Fall, page 10
He was afraid that he was calling attention to himself, darting this way and that, looking hard at every blond head he saw. He half expected security to snatch him up at any moment.
Still no sign of her. He tried to carve the casino into a regular pattern in his mind so he could make sure he covered all of it—notwithstanding the probability that she was not sitting still someplace, but was moving around just as much as he was, so he could miss her anyway—but its walkways were so irregular that that was hard to do.
Finally, Josh gave up. There was a plainclothes security agent giving him a hard eye—he recognized the guy from other trips here, and the man was always loitering, never playing, which marked him as an undercover man. Josh hadn’t seen Season anywhere. Probably his first impression was the right one: Either the old guy had been wrong altogether, or he had seen someone who looked like his old flame, but that someone was not Season Howe.
As he headed for the nearest exit, Josh felt his heart rate start to calm, his breathing become more regular. He had been, he realized now, dangerously close to a full-fledged panic attack. It had all been a false alarm, though. He wouldn’t be returning to this particular casino for a while, but at least he didn’t have to worry about Season Howe.
He was almost out the door when he saw her.
12
Scott didn’t pace. It might almost have been better if he did. Instead, he sat down at the couch, turned on the TV, ran through the channels using the remote. Finding nothing of interest, he turned it off again, drummed his fingers on the couch, then rose and went to the kitchen, where he rummaged through the pantry. Again finding nothing, he went back to the couch, drummed for a while longer, then clicked the TV back on.
Brandy, sitting at the dining room table and trying to cram for a midterm, thought she would scream. Or kill him. Or kill him and then scream. Earlier, occasional trick-or-treaters had interrupted his agonized fidgeting, but their numbers had trickled and then they’d stopped coming altogether.
“Can you please try to control yourself?” she asked, impatience evident in her voice. She had given up trying to hide it.
“What? Am I bothering you?” Clueless.
“Brilliant deduction, Sherlock.” She couldn’t put a finger on precisely when she had stopped loving Scott. But this was the moment at which she became aware that she had, and it struck her hard, like a physical blow, and made her queasy, almost nauseous. She had, for a long time, loved the guy sitting there on the couch looking at her from behind his glasses like some lost little boy. But she didn’t now. He had drifted away from her somehow. They had much in common, still—mutual friends, mutual interests—but that was a friendship, not a love affair or a lifetime commitment.
“It’s just that I’m worried about her.”
“About Kerry.”
Scott nodded affirmation.
And there it is, Brandy thought. The wedge that’s come between us.
“You think about her more than you do about me,” she said simply. “About us.”
He looked as surprised as if she’d slapped him. His thin cheeks crimsoned. “That’s not true. It’s just …”
“It is true,” Brandy said. “You can’t get her off your mind. Since we came back from San Diego, you’ve talked about Kerry more than anything else. Your grades are slipping because you worry so much about her. You check e-mail, what, twenty times a day, just in case she’s sent one? Thirty?”
“She’s important. To us,” Scott argued. He came off the couch now, walking toward her, and Brandy felt threatened by his approach. No, not threatened, that was wrong. Disturbed, though—she wanted distance. If he put his arms around her, held her close, if she breathed in the familiar scent of him, it would weaken her resolve. Somehow, this seemed important to her right now. Earlier, they’d taken turns answering the door to their apartment as trick-or-treaters came in search of candy, but since that had petered off they’d been alone with only the sounds of the TV and his finger-drumming disturbing the silence, grating on her nerves, pushing her toward a decision she had never wanted to make.
“She’s important to you,” Brandy shot back. “Okay, to both of us. But only one of us is obsessed with her. One of us thinks she can take care of herself.”
“Not against Season,” Scott rejoined.
“We don’t know that she’s fighting Season,” Brandy said. “In fact, we have every reason to believe that she’s not, and that she’s perfectly safe with Mother Blessing, like she told Rebecca.”
“I wish she’d called here—,” Scott began.
“Is that it? You’re ticked that she talked to Rebecca instead of you? She said she tried here, didn’t get an answer.”
“We have voice mail,” Scott pointed out defensively.
“Yeah, we do. And Rebecca said she was somehow talking via her computer, with no actual phone line. So maybe whatever magic made that work doesn’t play well with voice mail. Maybe it wasn’t even Kerry, maybe it was her audio doppelganger.”
“It’s just… I worry about her. I think she’s up to something dangerous. I think she’s the key to Season, somehow, and … I don’t know.” Instead of approaching Brandy, he flopped back down on the couch, as if he sensed the coldness with which she would have greeted his advance. It was almost as if she’d put up an invisible force field around herself, which was, in fact, what she had been trying to project. “Okay, yeah, you’re right, I worry about her. She’s our friend, is that a bad thing?”
“It is when it’s to the exclusion of the rest of your life,” Brandy offered. “Do you remember the last time you kissed me? I don’t mean kissing back if I kiss you, but the last time you took the initiative? The last time you made love to me? The last time you even took my hand as we walked across campus? You’ve been so distracted, so—I have to say obsessed, again—with Kerry that you haven’t been paying attention to anything or anyone else, including me. I’ve looked through your notebooks, Scott. Your notes are terrible. I don’t think you’re going to pass any of your classes. You can’t live like this—or, I don’t know, maybe you can, but I can’t.”
She paused, and Scott’s gaze bored into her as if he were looking for the Brandy he’d once known behind this new, cruel mask. Finally, he spoke again. “What … what are you saying? It’s… we’re over? Is that it, Brandy? Because if it is, if you’d let what we have, what we’ve meant to each other, end because of … because of something like this, of me worrying about a mutual friend who’s in trouble—she left her school, she went to some swamp—you know, that really sucks.”
“Maybe it does.” Brandy had to try hard not to shrug, but that would look too callous, even for her. “But it’s her Deliverance fantasy; she’s where she wants to be. You know, I’m sorry, Scott. This is not what I wanted at all. I wanted us to be together forever. But, see, by definition that requires both of us participating, and you haven’t been. I don’t see that changing. I think you love Kerry—or if not, your concern for Kerry outweighs every other aspect of your emotional life, which might as well be the same thing.”
Finally, Scott seemed to understand what was happening, and anger clouded his face. She saw him looking at her, narrowed eyes twitching as if he were searching her face to see if she meant what she was saying. She was pretty sure that she did. At any rate, she’d said it—it was out there in the room now, like a tiger let out of a cage, and it couldn’t be put back in.
She only hoped it didn’t draw blood.
“Brandy, I …” Scott let the sentence hang, unfinished. He swallowed, and she thought she saw a tear forming at the corner of his eye. At least that would be something, she thought, an emotional response that really was directed at me and not at Kerry. But he sniffed once and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, and when he blinked and looked her way again it was gone, if it had ever been there.
He looked like he was about to say something else when the phone rang. This is a test, she thought. If he lunges for the phone, hoping it’s
Kerry or news of Kerry, then I’m right about this. If he understands that we’re fighting for our own survival, as a couple, and lets it ring—
He lunged. “Hello?”
He was quiet for a minute, his face growing ever more somber. “Okay,” he said after a while. “Yeah, thanks. We’ll be there.”
He hung up the phone, left his place on the couch and came back into the kitchen. She didn’t like the look on his face. “That was Josh,” he said, and Brandy thought she detected a tremor in his voice. He opened the refrigerator and leaned inside, hunting for something, raising his voice so she could hear him. “He’s found Season. We have to go to Las Vegas.”
“What, right now?” Brandy asked, surprised. “We’re kind of in the middle of something here. And Las Vegas is, like, two thousand miles away.”
Scott swung around toward her, a Coke in his hand. “Brandy, you may not like it, but you’re in this. You’re part of this. Remember when Rebecca thought she saw her? If Season’s in Las Vegas she might be hunting Josh—hunting all of us. Or she might just be trying to hide out. Either way, something’s got to be done.”
“What can we do?” she asked. She felt a sudden panic—she had hoped their Season-fighting days were far behind them, for the rest of their lives. “We can’t hurt her. Even Daniel couldn’t beat her.”
“We can’t just leave her alone,” Scott insisted. “Josh could be in trouble. And if she’s after him, she’ll come for us, too. We have to try to do something. Rebecca’s going to try to reach Kerry. Maybe with the help of Daniel’s mother, she can …”
“Kerry’s going to save the day?” Brandy asked archly. “You just keep thinking that.”
Scott threw his hands into the air. “Okay, whatever,” he said. “I’m going to the airport to get the first flight to Vegas. You can come or not. Suit yourself. And anyway, Deliverance is hillbillies, not swamp rats.” He headed into the bedroom, and a moment later Brandy heard the sounds of drawers being flung open, his closet ransacked, as he packed for the impromptu trip.
She only thought it over for a few minutes, listening to him prepare. She hadn’t consciously changed her mind about loving him—almost as if a switch had been thrown, it was just over. He had demonstrated that his concerns were elsewhere, and that was all it took. The process, she was sure, had started a while ago; his obsession with Kerry had simply been the crucial card that brought all the others down.
But notwithstanding that, he was right. She was in this witch-hunt as much as he was, or as much as any of them with the possible exception of Kerry. And even if she was no longer in love with Scott, she didn’t want him to be injured. Maybe Kerry could take care of herself, but Scott couldn’t. Someone had to be there to keep an eye on him.
She went into the bedroom to gather the things she’d need. I hope this is a short trip, she thought anxiously. I’m going to have to make up that midterm.
“Samhain is a very special night,” Mother Blessing explained. She was wearing a green, velvety robe, and while Kerry bathed in a specially scented tub, she had placed a similar robe on Kerry’s bed. After Kerry donned the robe, marveling at its soft, luxurious fabric, they met in what had been the kitchen, except that, through some mystical process Kerry couldn’t yet fathom, it had become a courtyard, open to the moon and the stars and an aromatic breeze off the Swamp.
The floor, once vinyl tiles, was now earthen. Candles flickered everywhere—short, fat ones on the bare ground; tall, narrow tapers in multitiered candelabra; tea lights in glass dishes or simply arranged in lines upon the stone altar that stood at one end of the impossible arena. When Mother Blessing had pushed the door open and motored into this place, Kerry hadn’t believed her eyes. She tried surreptitiously to feel the ground with her hands, rolling dirt between her fingers to convince herself that it was real.
During her childhood, Halloween had been a very special event for Kerry—the one night she could really lose herself in imagination, in fantasy, giving herself permission to be someone else for the evening. She loved the costumes, the witches and jack-o’-lanterns and black cats, parties with bobbing for apples and other games, knocking on the doors of strangers and being rewarded for it with candy. She had never imagined a night like this one, though … had never believed that the witches were real.
“We celebrate the Old Ones on this night,” Mother Blessing continued. “We thank them for the gifts they’ve given us this past year, and we ask them to bless the crops which are to be harvested.” She allowed herself a chuckle. “Course, I don’t do a lot of harvestin’ myself, so that part’s just kind of traditional. But still, someone’s doin’ it, and I use the crops plenty. Just don’t pick ’em.”
The Old Ones, Kerry knew from Mother Blessing’s lectures, were the God and the Goddess. Mother Blessing had stressed that they were two facets of deity, and that other religions and cultures might see them differently—as a single deity, or as an entire pantheon full of gods and demigods. But in Mother Blessing’s world, they were two: male and female, opposite sides of the coin. The God represented war, power, rationality, and the seed; the Goddess emotion, beauty, art, and the womb. “Sexist, ain’t it?” she had said with a laugh. “But not really, because they’re both all of those things. Or they contain all those things within them. Or their aspects can be seen in those things. It’s a fluid system, child, that’s the important part. However you want to think of it is the way it will work for you. It’s only crucial that you do think of it, that you commune with them, because they are the power. You channel the power, nature provides the power, but they are part and parcel of the power.”
“I think I understand,” Kerry assured her. She was afraid of sounding simplistic, but it was a lot to take in and she was still processing. “I haven’t done a lot of harvesting myself, but I’m sure happy there are fresh fruits and vegetables and grains.”
“That’s right,” Mother Blessing said. She placed several objects on the altar: a cup, a bell, a knife. “Tonight is also a night of great power,” she went on, her voice taking on a warning tone. “So our ritual must be cautious. We want to honor those who have passed, and to prepare for their eventual return. But we don’t want to call them—on Samhain, that is far too easy to do and far too dangerous to contemplate.”
“The dead can come back?” Kerry asked, hope sparking within her for a moment. Maybe there was a way to see Daniel again, to be with him …
“The dead always come back,” Mother Blessing replied. “But not as those we remember. And not in frogs or rocks or, I expect, lawyers. Just as new people, with some trace fragments of who they were before buried deep inside them. But if they’re summoned on Samhain and they’re not ready to return … well, you don’t want to know, do you?”
Actually, Kerry thought, I kind of do. But she decided she wouldn’t let on about that. This whole thing was so exciting—finally being allowed to take part in a ritual, and such an important one at that. She felt that Mother Blessing was gradually learning to trust her. If she performed well here—which she figured meant keeping out of the way, not accidentally breaking anything, and doing whatever Mother Blessing asked of her—then surely Mother Blessing would ramp up her training, start in with the real goods. She knew it would be a long time before she could do the kinds of things that Daniel had, but baby steps were better than not walking at all.
Mother Blessing turned her cart around and was about to wheel away from the altar when a look of surprise washed over her face. She stopped cold and stared at the ground, as if listening intently to a voice Kerry couldn’t hear. When she looked up again it was directly at Kerry. “Someone’s trying to reach you.”
Kerry said the first thing that popped into her mind. “The dead?”
“The living,” Mother Blessing answered. “I hate to see our Samhain rites interrupted, but you had better see what they want. It’s urgent.”
“How …?”
“Check your computer,” Mother Blessing said. “You’ll be able to get through. Tonight, magic is easy. The veils between worlds are thin. Go, child, go.”
Kerry took a last look around at the unlikely courtyard, the candles, the objects arrayed on the altar, and herself and Mother Blessing in matching green robes. I’ll never learn this, she thought angrily, if I can’t have some uninterrupted time to do it in.
But she knew that Mother Blessing wouldn’t send her away if there weren’t a good reason. She went out through the door—into the rest of the house, just as if she’d been in the normal kitchen all along—and dashed down to her room. The laptop was in the cabinet next to her bed. As she booted up, she wondered what could possibly be so important.
13
Josh had figured he’d live his whole life without ever once saying—at least in any kind of serious way—the words “Follow that cab.” But when he finally spotted Season at the Mandalay Bay, she was walking out the front door, and by the time Josh reached the door, a doorman was closing a taxi door behind her. Josh had jumped into the next cab in line and uttered those eternal words, and as the taxi pulled out into the street, he was glad he hadn’t gambled away the second roll of quarters in his pocket.
Both cabs rolled out onto Las Vegas Boulevard—the Strip—and were immediately stuck in gridlock. The Strip was thick with vehicles: huge stretch limos, SUVs, hotel shuttles, and cabs mixing with normal passenger cars and the occasional city bus in a ballet of steel, glass, and rubber performed to a soundtrack of honking horns, screeching brakes, and squealing tires. Josh was half afraid that his cab would accidentally catch up to or pass the one Season rode in, and that either she’d see him or his driver would misunderstand the nature of the request and, thinking he was trying to join her, would flag the other driver down or radio him.
