Fury’s Kiss Page 4

  “Yeah, the thing is…” I took a deep breath. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever happened to that guy last night, I had no control over it.”

  Nora looked at the kitchen window. I followed her gaze and saw Jackson watching us. “Look,” she said, “I haven’t told Jackson what you are yet, but he’s going to have to know. We both lied to the cops for you.”

  Now that was welcome news—though I had trouble believing it had been an easy sell to get Jackson to lie to the authorities. But why was Nora so willing to put herself at risk to protect me?

  “Why did you do it?” I asked.

  “Because I know what you are and why you killed that guy. The signs were all there.”

  “Signs? What signs?”

  She gave me a look I recognized, having seen it on my mother’s face about a million times growing up. It was a mom thing that meant I know you know what you did.

  The trouble was, this time I really had no idea. “Humor me?”

  “OK.” Nora held up one finger. “First, the guy’s jeans were undone, meaning one of several things. Either he’d been relieving himself when he died, he’d been having a little solo fun in the parking lot, or he was with someone. Since Jackson saw you out there with him, it seemed like a safe bet that someone was you. If you had left, he would have just come in to drink with his buddy.”

  “Go on.”

  She raised another finger. “Second, there were no signs of a struggle. Meaning the guy was killed quickly. And you’re not big enough to take on a man that size without one hell of a scuffle. Unless you’re a black belt or something.” She looked at me and pursed her lips. “Since you’re probably not, and there’s no way you could have fit a gun in the purse you were carrying—”

  “Hey,” I interrupted, “who says I’m not a black belt? I could be very lethal, you know.”

  It was only after I said it that I remembered being incapable of committing murder was a good thing, especially since I was trying to convince someone that I wasn’t, in fact, a murderer.

  Thankfully, Nora ignored me and kept going. “Third, the body just didn’t look like a natural death. I’m no expert, but it was bloated and bluish, like it had been in the water for a while, but it wasn’t decomposed at all. And it couldn’t have been suffocation, because the guy was puffed up to almost twice his normal size.”

  I was impressed. She’d gotten a lot of mileage out of that crime scene. “You really know your ways to kill a person.”

  She shrugged. “What can I say? I read a lot of true crime.”

  “So just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right and I am a Fury. What, exactly, would that entail?”

  “Well, you know the mythology, right?”

  I shook my head. “Let’s just say I don’t.”

  “OK, here are the Cliffs Notes. In ancient Greek mythology, the Furies were born when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitals into the ocean. The Furies were formed by drops of his blood.”

  I grimaced. So far, ew.

  Nora continued, “Some sources say the sisters were even older than that, born of Night itself, but everyone agrees that they were goddesses of the underworld. They were associated with the usual underworld stuff—blood, death, serpents, you get the picture. Descriptions of them vary, but it’s pretty widely accepted that they had snakes for hair and they cried tears of blood. Sometimes they had the bodies of animals.”

  Lovely. The snaky hair was already familiar—and thank God that wasn’t literal—but now I had to wonder if I was going to start growing fur in unsightly places, too?

  “They were goddesses of vengeance,” Nora went on, “appearing on behalf of those who summoned them. They were called the Kindly Ones because they never punished anyone who didn’t deserve it, though the punishments were always pretty terrible. And they wouldn’t stop until they were satisfied justice had been done.”

  Ruby appeared at the back door and called for us to come inside for pancakes, and my stomach flopped. On the heels of Nora’s talk of snakes and death, lunch suddenly sounded a lot less appetizing. I looked back at the kitchen window where I could see Jackson setting the table, and felt a pang of regret that I wouldn’t have a chance to convince him I wasn’t the lunatic he must have thought I was.

  But even if my appetite hadn’t abandoned me, I couldn’t have stayed. If what Nora suspected was true, I was dealing with something huge and I couldn’t afford to be distracted. And worrying about what Jackson Byrne thought of me could be a major distraction if I let it.

  I turned to Nora. After lying to the police on my behalf and convincing Jackson to do the same, she deserved what little explanation I could give her.

  “Everything you just told me sounds basically insane, but you may be right about what’s happening. The thing is, I appreciate the help, but I don’t know any more than you do about what happened to that guy.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She waved a hand to dismiss my thanks. “For one thing, I’m a single mother to a little girl. And for another…didn’t my last name give you a hint as to why I’m helping you?”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “Katsaros? It’s Greek.”

  Well, duh. But so what? My ancestors were Scottish, but it didn’t mean I believed in the Loch Ness monster. Though I might have to reevaluate that one, all things considered.

  “OK. So you’re Greek. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I was practically raised on the old legends. That’s why I was able to recognize what you are. If that body had been found by anybody else in Hawthorne, you’d probably be locked in a cell by now.”

  When she put it that way, my knees sagged with relief. “But what does being a single mother have to do with anything?”

  “I’m raising a little girl on my own,” Nora pointed out. “It’s my job to protect her from guys like the one you took out. The way things looked when I found the body? I figure he had it coming. One less guy like that in the world is one less thing I have to worry about.”

  Huh. Maybe she was the real Fury here. The steel in her voice told me she would take out anyone who tried to hurt her daughter. With her bare hands, if necessary.

  Ruby called for us again and I made my excuses. “I should go, but tell Ruby I’m sorry for missing lunch. I’ve got some things I’ve got to figure out, and I don’t want you guys to get mixed up in this any more than you already have been.”

  “No problem. And don’t worry about Jackson. He won’t say anything if I ask him not to.”

  “What about Lefty?”

  Lefty was the manager at Spyder’s and he was known for two things—his love of booze and his dislike of people. His idea of a good time was watching the bar’s security tapes in hopes of catching someone doing something they shouldn’t have. It was a mystery how someone so disagreeable had ever gotten a job serving the public.

  Nora grinned. “Turns out there was a glitch with the cameras last night. No footage got recorded.”

  I felt tears pricking the corners of my eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time that day. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to make this up to you,” I promised. “Seriously, you didn’t have to do this for me. You hardly know me.”

  “I know you well enough to believe you’re a good person who didn’t deserve what happened,” Nora answered. Warmth crept up my neck and face, and I nodded my thanks before turning to go.

  I made it a few steps before one last, important question occurred to me and I turned back. “Hey. You don’t know anything about Miller’s friend, do you? He would have come into the bar right after I left. He saw me talking to his buddy.”

  Nora frowned, trying to remember. “Actually, I did overhear something about him. The police were looking for him so they could question him. They’d been to the motel where he was staying and asked around, but they were still trying to track him down when I left the station.”

  My frown matched No
ra’s. So Miller’s friend hadn’t gone to the police to report my contact with his friend the night before—but why hadn’t he? If your buddy turned up dead, wasn’t that one of the first things you’d do? And he had to know by now what had happened to Miller. The news would be all over the Cape.

  I had a million questions and no answers, so I said good-bye to Nora and headed back toward the curb out front, intending to rendezvous with the girls and share what I’d learned. But this time I headed around the side of the house instead of going through the kitchen, carefully avoiding the window as I went by. There was no need to antagonize Jackson further.

  Or to torture myself with another glimpse of something I couldn’t have.

  Chapter 4

  As I drove home from Nora’s, I tried to digest what she’d told me. Less than twenty-four hours ago, my biggest problem had been my lack of a love life. Now, I would have given anything to have that kind of problem back.

  You would separate yourself from me? A voice spoke in my head. It startled me so badly I let out a yelp and nearly veered off the road. My tires hit gravel and I had to swallow my heart back down into my chest as I wrenched the wheel to guide the car back onto asphalt. The voice was female, with a sort of reptilian hiss, and I recognized it from the night before. It sounded exactly how you might expect someone to sound if they had red eyes and snakes for hair.

  The way you might expect a Fury to sound.

  Hello? I thought, testing the waters. Who’s there? I turned the radio off so I could listen more carefully, then hit my turn signal and pulled over at a gas station on my right. I really didn’t want to rear-end someone because I was busy talking to the voices in my head.

  The voice didn’t answer.

  Hello? I tried again, but there was still nothing. Freaky-me seemed to be a woman of few words. Not sure what to do next, I stared blankly out the window and tried to think. Though the voice wouldn’t answer me, I was beginning to believe Nora had been right. There was something in my head, something that had killed Clinton Miller, and Fury seemed to suit it as well as any other word.

  The idea of something foreign and inhuman inside me was both terrifying and a relief. On one hand, I felt like Sigourney Weaver in one of those Alien movies, harboring some awful, destructive force inside me. But on the other hand, at least it provided an explanation for the things I’d done, for the kiss I’d used to kill Miller. What was that old saying? Better the devil you know than the one you don’t? At least having a name to attach to the voice in my head meant I might be on track to learning more about what was happening to me.

  I sat there half-hoping and half-fearing the voice would speak again until I was snapped out of my daze by the sight of a familiar face. Miller’s ill-mannered friend from the night before exited the convenience store attached to the gas station. He put on a pair of sunglasses as he stepped out into the bright afternoon sunlight and checked out a couple of young teenage girls who passed him on their way in.

  Pervert. Not that I was surprised, given the company he’d kept. His buddy had been found dead in a parking lot only that morning, and here he was buying Doritos and a newspaper like nothing happened.

  I slouched down in my seat in case he glanced my way, peering up over the dash every few seconds to follow his progress to the pumps. He opened the driver’s side door of a black, jacked-up truck and swung himself into the cab. The engine rumbled to life and I dithered over what to do next. Should I follow or let him go? And if I did follow, what then?

  Nora and Jackson wouldn’t implicate me in Clinton Miller’s death, and I’d been reassured that Lefty was no threat. That left the man in the truck as the strongest link between the body and me. Should I follow and confront him in an attempt to find out what he planned to tell the cops? Or should I let him go and hope he wouldn’t mention me?

  Follow, freaky-me urged inside my head. Again, she startled me, and I jerked up straight in my seat, managing to smash my funny bone painfully against the door. I stifled a moan and wished Alex and Rachel were there to back me up. Alex would tell me to follow the guy, no question. Rachel, though, would look at the situation rationally and point out that following the truck could only make things worse. That confronting this guy would do nothing but remind him of what I looked like and reinforce his memory of the night before.

  The voice spoke again. FOLLOW. Demanding now, not persuading.

  I thought of the leer the guy had given the two teenage girls he’d just passed and gritted my teeth. Whether I wanted to or not, I couldn’t go back to the way things had been. The voice in my head was proof of that. And what if what was happening to me wasn’t such a bad thing? Maybe Nora was right, maybe there wasn’t enough justice in the world.

  Maybe this was happening to me because I was supposed to stop guys like Miller and his friend.

  My knee bounced rapidly and butterflies fluttered in my stomach. I took quick, shallow breaths and put the car in drive quickly so I wouldn’t have time to chicken out. As I pulled out behind the truck, I eased off the gas to keep some space between us. I didn’t know if the slimeball behind the wheel would recognize me if he looked back, but there was no sense drawing attention to myself.

  My hands clenched so tightly on the wheel my fingernails turned white, and I exhaled in heavy relief when the truck signaled a right and pulled into the parking lot of the Stardust, a cheap motel where you could rent a room by the day, week, or month. The truck stopped in front of room number five and I continued on past the motel to park at the neighboring grocery store.

  I watched as my quarry let himself into his room, then felt around in my purse for the pepper spray Alex had pressed on me before I left the house. I twisted my long hair up into a bun and grabbed an elastic from the jumble of hair ties and bobby pins I kept in one of the cup holders. There was a ball cap on the backseat, so I jammed it on my head and pulled the bun out through the hole in the back. Sherlock Holmes, I wasn’t, but my makeshift disguise was the best I could do.

  I reached for the door handle, but paused before exiting the car. Was I really going to go through with this? Follow a strange man into his motel room and confront him? My intention to do so went against every ounce of caution and self-protective instinct I’d had drilled into me by my mother, Oprah, and every man who’d ever catcalled me on a public street where I should have felt safe.

  Then I remembered how I’d felt the night before, when this man had called me a bitch simply because I’d walked away from him. And how his friend had felt entitled to take what he wanted from me just because I was a young woman out alone at night. Nora’s words about protecting Ruby rang in my ears and I knew that yes, I would follow this man into his motel room. And yes, I would do whatever it took to protect myself.

  I would not be a victim again.

  Costume in place, I got out of the car and tried to look like any other shopper picking up a few groceries on a Saturday afternoon. My heart was pumping adrenaline through my veins as fast as it could, and I hoped my nervousness wasn’t apparent to anyone who looked my way. I walked over to the motel and took a quick scan of my surroundings to make sure no one was paying any particular attention. I didn’t see anyone, so I kept my head down and knocked on the door marked with a five. I heard movement inside. After what seemed like hours, the chain rattled and the door opened about six inches.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hiiii.” I drew out my vowels and tried to sound as perky as possible. “I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but I was hoping I could use your phone. The phone in my room’s not working and there’s no one in the office.” I gave the guy my best dumb-blonde smile. “It’s kind of an emergency. My sister took the car to get a few things, but I forgot to tell her there’s no gas in the tank. And the gauge is broken, so there’s no way for her to tell.”

  As cover stories went, it wasn’t much, but I hoped I was cute enough and he was dumb enough not to think about it too hard. If I’d learned anything from Alex over the years, it was that you co
uld get away with just about anything if you sounded like you believed your own story.

  He closed the door to unhook the chain, then opened it again and stepped back to let me enter. He pointed out the phone with a grunt as I stepped inside and looked around. In addition to the nightstand on which the phone sat, there was a double bed that took up the middle of the room and a dresser, TV, and cable box. A closed door led to what I knew would be a small, basic washroom. The room was clean and had nothing obviously wrong with it, but there was something off, just the same. A sick knot of anxiety twisted in my stomach and I wished I hadn’t followed him, after all. But it was too late to turn back now.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Alex’s number. She answered after a few rings and I turned my back to the guy. “Hey, sis,” I said into the receiver. “I forgot to tell you the car’s almost out of gas, so you should definitely stop and get some.”

  “What? Tara, is that you? What are you talking about?”

  “Yeah, I think I saw a gas station right up the street from the motel.”

  “You’re at a motel? Doing what? With who?” She paused, trying to come up with a reason for my random phone call. “Is Jackson there with you?”

  Yeah, right. I wished.

  “No, the phone’s still not working. I’m using our neighbor’s.” I could hear Rachel in the background, demanding answers.

  “Do you need help?” Alex asked. “Is this a code? Are you talking like this because you’re with someone?”

  “No, no, and yes.” I tried to keep her questions straight. “You know you’re not supposed to talk and drive, though, so I’ll let you go.”

  “Tara, do not hang up this phone,” Alex ordered. Her voice was firm, but I ignored it.

  “OK, you too. See you soon. Bye.” I hung up. Rachel would want to reverse dial the call right away, but Alex wouldn’t let her. She would be just as worried and curious as Rachel was, but she had enough common sense to realize that if I was calling with some story about a motel and a neighbor’s phone, calling back would just cause more trouble than I might already be in.