Dying For You (19 page)

“Your point?” her father had asked.

“Why do it at all? It’s fruitless.”

“We do it,” her mother had said, sounding firm for once, “because it is our family duty. And we do it to rid the world of evil. I don’t want to lose you, Rhea, but I’ll see you dead by my own hand before I’ll let you turn your back on the world, on your family.”

“Great, Mother. Just wonderful.”

Still trying to reconcile the fact that her parents were fine with seeing her dead—by a witch or by their hands—Rhea groped for her Beretta and obliterated the mannequin’s face with eight rounds.

It didn’t make her feel much better.

Chris drove the rental car through the gate and up the winding driveway, admiring the trees lining the drive, their leaves in full summer glory.
It must be amazing in the fall
, he thought.

The house and barn loomed before him, the barn a traditional red, the two-story house cream-colored with black shutters. Horses grazed in the field beside the barn, their coats glossy in the July sun. It was too idyllic for a hotbed of born-and-bred killers, which cheered him. He braked, yanked on the parking break, shut off the engine, and got out.

Just in time to practically shit his pants when a voice behind him shrilled, “Kill the witch! Kill the witch!”

He whirled, frantically trying to think of a rhyme to save himself, only to see a girl around seven years old pointing a toy six-shooter at him.

“Yeesh,” he said.

“Kill the witch! Pschow, pschow!” She aimed the toy gun between his eyes and fired twice. She was grinning hugely, showing the gap between her front teeth, the sun bouncing off the golden highlights in her light brown hair, dark eyes sparkling with fun. “You’re dead, witch!”

“Uh, run along, kiddo.”

“You’re dead, witch!”

“Okay. Bye now.”

With a final “pschow!” she darted past him and up the porch steps, disappearing around the corner.

Chris took long, steadying breaths.
Okay. I clearly have not prepared for this encounter. It’s okay. Deep breath. The kid caught you off guard, and you’re on edge anyway, because nobody’s tried the “let’s just talk” approach, ever. And you’re breaking years of tradition by showing up before your official “coming of age” ceremony. Deep breaths.

He attached little importance to the witch game; the kid had, after all, grown up in Salem. They probably soaked up “kill the witch” with their mother’s milk. Instead, he shrugged off the encounter and mounted the front porch steps, then rapped politely at the front door.

It was opened almost immediately by a middle-aged woman, late forties or early fifties, a woman who would have looked very nice if her eyes weren’t so red and swollen.
Allergies
, he thought.
Or she’s been crying for a while.

“Yes?” she asked in a watery voice.

“Uh, hello, I’m looking for your eldest.”

“My—you mean Rhea?” She pulled a tissue out of her sleeve and blew her nose. “Who are you? Are you from her school?”

“My name’s Chris Mere,” he replied, not expecting much in the way of consequences. He’d done this thousands of times in the past five years.

So the woman’s reaction was startling, to say the least. Her eyes widened, then narrowed, and she started to slam the door, on his foot, which he’d thrust forward.

Bingo!

“You get out of here, foul thing! You’re two years too early!”

“I like to plan ahead. Uh, ma’am, you’re crushing my foot.”

“Pity it isn’t your head,” she snarled, shoving harder.

“Look, I just want to—ow—talk. I’m not here for a fight.”

“Too bad,” the woman replied, half a second before a walloping pain slammed into his left ass cheek.

He staggered and went down on one knee. “Ow, damn it!”

“You get away from her
right now
,” a female voice said coldly, behind him and to his left.

Shot me in the back
, he thought, astonished. He clutched his ass and fell on his side. His other side, luckily.
One of the friggin’ Goodmans
shot
me in the back!
The pain of it was like nothing in the world; the thing felt like it was coming out his belly button.

He heard steps running up the porch and rolled his eye up to see her. Arrows? Flying? Flying arrows? No, arrows flying true. That was it, by God.

“Rhea, watch out! You’re not ready yet!”

Rhea
, he thought.

She pointed the crossbow at his forehead. Not ready, his bleeding butt! He assumed she was the eldest Goodman; she looked about the right age. And the good looks he’d hardly noticed in the child and hadn’t seen in the mother were unmistakable in this one.

She stared down at him, and time seemed to slow down, giving him a chance to take in her excellent good looks. Shoulder-length brown hair with gold and red highlights. Fair skin, freckled nose. Big dark eyes, currently narrowed to thoughtful slits. About five-seven, one-thirty. A foxy little pointed chin. Curves in all the right places, though the muscle definition was clear, because she was wearing khaki shorts and a red tank top. Red, the color of blood.

Her finger tightened on the trigger. From his vantage point (writhing in pain on the front porch) the arrow looked very, very big and very, very sharp. He could actually see her finger whitening as she slowly squeezed. Summer sunlight bounced off the arrow’s silver tip.

I’m going to be killed,
he thought,
by the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.

Rhea heard the car come up the drive, but paid little attention. Her parents were always having friends over, salesmen often called (her parents were notorious for having trouble saying “no, thanks”), old school chums dropped by, people occasionally got lost in the country and stopped for directions. So she kept practicing until her father decided to check the stock. Then she made her escape.

Fuck destiny
, she thought.
It’s too nice a day to think about killing. Or being killed.

Weapons were so much a part of her upbringing that she actually forgot to put the crossbow and quiver away; the bow was like an extension of her hand, and she didn’t even notice the weight of the quiver. By the time she realized it, she saw her mother try to slam the door on the tall stranger.

In all Rhea’s twenty-one years, her mother had
never
slammed the door. Not even on the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

So she shot him. Not to kill. To get him to remove his foot from the bottom of the doorway. And it worked splendidly. He went down like a ton of saltwater taffy. She was more than a little amazed; had she worried so much, just an hour ago, about her ability to wound or kill?

She darted up the steps in time to see the tall man curl on his side like a shrimp and frown up at her.

“Rhea, watch out!” her mother shrilled. “You’re not ready yet!”

She stared down at him, bringing the crossbow up in slow motion. At least, that’s what it felt like. Everything was happening so slowly, she had plenty of time to get a good look at the guy.

Unmistakable: a de Mere. Short, sandy blond hair. Eyes the color of wet leaves. Tall, very tall (his head had almost touched the top of the doorway, before she shot him). Thin, but his broad shoulders were in evidence through his black T-shirt. His long legs looked even longer in the tight, faded jeans.

He looked exactly like the pictures of the de Mere her great-great-great-great- (how many greats was that?) grandfather had burned at the stake (except for the modern clothing). She had seen the archives, the drawings.
Fairy stories
, she had thought. About witches and the warriors who protected the world from their evil. And the demons some of the witches would call forth.

At last, the crossbow was in place. Her finger tightened on the trigger.
This is it! I’m going to kill him on my own front porch, and I’ll live to a ripe old age. Why the hell were my folks so scared of him?

“Arrows, arrows, flying true,”
he rasped.

“Form instead a cloud of blue.”

The arrow in his butt vanished in a puff of blue smoke. The arrow loaded in her crossbow vanished as well. And her quiver suddenly felt pretty light. Horribly light.

“That’s better,” he mumbled, climbing to his feet with difficulty. He staggered for a few seconds, clutched his butt, then muttered,

“Arrow’s wound paining me,

Form instead a—shit!”

“Are those supposed to be poems?” Rhea asked, reaching for her Beretta, then remembering she’d locked it in the barn after practice.
Oh, great.

“You shot me in the back,” he snapped, still massaging his ass. His hands were red to the wrist. “That’s why I’m the good guy, and you’re the bad guys.”

“The hell!” she almost shouted, then realized her mother was still standing in the doorway, utterly shocked. Rhea darted forward, shoved her mom back, and slammed the door. Meanwhile, the witch was hobbling around the porch, dripping blood all over the place and mumbling “Ooh, ow, ouch, God help me, ow ow ow…”

“You’re wrong,” she snapped, freshly outraged. How dare he accuse her of villainy? He’d come to her home uninvited
and terrorized her mother. For that last one, if nothing else, she’d see him dead.

Her blood was still humming; her heartbeat thundered in her ears. She itched for a weapon, or a stake, some rope, and a box of fireplace matches. Because she wanted to kill him. She needed to kill him. Everything that was in her, centuries of tradition, cried out for it.

It was like, until she saw him in the flesh, her life had been rudderless.

“The hell,” he retorted, and she tried to remember what they had been talking about. “I’ve never shot anybody in the back in the twenty-eight years
I’ve
been running around on the planet. You can’t say the same, Rhea. Hell, your little sister runs around yelling ‘kill the witch’ at complete strangers.”

“Shut up.” She wondered if she could kick him to death. Surely it was worth a try. “You’re the foul evil magicks bringer and demon raiser, not me.
I’m
protecting the world from
you
. It’s not the other way around.”

“Magic,” he sighed, straightening. “And I don’t
raise
them. I just get rid of them. That’s an old wives’ tale, that we raise demons.
Magicks.
Jesus!”

“What?”

“Not magicks. Magic. I can hear the
‘ck,’
and you’re wrong about that, too. What rhymes with wound?”

“Boon, dune, croon, cartoon, commune, swoon…” she answered automatically. She’d been studying poetry since the seventh grade. Her other talent, you might say.

“Swoon!” he shouted. “That’s it.

Unkind arrow, leaving a wound,

Fix me up before I swoon.
”

She gasped as the bleeding stopped, as the blood disappeared from his hands, as he straightened up with a sigh. “Oh, God, that’s so much better. Christ, my aching ass.”

Okayyyy. So, her parents were right to be scared shitless by this guy. It seemed her ancestors had the right idea: Wipe out the de Mere line, witch by witch. Funny, in all the archives and all the old records and during her training, no one had mentioned he could
bend the very fabric of reality to his will
.

“Nobody told me you could bend the very fabric of reality to your will.”

“Gee, so sorry your intel isn’t up to snuff. No pun intended.”

“I thought you were supposed to curse cows and sour their milk, or be a bride of Satan, or something like that.”

He stared at her, green eyes wide. “Do I look like I spend my days hanging around cows? And I’m not a bride of anything.”

“Why didn’t the archives mention your little poetry trick?” she mused aloud, not really expecting an answer.

“Nobody knows, except you Goodmans. My great-great-great-great-grandfather couldn’t.”

“Not enough greats.”

“Never mind. Anyway, Christopher de Mere couldn’t do it, and none of his descendants could, for the longest time. And FYI, we dropped the ‘de’ about four generations ago.”

“What do you mean, they couldn’t do it? You can all do magic.”

He nodded and even smiled. She couldn’t believe they were having a civilized conversation.

She still wanted to kill him, though.

“Oh, they could do magic,” he replied, “but it was a lot harder—I mean, would real witches allow themselves to be burned at the stake if they could save themselves? Oh, and that’s quite a family history of murder, mayhem, and close-mindedness you’ve got there.”

“Shut
up
. It wasn’t just my family,” she added lamely. The insanity of the Salem witch trials, deemed so necessary three hundred years ago, were an embarrassment to the Goodmans these days. So many innocents. Not enough of the guilty. “Why are we having a conversation? You’re a dead man walking.”

“Takes one to know one, sunshine. Except for the ‘man’ part, of course. And to finish answering your rude and intrusive questions, the Mere family has been evolving each generation in order to better deal with
you
bums. Thus, I rhyme, things happen. I rhyme, your pretty shiny things go bye-bye.”

“Oh,
great
.”

“I thought so,” he admitted.

She abruptly turned and marched down the porch steps, annoyed to hear him following her. “Hey! We’re talking, here.”

“We’re done talking.”

“Where are you going?”

“Shut up.”

“Are you going into the barn?”

“Shut up.”

“Rhea, Rhea, tell me true

What is in the barn for you?”

She felt an invisible hand seize her mouth and force it open. She stopped in her tracks, appalled, and fought with as much inner strength as she could muster, but still her traitorous mouth fell open, and she said, almost babbled, “Four nines, two crossbows, a twelve-gauge shotgun, a twenty-gauge shotgun, ammo for everything, four skinning knives, two filet knives, six switchblades, and a Magnum .357.”

“But we were just talking!” he yelled after her, sounding panicked. “There’s no need to take out four nines! What the hell is a four nine?”