Strange Fates Page 21

  Talbot was lounging on the red velvet sofa, looking like Lord Byron in an old smoking jacket from the shop. She knelt in front of him and caressed the good side of his bandaged face.

  “Nyx told me what happened,” she said. “Are you okay?” If I had any doubt that Naomi cared about Talbot, it was dispelled when I saw her touch his face.

  He pulled her onto the sofa and whispered something in her ear that made her blush.

  I turned away to give them some privacy. When seconds stretched into minutes, I cleared my throat.

  They broke apart, wearing matching blushes.

  “How did Gaston manage to convince Deci to give him the harpies?” I asked Naomi.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said.

  “You have to tell me, you little idiot,” I growled.

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” she snapped.

  “I can’t believe you can’t see what he’s after,” I said.

  “What is he after?” Her expression didn’t give anything away.

  “He’s after the Fates,” I said. “He’s been your little errand boy for so long. The aunts couldn’t even see it when he started to turn on them.”

  “Do you have any proof?” she asked.

  “Naomi, just get your mom to go somewhere safe,” I told her. “The farther away from Gaston, the better.” Part of me wanted to leave the Fates to Gaston, but Gaston got his kicks from hurting women. There was no way I’d let him win.

  “Why should I believe you?” She was in a snit, but I couldn’t really blame her. I’d handled it badly.

  “Trust me,” I said. “You don’t want to turn your back on Gaston.” I rubbed the scar on my wrist.

  She stared at me for a long second. “I do believe you are serious. But you’re still an asshole.”

  “I might be an asshole, but you know I’m right,” I said.

  “Don’t be mad at Nyx,” Talbot said. “He saved me.”

  “You were lucky,” I heard Naomi murmur.

  “We all need a little luck,” Talbot said.

  It was going to take every bit of luck we could find to get through this.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The next day, the harpies hadn’t returned, but I couldn’t shake off the sense that there was a whole lot of bad juju headed my way. And I still hadn’t heard from Elizabeth.

  I decided to look for Elizabeth after her last class. I parked the Caddy in front of the imposing brick building where she took her acting class and got out and sat on the hood. College kids streamed through its doors, but I didn’t see Elizabeth in the throng.

  Why were snooty colleges always made of brick or stone or something equally hard and unmoving? Perhaps to impress prospective students and their families even more, it was named after some forgotten Romantic poet.

  I waited until I spied a likely-looking coed and sauntered up to her.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  Her eyes did a full inventory of me before she cracked a smile.

  “Well, he-llo,” she replied, drawing the word out.

  “I’m looking for Elizabeth Abernathy. Have you seen her?”

  “I don’t know an Elizabeth,” she replied. “And I know everyone. Except you.”

  “Tall, blond, gorgeous? Green eyes?”

  “You can check the commons,” she said. “I saw a girl matching that description there just now. With her boyfriend. But I think her name is Beth.”

  Beth? Elizabeth wasn’t a Beth. Beth was the saintly, sickly girl from Little Women, which I’d been forced to read when I’d been holed up like a rat in a London attic one winter. Elizabeth was my daring, bold, funny girlfriend. Wasn’t she?

  The flirty coed had the boyfriend thing wrong, too. People got stuff wrong all the time, I told myself, but a cold creeping dread filled my heart.

  I assumed a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “Point me in the right direction?”

  After the coed offered directions and her phone number, I took the first and declined the second, but took my time to find Elizabeth. Time I needed to unclench my spine, ungrit my teeth, and return my heartbeat to a normal rate.

  The commons, which was just another word for an interior courtyard, kept out most of the wind, but ice and snow had found their way in just the same. Long icicles hung from the rim of the roof and stabbed at the air like frozen daggers.

  At first, I thought the courtyard was empty, but then I noticed two figures huddled together at a cheap industrial picnic table, the kind that was bolted down. As if anyone would want to steal a scarred metal table.

  There she was, in the wool coat that brought out the green in her eyes. And sitting next to her, staring into those green eyes, was the Tracker. I’d never seen him like this, all gooey-eyed, instead of lit with animosity.

  Gaston was sitting too close to her, but Elizabeth didn’t move away. The fog of lust I’d been walking around in had cleared and I saw her with dreadful clarity. Her too-pale face looked ruthless in the pale afternoon light.

  My only satisfaction came from the fact that they were arguing.

  I had the foresight to mutter “obscura” before I was spotted, but that was my last clear thought. They wouldn’t be able to see me, but I would still be able to see them.

  And I didn’t like what I saw.

  “That isn’t what I agreed to do, Gaston,” she said.

  “Tell me where he is,” he said.

  There was a stubborn set to her lips that I recognized. “No.”

  He grabbed her wrist and twisted it until she winced. She yanked her hand away. “Don’t touch me,” she said. “You may be able to get away with that with Jenny, but I’m not your punching bag. I wish Jenny had never met you.”

  “You’re already in it this far,” he said. “And there’s your brother to think of.”

  “Is that a threat? I agreed to get to know Nyx, that’s all.”

  “You agreed to get him to fall in love with you and you agreed to break his heart.” The words sent a spike of pain to my heart, but I told myself to be cold, to be still, to wait.

  “You promised they’d let Alex go,” she burst out.

  Excuses, rationalizations, and bargains all swam up from my heart to my brain until the thought coalesced. I’d been conned. There was no other explanation. There were no coincidences. Gaston worked for my aunts and apparently, so did Elizabeth. The girl upon whom I had pinned so many hopes was a liar.

  My brain was boiling with ideas, how to hurt them, how to make them pay. I’d been a willing victim to Elizabeth’s seduction. I’d been a sucker, a fool. But all that was over now. I would remind them that I was one of the Wyrd family. And my reminder would hurt.

  I passed the coed on my way out but didn’t return her smile. I was afraid showing my teeth would scare her.

  * * *

  I slammed into Eternity Road.

  “Talbot, can I borrow your laptop?” I hollered.

  “Help yourself. It’s on the counter,” he shouted back. His voice came from the office, which is where his father brought him since the harpy attack. Talbot was on serious lockdown. The wound on his face had started to heal, but whenever I looked at him I was reminded of how I’d put him in danger.

  “Thanks!” I sat at the cash register and fired up the laptop. The Internet had to have been created by a true sorcerer. It was amazing the stuff you could find out with one click of a mouse. Especially when you knew the girl who claimed to love you was a liar. I typed in “Elizabeth Abernathy” and got a hit almost immediately.

  A younger Elizabeth, hair in pigtails, standing next to her brother at a local science fair. The headline read “Boy Genius Finishes in First Place.”

  Then her parents’ obituary. At least she hadn’t lied about that. I tried her brother Alex and found everything I needed to know.

  The article was a puff piece. At sixteen, boy genius Alex Abernathy graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy League university and then went to work at a local Minneapolis business in rese
arch and development. It didn’t mention the business by name, but in the photo, Alex held a bottle of that atrocious nectar of the gods that Gaston was always sucking down.

  That was the link. I’d found bottle caps all over the city. All with the Parsi logo and smelling of nectar of the gods. Gaston was double-crossing my aunts, but why? What did he get out of it? He’d been their loyal dog for a good long time and they kept him supplied with the orange liquid that rotted his brain, but extended his life. What had changed?

  There might still be time to stop him, if the aunts would listen to me.

  I’m not proud, but I waited until everyone was out and searched Elizabeth’s house. I went there looking for answers, but what I found surprised me.

  I crossed to the desk, only to find the drawers locked. I used a trick a retired thief had taught me instead of magic and after a few tries, the drawer slid open. It looked like a typical home office filing system, everything neatly arranged and labeled, except for one folder in the back.

  I took it out and opened it. I spied a reproduction of an oil painting of me as a baby. It had been painted by a starving artist in London. The original hung in the Louvre.

  There was a black-and-white photo of me, in uniform right after the war ended, kissing a girl I didn’t even know. Another of me at my friend Marco’s funeral. He’d been fifteen when we met and had died an old man. I’d passed myself off as his old friend’s grandson.

  The third photo was taken sometimes in the early eighties. I wore Doc Martens, tight black pants, and no shirt under the same leather jacket I carried with me everywhere. The punk scene had appealed to me. The angry music and angrier people who loved it. I had fit right in.

  Where had she managed to get these?

  “What are you doing in here?” Elizabeth’s voice came from the doorway.

  “Why do you have all these pictures of me?”

  “Nyx, come sit down and we’ll talk,” she said. Of course she recognized me right away without the occulo spell. She’d known what I really looked like the entire time.

  “Let’s talk now. I think you have some explaining to do,” I told her. I threw the photos and they landed in a pile at her feet.

  “Nyx, I wanted to tell you,” Elizabeth said.

  “Tell me what, exactly? That you’ve been playing me this whole time? Yeah, I finally figured that out,” I said.

  She didn’t know what to say. What could she tell me that would ease the ache in my stomach?

  She ran from the room and I followed close at her heels, straight to the kitchen, where Jenny sat.

  “He knows.” Elizabeth burst into tears.

  I knew everything I needed to know. I’d been betrayed by the girl I loved.

  “We’ve looked for you for a long time,” Elizabeth said.

  “So our meeting wasn’t a coincidence?” I asked. I kept my voice carefully even, but inside I was raging. She’d waited until there was someone else around before telling me the truth. If I was honest, it was lucky she did. I don’t know what I would have done if Jenny hadn’t been there to witness my humiliation. Beg, plead, cry. Or all of the above.

  “Morta,” Elizabeth said. “It was her idea.”

  The words were razor blades to my heart. “Go on,” I managed to say.

  “Your aunts asked me to find you,” she said. “So the entire time, you knew.” My aunts had asked for a cease-fire, while all the time they were planning on ripping out my heart, one way or another.

  “Knew what?” she asked.

  “That I was cursed with eternal life. That my aunts want my thread of fate.”

  “Hardly a curse,” Elizabeth said. “It’s a gift.”

  “A gift? To watch everyone you love die? To be alone in the world? To know it’s safer that way because if you do love someone, you’ll have to watch them die and you’ll be alone again? Does that sound like a gift to you?”

  Elizabeth put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off. I couldn’t bear for her to touch me, to know I’d been played like a trout on a fishing line.

  “You make me sick,” I said.

  Elizabeth flinched, but continued anyway. “They want to know where it is.”

  “Where what is?” I stalled, but I knew right away what she meant. “If I knew, I’d give it to them. Don’t you understand? I have nothing left to live for.” It had been a cleverly crafted illusion. “You couldn’t see them for what they are?”

  “I’ve never met them,” she insisted. “We communicated through Gaston.” An elusive thought niggled at my brain, but I was too angry to pursue it.

  “You deliberately slipped me the libido spell to get me to sleep with you,” I accused.

  “That was his idea,” she said. “He said your aunts were getting impatient.”

  I stayed stone-faced, but I was gasping for breath on the inside.

  “So your boyfriend Gaston was giving you tips on how to seduce me, is that it?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Elizabeth burst out. “And he’s not my boyfriend, he’s Jenny’s.”

  “Was my boyfriend,” Jenny objected. “He’s a psycho.”

  “So you believe in all that fate stuff?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I was desperate.”

  “Our meeting at the Red Dragon wasn’t coincidental?” My tone was even. “And here I thought I was just a lucky guy.” The whole thing—our meeting, our relationship, everything—was fake.

  Elizabeth threw me a quick, panicked look. “I had no choice.”

  “You went out with me because of my aunts?” The hot rage I’d felt had turned to ice in my veins.

  “Please, Nyx, I would give you anything,” Elizabeth said.

  “Apparently,” I replied.

  She flinched, but recovered quickly and glared at me. “You make it sound so sordid.”

  “Isn’t it?” I hadn’t even noticed when my hands had clenched into fists. I flexed my fingers until they unlocked.

  “Nyx, don’t you love me? Why can’t you tell me?” Elizabeth cried.

  “My death is far from here and hard to find,” I replied. I wondered if she would understand the quote.

  “The Golden Bough,” Jenny said. “I do appreciate a well-read individual.”

  I gave her a look that I hoped clearly indicated how little I gave a shit what she appreciated.

  “Look, you’re wasting your time,” I replied. “I could take what you’re offering, but you’ll never be free of them.”

  “I need to try,” Elizabeth said.

  “What was the plan, exactly?” I asked her.

  She wouldn’t look me in the eyes. “I was supposed to…befriend you.”

  My fists clenched again, but I forced my hands to relax. “And then?”

  “Get you to tell me where your thread of fate is and I would be free.”

  “So they hired you to break my heart? Congratulations on a job well done.” Lying, treacherous bitch.

  “They have Alex,” she said flatly. “They are holding him somewhere. Until I do what they want.”

  “So now you decide to tell me the truth?” I asked.

  “Nyx, I love—”

  “Don’t say it!” I screamed the words. “Don’t you ever say that to me.”

  “Alex is—” She gulped, and then continued. “He’s my brother. I’m his only hope.”

  “Why should I believe you?” God, how I hated her, but even with everything I now knew, I wanted her to say something, anything to let me love her again.

  “You have no reason to believe me,” she said. “But everything I’m telling you is true.”

  “Only one person in the history of the world has managed to steal a thread of life, and she’s dead now.”

  “That’s what you have to do?” she asked. “Just give them a thread?”

  “I have to give them my thread. The thing that keeps me alive. They killed my mother and they want to kill me.” They’d offered another option, but it wasn’t one I was
going to consider, not now. The burning need for revenge had been reignited.

  “She didn’t take her own thread when she took yours?”

  “No, she didn’t think she had to. The Fates live a very long time. Not forever, but close enough. My mother never dreamed her own sisters would cut her thread.”

  Her face softened, but she was smart enough not to try to touch me. “So you’ll do it?”

  “I haven’t agreed to do anything,” I replied. I’d told her too much. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Please help me,” she begged. “Just think about it before you give me your answer.”

  What would Gaston do to Alex and Elizabeth if I just walked away? It wouldn’t be pretty. I couldn’t have another death on my conscience. But that didn’t mean I would be her dumb lovesick puppy ever again.

  I met her eyes and nodded slowly.

  She threw her arms around me, but for the first time I felt nothing when she touched me. Betrayal made me numb.

  “Why’d they choose you?”

  “Does it matter?” she replied.

  “It matters to me.”

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Convenience,” she said. “Gaston and Alex hung out after work sometimes and I guess Alex talked about me and…”

  “And what?”

  “Gaston said I looked like your ex-girlfriend.”

  “He should know,” I said bitterly. “Since he’s the one who killed her.” I went on, “Why did they think it would work?” It had worked, all too well, but I didn’t want to think about that now.

  “I fancied myself quite the actress,” she said bitterly. “Alex was so proud of me. He—” She gulped and then continued. “—he used to say that I was so good at becoming someone else that I could fool anybody.”

  My mind was whirling. “Tell me again why you agreed to do it,” I said.

  “I told you,” Elizabeth said. “They have my brother.”

  I cleared my throat, hoping to dispel the nausea. “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you think I’d agree to something like this if I knew? I’m not a bad person.”