t. I thought you were just giving random images and hoping that I would connect them together later on, and then I would think that you had predicted the future. Because that’s the way people think.”
“So did you want to come for another reading? The crystal ball worked a lot better for you.”
“Uh… no. I just wanted to tell you…”
Reg waited. Maybe it was a little mean to make Vivian come out and tell her what had happened, rather than letting her off the hook and saying she had seen it on TV. But she wanted Vivian to admit that Reg had been right, and they hadn’t just been three random images that she’d hoped Vivian would be able to tie together.
“You see, there’s this big tree outside my house,” Vivian explained. “Or, the house that I’m renting. A big old tree. And yesterday… a big branch broke off of the tree…”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Reg said blandly.
“It came in through my window. Crashed in through the kitchen window and sliding doors. It was huge. And…”
Reg waited.
“Well, I guess that’s why you saw the tree, and house, and kitchen. Because that’s exactly what happened.”
“You could string any three random images together,” Reg reminded her. “People’s brains make connections, even where there aren’t any.”
“I don’t think that these images just happened to be connected…”
“So…?”
“Well, I was wondering if you could help me. I thought… maybe if I tell you a little more, you can look into your crystal ball, and you could help me, or point me in the right direction to get help…”
“With what?”
“I’ll explain when I get there…”
Reg was curious as to what Vivian would have to tell her. It was clear that a lot was going on that Vivian wasn’t telling her. People didn’t just have bad luck like Vivian did. There was something else going on.
Reg watched the trees waving out the window, watching for some sign of Forst, who she knew was there. But she often couldn’t see him when he was working; he blended in with the garden so well. One wouldn’t have thought that the red cap could just disappear into all of that green, but somehow it did.
There was a knock on the door, and Reg turned toward it and stood up. She walked to the door and opened it for Vivian.
Vivian stood there, looking just as she had the first day she had come to Reg. Not a mark on her from either the truck accident or the tree through the window. She had miraculously escaped injury in both cases. Reg wondered whether she had supernatural powers. Something that allowed her to move at the last moment when she was a split-second away from being crushed by a boulder, truck, or tree.
Vivian didn’t just have bad luck; Reg was sure of that. There was something else going on.
“Hi, Vivian, come on in.”
Reg had the tea made and out on the coffee table already. Vivian was right on time, so the water was piping hot and ready to go. Reg resumed her previous seat. Starlight jumped up onto the couch next to her and sat, looking at Vivian.
Vivian chose one of the chairs and sat down. She eyed Starlight. “You can see, sometimes, why cats were worshiped in ancient cultures.”
Reg looked over at Starlight, the way he was sitting up tall, looking very regal. As if they were his servants. And she supposed she was. She made sure that he was fed, finding him special delicacies when he refused to eat the food that she had spent good money on, scooped his poop, cuddled with him, and kept him company. She’d taken him to the vet and strengthened him with her powers when he was sick, determined to find someone or something that could heal him. She’d found Nicole for him after he’d spotted her through the window. She was there to serve his every whim.
“I suppose so,” she agreed. “They do manage to get under our skin. Corvin says that people domesticated them because they were helpful in catching mice. But I think cats domesticated people because they didn’t want to waste all of their time catching mice.”
Vivian laughed. “Yes, you’re probably right about that one. They do seem to have us very well-trained.”
Reg petted Starlight. She scratched his ears and gave him long strokes down the back.
“He’s great when I do a reading. He helps me to focus my powers and… sort of magnifies the effect. It makes a big difference.”
“He reminds me of Bastet.”
Reg nodded. “Was that your cat…?”
Vivian laughed. “No. Bast. Bastet. She was an Egyptian god. Or is. Whatever.”
Reg looked at Starlight. “Did you hear that? She just compared you to a god. I’ll bet that makes you feel special.”
Starlight just kept looking at Vivian, not at Reg. His ears flicked, but otherwise he was still. Like he was pretending to be one of those Egyptian statues. The regal Bastet.
He seemed fascinated by Vivian but, other than that, she wasn’t able to sense any emotions from him. Was he keeping them from her? Or maybe she was just tired.
“So, you had something to tell me? I’m not sure what it is we’re doing this session.”
“Well…” Vivian delayed by pouring herself tea. She fussed with it, stirring, adding honey, considering the cream. “It’s hard to know where to start. You know about Colorado. And about the truck and the tree.”
“Francesca did say that bad luck comes in threes. So you should be off the hook for a few years now!”
Francesca shook her head. “I only wish that were the case.”
Reg sipped her own tea, watching Starlight, waiting. Vivian wanted to get it off her chest. Sooner or later, she was going to have to just come out with it.
“A lot of things like that have happened to me. And it seems like it’s been getting worse. It used to be just occasional… bizarre, unlucky accidents. But it’s like it’s accelerating. Intensifying.”
“So it didn’t start with the house in Colorado?”
Vivian shook her head. “No. There were other things before that… and since then.”
Reg leaned back, thinking about that. She picked Starlight up and held him in her lap. She closed her eyes and thought about the emotions around Vivian. Her aura.
“Is that why you were so worried about the black cats at Francesca’s?”
“I don’t know why I would worry about a little thing like that.” Vivian shook her head. “I’ve already got more than my share of bad luck; it isn’t like one black cat is going to change that.”
Reg didn’t correct her that there had been four black cats. Vivian had made her point. Why worry about cats when she had boulders crushing her house and runaway trucks making straight for her?
“So you’re not worried about black cats.”
“A little,” Vivian sighed. “I’m kind of paranoid about anything that is supposed to cause bad luck. But it isn’t like avoiding those things is going to change anything now.”
“When did this bad luck start?”
“It’s not just bad luck… I don’t have trouble getting a job, or having to pay unexpected overage fees on my cell phone, or things like that. I’ve even tried buying lottery tickets, and I can still win the prizes, if I buy enough cards. It isn’t bad luck; it’s these accidents. These… near-death events.”
“And it started…?”
“I don’t know.” Vivian thought back. She closed her eyes, and her face relaxed as she accessed her memories, trying to identify when the accidents had begun. “I was still pretty young… I was camping with my family. We did that kind of thing a lot. Went interesting places and camped out while we explored them. I was attacked by a lion. It got into the tent and dragged me off.”
Reg leaned forward, her jaw dropping open in shock. She couldn’t think of what to say. It was one thing to calmly talk about boulders rolling down the mountain to crush Vivian’s house. But the thought of her as a little girl, being attacked by a lion…?
“That’s horrible. You must have been terrified. What happened? How did you get away? Were you injured?”
“I woke up. I was screaming, writhing, trying to get away from it and figure out where I was and what was happening. My dad, he came out of the tent yelling, waving his arms around, and attacked the lion. He kept hitting it in the face with the heel of a shoe. And then… it dropped me, and ran away.”
Reg blew out her breath. “Wow. That’s incredible. And were you hurt?”
“No.” Vivian’s voice was low. “I got away without a scratch.”
“That’s amazing. And things like this have been happening ever since?”
“Yes.”
“Attacked by a lion! You hear stuff like that every now and then in the news, but I never met anyone it happened to.”
“People usually don’t believe me.”
“Really?” Reg thought about that, then nodded. “Yeah, I suppose. People never believed the stories I told as a kid.” And with good reason. If someone didn’t believe in her gifts, then they wouldn’t believe the things that happened to her or around her.
“What about as an adult?”
Reg raised her brows. “I learned to tell more believable stories. Even if they weren’t true.”
Vivian nodded. “Yes. Exactly. People say they want to hear the truth, but they don’t. They want to hear things they believe.”
Starlight rubbed against Reg’s chin and kneaded her legs, his sharp claws pricking her skin. “Ouch. Settle down.” She scratched his chin and tried to get him to be still. “And… you think it’s getting worse.”
