Fire in Her Blood: Death Witch, Supernatural Investigative Unit, page 8
“Has your girlfriend decided she wanted dessert after all?” the waiter asked him with a grin and then turned to me.
“Um, I’m not, no that wasn’t,” I stammered.
“We’re fine.” Jakob pronounced with vengeance. I suspected the man’s tip had evaporated. The waiter shrugged and left.
“Is something wrong?” Jakob asked. I noticed he didn’t call me my love.
“I was hoping I could get my coffee warmed up.” I swirled the fluid a bit, then pushed the cup toward the center of the table. “Oh, well it’s getting late anyway, probably best I go without.”
“Don’t be silly.” E reached over and put her hands on the side of the cup. A warm breeze of power brushed over me, bringing with the smell of wood smoke. The coffee in my mug started to steam as the heat from her hands leeched into it. The show was quick. I was still impressed.
“Wow, thanks. That’s a pretty remarkable way to end a night.” Not the most subtle hint in the world, but I was tired of the tension.
“It’s not the end of the night yet. You still have time to stop by my place and meet Puss.”
“Do you live nearby?” I stalled. It might not be late, but I tried to end my Friday nights between the sheets with Jakob. Normally he’d leave me asleep and then head into work for the night. It seemed like this Friday was an exception. He wasn’t making any moves to ask for the check or get out of here in time for work or anything else. Still, appetizers, salad, dinner, desserts, and coffee was enough for an evening. I hoped I wouldn’t be forced to spend a few hours on E’s couch making loving faces at her cat.
“Didn’t Jakob tell you?” She smiled. “We’re neighbors.”
5
We were neighbors. The vacant apartment on my floor, the one I’d assumed a guy moved into, was E’s. Jakob asked her how she liked the Eclipse and the two of them chatted aimlessly. I couldn’t get over how she’d so neatly inserted herself into my life. Hugging Jakob when I wasn’t there, showing up at Convenire, and now, she lived next door to me.
I was on the edge of saying something when a cold touch on the back of my hand stole my attention. It was Mark of all people, his fingers barely brushing my skin. I looked up at his face and saw that he got it. Jakob was oblivious, but Mark understood. Did that mean something? Was this some giant flashing sign that my relationship with Jakob was doomed? My heart started to race, and suddenly the room felt too small. Something bothered me, and the wrong man at the table got it.
I was about to panic when Jakob looked over and smiled at me. When he heard my heart pounding, he’d looked over. I melted. He was oblivious, yes, but not with malice. E was done with her dessert, and my coffee, even if it was magically heated, wasn’t that enticing. I smiled back at Jakob briefly before I stood.
“Excuse me, I think I need a minute before we get the check.” I hoped pronouncing dinner over wasn’t too rude.
“I’ll come with you,” E chirped. If she’d been Phoebe, I wouldn’t have been bothered, so I did my best not to be bothered by her. Why women feel the need to bond after using the toilet I’ll never know, but three minutes later, there we were washing our hands and chatting.
“Did you have a good time at Convenire last night?” I asked.
“So-so. I don’t know if I’ll be back.” Away from Jakob she was almost likable. “I’m sorry about crashing your party.”
“It wasn’t a party, just an attempt to cheer Anna up.”
“Goddess knows she needs it. Her father is out of hand.”
“She told you?” The drive from Convenire to the Eclipse wasn’t long, when had Anna had time to get into daddy issues?
“Uh, yeah, we ended up at her place.” At her place? Anna’s was in the opposite direction of the Eclipse.
“Really?” Was she Anna’s type? We’d never talked about the kind of women she liked. Was E even gay?
E smiled widely at my confusion. “Raya likes girls, and so do I.”
I followed her out of the bathroom, glad to leave the conversation behind. Mark was standing outside the door, wearing a smirk wide enough to tell me he’d overheard us.
“Jakob’s getting the car”—he grinned—“leaving me with the two most beautiful women in the place. I’m a lucky man.”
“Vampire, you’re a lucky vampire,” E corrected. It seemed important to her.
“That too.” His grin didn’t leave. The hostess signaled to us, and we walked to the door. Mark whispered in my ear, talking only to me in a room full of people. It was a vampire’s trick, but one I was used to.
“If you get tired of Jakob fawning over his prodigal granddaughter tonight, mention that she went home with Anna. I’ll talk to him about the rest of it tomorrow.”
His words put a smile on my face. Jakob was damn near perfect in every way, except for his trauma-induced homophobia. E was his darling girl. If he found out she’d spent the night with another woman, she’d be a lot more grown-up and human. When Mark opened the car door for me, I put my hand over his for a second and smiled at him.
“Thank you.” I looked into his eyes, hoping he’d understand that I wasn’t grateful for something as small as opening a door.
“Thanks for letting me come along. I had a lovely time.” His words were cliché, but the sympathetic look in his eyes wasn’t. We pulled up to the Eclipse fifteen minutes later, and I was still smiling over it. E invited us to meet Puss again, but I begged off, reminding Jakob that we always spent Friday night at his place. I didn’t know if he would support my lie, but at the last instant, he surprised me and backed me up. Unfortunately, even with her out of the car, the tension didn’t evaporate.
“Do I need to be concerned about you and Mark?” he asked.
I laughed rich belly laughs over the insanity of it.
“It’s not funny.”
“No, you’re right. It’s hilarious.” I gulped a fresh breath while he drove with tight angry movements. “I’m jealous of E, and you’re jealous of Mark.”
“I saw him holding your hand at dinner.”
“Touching my hand, not holding it, touching it. He could tell how upset I was, and he was trying to comfort me.”
“Your heart was racing,” Jakob said in a surly tone. “And what was he whispering to you?”
“I didn’t think you could hear that.” His anger somehow seemed comical, maybe because I didn’t really believe he was falling in love with someone else.
“I couldn’t, so you’ll have to tell me what he said.”
“Oh, you don’t want to know. Suffice to say, love, he was trying to cheer me up.”
“That’s my job.”
“Well, you were busy,” I teased, but he wasn’t having any of it. He drove faster than usual, leaving me glad the top was up to protect us from the wind. The night was filled with a thousand sounds, loons calling in the early fall, the last of the summer crickets chirping. We pulled into the driveway where last night we’d ended a fight with our bodies pressed together under the trees. I wondered how tonight would end. Jakob’s silence as we entered the house didn’t bode well for things.
“Tell me what upset you. I’m sorry I didn’t see it, whatever it was.” He seemed contrite as we sat down in the living room.
“I don’t like the way I disappear when E’s in the room.”
“You don’t disappear.”
“I may as well for all the attention that you give me. You adore her, I see that, but it’s a little hard to watch.” I tried to keep a smile on my face, to keep this light instead of accusatory, but it did hurt to watch him dote on her.
“She’s like a daughter to me.” He thought for a minute. “Hold on.”
I sat completely baffled. His jealousy made sense, seeing my side of it made sense, but this was where we should kiss and make up. Sure, dinner was a disaster, but it was nothing a little kissing and making up couldn’t cure.
“I introduced you to her the wrong way.” He came back into the room carrying a box painted silver and covered in stickers. There were horses and hearts, along with all the other symbols of a young girl.
He put the box in my lap. “I don’t understand?”
“It’s E. It’s what I think of when I see her. Open it.”
I followed his instructions. The box held a motley assortment of the debris of childhood. There were art class sketches labeled “To: Jakob” in shaky letters, notes with the intricate folds of junior high, and the kind of arts and craft pieces children make and only the adults who love them care for. I sorted through years of class pictures and dozens of snapshots of Jakob, a young man I didn’t recognize, and a very young E.
“Who’s this?”
“Ronald at eleven. E was five then. She attached herself to him, utterly in love with her new relatives,” he said, and the pictures proved it. There were vacation snapshots and Christmas dinner photos. It was an entire lifetime shoved inside a cardboard box. Pushed up against the side were letters and postcards all written longhand in the script of a young woman.
“Wow.”
“Did it never occur to you that if she looked like my wife, she might also look like my daughters?”
“No, honestly, it didn’t.” For a minute I felt like a complete ass, but then I remembered the way dinner had gone. “But that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“What would?”
“Could we have some space, some time apart from her? I know she’s just back, but you saw her Monday night, then last night, and now tonight, could we not have E come up in conversation for say the rest of the weekend?”
“Done.” His smile was unsure. “Will that be enough?”
“For now, I might need more later.”
“I’ll do my best to see it before Mark does.”
“Good.”
“Come to bed?” he asked, holding out his hand.
I was up to my elbows in the box, putting back the photos and cards I’d taken out a minute before.
“The box stays out here,” I said, defiantly.
He laughed loudly as I took his hand. His fingertips were cool against my own. It was fascinating but not fascinating enough for me to forget how much he was laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“It was never in the bedroom.” He grinned.
“Uh-huh.” I deliberately turned my back on him and walked down the hall. The cold tile floor tingled against my feet. I was undressing as I walked, slipping out of my shirt and then bra, leaving them behind for him to follow. There was no good way to get out of a pair of pants while you walked, though, so I entered the bedroom bare from the waist.
Jakob’s bedroom was far too utilitarian for my tastes. It held the wide king-sized bed on a simple modern frame and two matching side tables that were required to make it a bedroom but little else. The only decoration was a mirror hanging from one wall. It was all too neat; on top of the long dresser was a simple dark wooden box where he kept his watches and jewelry, all of it orderly. I kicked off my shoes and tossed them in the middle of the thick white carpet. It looked better, messy. I pulled off my pants and left them crumpled by the bed. That improved the room even more.
“Are you cluttering up my bedroom?” a smooth voice asked from the doorway.
“Uh-huh.” I dropped my earrings on the side table on the right. I put my watch on the other table. “This room is entirely too organized.”
“It serves its purpose,” he said.
“Life isn’t just about serving a purpose,” I said, trying to make my voice seductive. He was standing by the bed, and I raised myself up on my knees. I was the perfect height to look into his wonderful blue eyes. I could get lost in them for hours, in those many crystalline patterns, the light blues chasing the dark in swirls and dips. My fingers worked at his tie.
“That’s what my life was about before I met you.”
“Aren’t you glad I changed all that?” I threw the tie, and it fluttered down to land somewhere by my shoes.
“More glad than you’ll ever know.”
“Why don’t you show me?” I teased, slipping his shirt from his shoulders, letting it fall on top of my pants.
When the pleasure had ripped from us, leaving me breathless, and him spent, we held each other in bed. I struggled to catch my breath, but my vampire didn’t have that trouble.
“Was that what you wanted?” he asked, his lips brushing against my ear lobe as he spoke.
“Pretty much,” I teased between pants.
“Really? Because we could try again, you know, until we get it right.”
Too exhausted to think, I laughed in reply.
I was on the edge of sleep, half awake, trying to figure out what had woken me. Jakob wasn’t in bed, and the faint sound of talking came from the kitchen. I pulled on my pants and his shirt before I stumbled into the hallway where the voices became clearer.
“Do I need to tell you to stop ignoring Mallory when E’s around?” Mark’s voice was mirthful.
“No.”
“Then I’ll assume I don’t need to mention that Mallory’s feeling a wee bit threatened by E?”
“No.”
“Or that E, while she’s wonderful, isn’t the little girl you raised anymore?” There was a loud crash, and I raced into the kitchen. Mark was standing in front of the refrigerator straightening his shirt. The magnets that usually held a dozen recipes Jakob was waiting to try were all over the floor. The cookbooks normally lined up on top of the refrigerator covered the floor like earthquake victims. Jakob was in front of Mark, his face a mask of rage. Obviously, I had missed the part where Jakob threw him up against the appliance.
“You wouldn’t be upset if I wasn’t right.” He grinned at Jakob and then turned to me. “Don’t let your heart race too much for me, he’ll get the wrong idea about us and then—”
“Mark.” Jakob’s voice cut like a knife. A thin line of blood formed across Mark’s mouth like he’d been smacked hard enough to split his lip.
“You really are having trouble with this, aren’t you?” He dabbed at the blood before it had a chance to run down. “Deal with it, Jakob, because the woman you’re about to lose is worth it. Good night, Mallory.” Mark blew me a kiss as he walked out, grinning.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Jakob took a moment to get himself under control and then turned to me. “Am I losing you?”
“No.” I hesitated. “Unless you want to be. I guess I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but maybe you do. Shit, I thought we had settled this.” I turned away from him to try and think. I’d been happily asleep a few minutes ago, and now Jakob was beating Mark up over E. Or maybe over me, I wasn’t sure which remark upset him more. I stepped toward the couch to sit down to sort it out. Instead, I walked into Jakob’s chest. He wrapped his arms around me.
“I can’t lose you.” He spoke above my head, so I couldn’t see his eyes, but his tone told me Mark had gotten to him. “I was alone for too long before I found you. Now that I have you, now that I love you this way, I can’t lose you.”
“Then don’t. Tell me why you got so upset at Mark over her and not me?”
“Sometimes I think the two of them, the way they act together…” He stopped himself. “It’s silly and not worth mentioning. But you, you’re what matters, and I promised you we wouldn’t talk about this.”
“We can if we need to. Do we need to?” I was tired of talking about it. He told me he loved me. He promised not to ignore me. I wanted the issue to be done.
“No. I love you. If you still love me, the rest of it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course, I still love you,” I said kissing him fiercely. “It’ll take a hell of a lot more than one bad dinner for that to change.”
Sleeping in on Saturday was a luxury I only got to enjoy every other weekend. I had worked last Saturday, ending a day of domestic violence (witch v. troll), shoplifting (imp), and a host of other normal crimes committed by not so normal citizens before the arson case where I met E. I gave myself an extra half an hour of indulgence out of respect for how nasty that Saturday was, finally rolling away from Jakob’s mostly dead form a little after eleven. I didn’t have clothes at Jakob’s place, so I pulled on my jeans from last night with one of his shirts and wandered into the kitchen.
It was fall, so the house was stocked with apples, pears, and plums. He couldn’t eat, but that didn’t stop Jakob’s obsession with food. Unfortunately, his idea of a decadent culinary extravagance was fresh fruit, not the sinful chocolate creations I would have chosen. I crunched a tart pear while I lay on the couch, wondering what I could do with myself until he woke up.
My eyes fell on the box of E memorabilia. I’d asked for a weekend of not talking about her, but curiosity ate at me. I pulled the lid off and rummaged around. A packet of letters caught me, the envelopes in order, five of one type of stationery, then six or eight of another, with postcards tucked in between. They were arranged chronologically thanks to my boyfriend’s adorable organization skills. I pulled the rubber band off and got started.
Farthest back were postcards of cartoon characters and national monuments, the stuff of summer trips. This was E in grade school, with big looping script and i’s dotted with hearts. The best part of the Grand Canyon was the campfire which she pronounced “awesome” but the donkey ride down the side of the canyon was “dullsville.” Mikey was annoying, Mom and Dad were fine. I guessed Mikey was her baby brother from the photos. The next family trip was Washington D.C. where she looked up names for Jakob on the Wall. I stopped to dig through the box to find the rubbings and wondered about the names listed there. There were other postcards from similar family trips, big cities, theme parks, and all the big national parks.
