“Your timing couldn't be better,” he said, shaking the guys' hands. “You wouldn't believe who just left.”
“Oh, I bet we would,” Jim muttered.
“So I got some questions for you,” the one with the piercings said. “We know your girlfriend. Very well, unfortunately.”
“She's not my girlfriend.”
“Well, she's not out of your life yet, unfortunately. But we're going to try to take care of that. Our boy Jim here says that when you were seventeen, you performed some kind of ritual. Can you describe it?”
“It was supposed to get rid of what's inside of me.”
Naturally, Marie-Terese opened the guest room door at that moment. Dressed in her jeans and fleece, she had pulled back her hair and tucked her hands into the front pockets of her pullover. “What's inside of you?” she asked.
Vin rubbed his face and glanced back at the men. Before he could figure out how to shade the truth appropriately, Marie-Terese cut off his mental gymnastics. “I want to know everything, Vin. The whole deal. And I deserve to know now that I've seen her up close—because frankly, I'm not sure what I saw just now.”
Shit. As much as he wanted to keep her out of things, he was hard-pressed to deny her reasoning. But man, he wished like hell he didn't have to have this conversation.
“Gentlemen, will you give us a minute alone?” he said without looking away from her eyes.
“You got any beer around here?” Adrian asked.
“Fridge by the wet bar in the living room. Jim knows the way.”
“Good call. Because he's the one who needs it. You two come down when you're ready—and don't worry, we'll make sure Devina doesn't get back in here. I'm assuming you have salt in your kitchen?”
“Ah, yeah.” He glanced over with a frown. “But why do you need—”
“Where do you keep it?”
After he shrugged and told the guy to go to the dry-goods cupboard, the men hit the stairs again, and Vin ushered Marie-Terese over to the bed. He couldn't stay put, though, and took up pacing around.
Going over to the view, he wondered why life had brought him to this point. Wondered why he'd started where he had. Wondered…how it was all going to end for him.
Looking down at the highway by the river and seeing the cars traveling in their prescribed lanes, he envied the people behind those steering wheels and in those passenger seats. It was a good bet the vast majority of them were doing normal shit, like going home or heading out for a movie or struggling with weighty decisions like what to have for dinner later.
“Vin? Talk to me. I promise I won't judge you.”
He cleared his throat, and hoped like hell that was true. “Any chance you believe in…” Well, now, just how was he finishing that one? By listing a bunch of crap like Ouija boards and tarot cards and black magic and voodoo and…demons…mostly the demons? Great. Fabulous.
She broke the silence he couldn't bear to fill. “You mean about the episodes you get?”
He rubbed his face. “Listen, what I'm about to say isn't going to sound real—shit, it's not even going to sound plausible. But can you please not leave until I finish? No matter how weird it gets?”
He kept looking out at the view because he didn't want her to see the weakness he knew was in his face, and at least his voice sounded halfway normal.
The headboard of the bed creaked, indicating that she'd sat back even farther on the mattress. “I'm not going anywhere. Promise.”
Another reason to love her. As if he needed one.
Vin took a deep breath and threw himself off the proverbial cliff: “When you're young, you think whatever is going on with you, around you…inside of you, is normal. Because you don't know any different. It wasn't until I was five and went to kindergarten that I learned the hard way other kids couldn't move forks without touching them or stop the rain in their backyards or know what was going to be for dinner without talking to their mothers. See, my parents couldn't do any of the things I could, but I felt totally different from them anyway, so I didn't think it was weird. I just thought they weren't the same because they were parents, not a kid.”
He refused to go into the various ways he'd learned he wasn't like other kids—and what those little shits did to punish him because he was out of the ordinary: The details of getting pounded on a regular basis by groups of boys or sneered at and laughed at by girls were not going to change whether or not she understood or believed him. Besides, pity had always given him a case of the scratch. “I figured out pretty damn quick to shut my mouth about what I could do, and it wasn't hard to hide. Basically, I just had parlor tricks at that point, nothing that got in the way of life, but that changed when I was eleven and I started to pull that on-my-ass babbling crap. That was a big problem. It happened whenever and wherever it wanted to. I had no control over it, and instead of growing out of it, like I did all that manipulation and small-scale clairvoyance stuff, it got worse and worse.”
“You were gifted,” she said, with no small amount of awe.
He looked over his shoulder. Most of the color had come back into her face, which was more than he would have hoped for, but he did not agree with her assessment.
“Cursed was the way I saw it.” He went back to staring out at the lines of tiny cars far, far below. “As I grew up, I got bigger and tougher, so getting harassed was less of an issue, but the episodes didn't stop, and I was getting more and more frustrated by feeling like a freak. Finally, I decided I had to talk to someone, so I went to this psychic downtown. I felt like a total fucking fool, but I was desperate. She helped me, told me what to do, and even though I didn't believe in it, I went home and did what she said…and everything changed.”
“You stopped getting the seizures?”
“Yeah.”
“So why are they back now?”
“I don't know.” And he didn't know why they'd started, either.
“Vin?” When he glanced back at her, she patted the bed. “Come and sit down. Please.”
After he searched her face and saw nothing but warmth and empathy, he went over and lowered his ass on the mattress beside her. As he braced his fists on the duvet and leaned into his shoulders, her hand landed lightly on his back and she rubbed him in a slow circle.
He drew incredible reserves of strength from her touch.
“After the seizures stopped, everything was different. And in a totally unrelated weirdness, my parents died accidentally soon thereafter—which really was not a total surprise, because as violent as they were with each other, it was only a matter of time. As soon as they were gone, I dropped out of school and went to work for my dad's boss as a plumbing assistant. I'd turned eighteen by then, so I was legal to work in the trade and I made it my business to learn everything. Which was how I ended up on the contracting side of things. I never took a vacation. I never looked back, and ever since then, life has been…”
Funny, up until a couple of days ago he'd have said
But he was starting to think that all he'd done was slap a shiny, pretty coat of paint on a rotting barn. He'd never been happy, had taken no joy out of the money he'd made…had deceived honest people and raped countless acres of land, and for what? All he'd done was feed the tapeworm in his gut that had driven him. None of it had nurtured him.
Marie-Terese took his hand. “So…who is that woman? What is she?”
“She's…I don't know how to answer either of those questions. Maybe those two guys who came with Jim can.” He glanced at the doorway and then looked at Marie-Terese. “I don't want you to think I'm a freak. But I won't blame you if you do.”
As he dropped his head, for the first time in a long, long while, he desperately wished he was someone else.
Words were better than nothing when it came to explaining things, but that didn't mean they went nearly far enough in some situations.
This was one of them, Marie-Terese thought.
In her life, things like what Vin was talking about happened in the movies or in books…or they were whispered about when you were thirteen and on a sleepover with your friends…or they were lies that were advertised in the back of cheap magazines. They were not part of the real world, and her mind was fighting the adjustment.
