Brennan opens the gate of our booth and holds out a hand. “Come, let’s dance. Arla has hogged you long enough.”
I look at her, and the implicit need for permission troubles me as soon as I register it, but she shoos me away with a perfectly manicured hand. “Go. Have fun. Enjoy yourself, kitten. We’ll talk later.”
I let Brennan pull me away, my maiden’s prayer still sloshing in one hand. He tugs me back through the keyhole toward the crowded dance floor where a heady beat is pumping beneath brass horns and another instrument I can’t make out. I feel out of place, still in my T-shirt and trench coat, but no one seems to notice or care. The twins are already dancing, I realize. They must have come in after us, after stowing their cemetery loot elsewhere. An involuntary quiver runs along my extremities. Far be it for me to chastise anyone for stealing, but making off with your great-aunt’s cremains is next level.
Twig slithers through the crowd, an impish smile on her face as she reaches up with her snake whip, curling it around my neck to pull me close.
I should be afraid of her,I think. I am, actually. But the music and the booze are coursing through my system, dragging me away from reality. Shaking my head, I say loudly into her ear, “I thought you didn’t like me.”
She shrugs. “I’m not the one who has to like you.”
“What do you mean?” I shout above the music, Brennan at my side.
Twig giggles like a little girl. “Shedecides who comes, who stays…”
“Who?” I press. “Arla?”
My question causes her to erupt in a fountain of giggles that settle more abruptly than they began. “The dragon tries by fire,” she says, a deadly glint in her gaze. “I thought you knew that.”
My eyes narrow, but Brennan is tugging her from my neck, pushing me deeper onto the floor before I can ask something else. “Relax, Jude,” he says as I resist, my eyes following Twig even as she disappears into a cluster of people. “Tonight is for celebrating. Tomorrow is for questions.”
We start dancing, several people shifting nearer to me, grinding against my side or twirling around me like I’m some kind of celebrity. Brennan laughs, lost in the rhythm, and I finish my drink but keep holding the glass because there’s nowhere to set it. The cocktail must have been stronger than I realized because the riddles swirling in my mind drift further out of reach until I can’t place them at all. In their stead, there is only the thump of music and feet and a slide show of images I no longer understand—a hole gaping in the earth, Arla grinning in the pale firelight, the serpentine coil of a scaled body, circling back on itself, glinting in the dark. At the center of them, the dim recollection that I should be afraid, but I can’t remember of what or why.
I can’t stretch my consciousness beyond this dance floor, beyond this moment or these people. At one point I spin to see Arla leaning over the bar, whispering to the bartender. He looks my way and nods. I wonder what she’s on about. I want to ask. But Brennan has me by the waist and is turning me around, and Twig, on her tiptoes, is kissing Rock and a young woman with long silver waves and white headphones is beaming at me like we’re old schoolmates. The floor pulses with bodies and music and suddenly my glass is no longer empty. I drink it back, againand again, only to find it mysteriously refilled. I want to ask the gray-haired woman her name and I want to tell Brennan what happened in the cemetery and I want to find Arla and demand some real answers.
But those wants turn fuzzy. And all I can manage to do is keep dancing.
12WITCHCRAFT
I don’t know where I am.The thought floats lazily through me as I slowly make my way to consciousness. It is the same thought I had my first morning at Solidago. I remember waking up in my distant room, scooting from the bed into the hall, and wandering through the bone-white maze of a house, chilled and calling for my mom. She’d tucked me in the night before, lain down beside me until I drifted off. I never expected to wake up alone. But the halls were empty, the doors all closed. And I never heard her voice call back. By the time I found the kitchen, I was sobbing. Nina, in her infinite goodness, scooped me up and bundled me into an empty chair, stacking a pile of pancakes so high before me that I could scarcely think through the flood of maple syrup.
I manage to peel open one eye and then the other. A gauzy champagne light is pouring through tall windows, stroking me softly awake. In it, particles of dust glint like bubbles. I make a feeble attempt at prodding my memory of last night for answers, but it remains stubbornly dormant. Instead, I take in the room, craning my head to examine the beaded purple bedding and the dark leg to my left—hairless, smooth as silk, decidedly feminine. A jolt of alarm forces me all the way up, and I stare down into a sheet of platinum-gray waves. My eyes follow them to their source, theyoung, rounded face of the woman on the dance floor, her headphones resting on the nightstand beside her.
Did I come home with her? Did we…
I quickly check myself beneath the covers, take stock of my current state. My trench coat is nowhere to be seen, my jeans are in a heap on the floor on the opposite side of the bed, but I’m still wearing the black T-shirt and my not-at-all-sexy underwear don’t look like they’ve seen any action since they came out of the package. I reach up to find my hair unattractively knotted on one side. Sliding out of the bed, I tiptoe over and start to drag on my jeans, noticing that Madam Gray is also dressed on top, making a tryst seem less and less likely.
With my jeans all the way up but not yet fastened, I pick up her headphones and slide them on, curious. There’s no sound, just a sudden sense of slipping out of the world, a muffled quiet that wasn’t there before. I take them off and set them down. Who wears noise-canceling headphones to a nightclub?
I stagger to the window and look out over a Seattle street capped with a yellowed sky the color of an old bruise. I am several stories high, which is exactly what I was last night too. The evening begins to flicker back to life like a silent film. The cemetery. The club. The dancing. What were they putting in those drinks? Arla has some explaining to do.
As if the thought conjures her, a florid mahogany door swings wide. Arla stands in the frame, her silk kimono robe dripping off her in a dance of peacock feathers. Her face is porcelain, unblemished and unadorned. There is not one feature, I think as I stare at her, that stands out on its own besides her smile, which is curly as incense smoke. It’s the way they come together that strikes the eye, the fit rather than the parts.
She looks me over and grins. “Oh good. You’re awake. There’s coffee.” Then, just as quickly, she twirls away.
I’m still doing up my fly when I trail after her into a large, open room with the same tall, vertical windows. Plush, curving sofas square off before them, an engorged fringed ottoman in thecenter, its upholstery the same rosy hue as a bloated mosquito. On one of the sofas, Brennan is laid out with a vintage issue ofVoguespread open. On the other, Rock is snoring. A freestanding fireplace encased in glass glistens seductively in a far corner.
To my left, a long glass dining table is poised on two ibex heads made of brass, their horns curling gracefully from table to floor, and surrounded by delicate chairs. Beyond them, Arla is standing behind a zebra-marble island lined with brass stools. A wall of sleek black cabinets backs her, and a Jura coffee machine purrs at her side. I recognize the brand because Roger was always going on about them. They were in the top three items on his fantasy Christmas list, sandwiched between a Breguet watch—sorry,timepiece—and a trip to the Faroe Islands. I should have known what a tool he was then.
“What time is it?” It’s Monday, I recall groggily. The thought of being late for work again so soon after the last disastrous occasion stirs my anxiety. Calvin will eat this up.
“Sit down,” she commands. “I called your office. You’re at the UW Medical Center being treated for food poisoning.”
“I am? Why would they believe that?”
She smiles softly at me. “Because I’m your nurse.”
I can’t imagine Arla as a nurse unless it’s a slinky, pinup one. But arealnurse—finding a vein, holding someone’s colostomy bag? No. She seems to have a way of convincing people of the unbelievable, though.
