To Dance with the Devil

Every photo held a memory, most of them good. There were few images of my father. My mother had thrown most of them out in the great purge after he left. I had grabbed a few and hidden them under my mattress, unable to bear losing that last bit of the past. I still had them; they were in the drawer of my nightstand. I never looked at them anymore, but they were still there.

Em and I flipped through the box of memories, chatting happily. My psychiatrist had tasked me with finding pictures of myself and my baby sister from shortly before Ivy died. I picked out a few, but discovering that box put an end to the cleaning for the day. Emma and I just sat, drinking and talking, until it was time for her to leave and meet Matty for dinner.

I was sorry to see her go.

I returned most of the photos to the box and closed it reluctantly, leaving only a pair of photos out on the coffee table to take to my appointment tomorrow.

I wasn’t hungry, but I fixed myself some food anyway. I have more control over my vampire nature than I used to, in part because I’ve learned not to go too long between meals. Tonight’s menu was from the assortment of baby food I had stocked up on: squash, plus pureed chicken and noodles, warmed in the microwave, with a bit of organic applesauce for dessert. Not exactly haute cuisine, but so much better than the full liquid diet I’d started out on after the bite that I wasn’t about to complain.

I ate at the kitchen counter, then rinsed the dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher. It was nearly full, so I went ahead and started the cycle. On impulse, I fixed myself another drink before heading back into the living room.

The place was a wreck. Just looking at it was depressing. I knew I should finish going through the boxes, but I so wasn’t in the mood. Nor was I willing to put them back as is. After some internal debate I decided that I would deal with them tomorrow, and on impulse I sat down in front of the computer.

I scolded myself for being stupid and indulging my idle curiosity. I had plenty of real work to do. Abigail Andrews had very definitely not hired me. Nobody was going to pay me for what I was about to do. But something about our meeting just kept bugging me. I couldn’t seem to let it go. So to satisfy my very unprofitable and probably unhealthy curiosity, I brought up my favorite search engine and began doing a little research. I felt a momentary flash of annoyance with Dawna again—this was work she should have done.

There was nothing on Harry Jacobs. Well, not quite nothing. There was a Harry Jacobs who owned a used- car lot in Tulsa; I found links to videos of a couple of seriously bad commercials he’d made. But they were recent, and he was not in prison, so I was willing to bet that he wasn’t the right Harry. There were other Harry Jacobses, but nowhere near Santa Maria.

So I tried Abigail Andrews. Again, nothing useful.

Now, I know not everybody lives a newsworthy life. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have no identity online at all. But Abby had some seriously interesting scars. There would normally be some record of anyone or anything that had caused them—even a simple car wreck. But I was getting nada. In my head I heard that ancient childhood taunt: Liar, liar, pants on fire, your nose is as long as a telephone wire.

As an experiment, I typed in Emma’s name. In seconds I was looking at a whole history of her achievements, including all her gymnastics titles and her second-place finish in the tristate spelling bee back in grade school.

Similarly helpful results popped up when I searched Dawna’s name.

But nothing on Harry, and nothing on Abby.

I wasn’t even a little bit surprised. Feeling distinctly grateful that I hadn’t been hired, I shut down the computer. Taking my drink with me into the bathroom, I ran a hot bubble bath. The combination of alcohol and hot water might just relax me enough to get to sleep.

* * *

Friday morning came too soon to suit me. I know a lot of “morning people.” I am not one of them. Still, I managed to haul my sorry butt out of bed and stumble into the kitchen, where I proceeded to pour myself a cup of coffee and took up a position by the French doors to see what the weather had to offer. It was beautiful. The sun was shining, not a cloud marred the perfect blue of the summer sky. Later in the day I expected it would be miserably hot, but now it was perfect. Setting down my coffee, I reached for the bottle of sunscreen I keep by the door. I slathered high-SPF lotion over every inch of skin not covered by the sweatpants and T-shirt that were my usual nightwear and pulled on my favorite picture hat. On impulse I detoured into the living room to snag the pair of photographs from the coffee table. I stuffed them into my pants pocket on the way out the door.

A strip of private beach came with the guesthouse. It’s a little rocky, and the currents are tricky, but I swim there anyway when the water isn’t too cold. When it is, I just sit on the rocks or under a beach umbrella and watch the gulls and the waves. I’m part siren—the ocean soothes me. But I’ve seen plenty of humans who do the same exact thing when they can. There’s just something about the sea.

Today I needed some soothing. This afternoon I was due at the therapist for a preteleconference therapy session. I needed it. I so didn’t want to have to deal with my mother and her issues. I’d rather be doing anything else. Seriously, anything. Demons, vampires, zombies—I’ve faced them all. And I’d rather do any of that again than deal with my family history. But there you go. You do what you have to do.

I clambered up on the rough surface of my favorite rock and stared out to sea. When I thought I was calm enough to handle it, I pulled the first photo from my pocket. Old and faded, it had been taken with a technology that no longer even existed. I remembered that day so clearly. It had been my birthday. My father had grabbed the Polaroid and snapped a shot of me right out of bed, blonde hair tangled and sticking up as I stood there in my Barbie pj’s. Ivy was in the background, looking small and adorable, her wide blue eyes staring at the cartoons playing on the television, completely oblivious of everything else going on in the house.

I’d also brought the shot of Ivy with her cake. I hadn’t said anything to Emma, but this was the last picture of my sister. Gran had taken it just about a week before three of my mother’s male “friends” had kidnapped my sister and me. They’d hoped to get Ivy to use her gift of speaking with the dead to find treasure—they’d seen something in the news about a kid in Florida who had done that. They tortured me to get her to cooperate. Instead, she’d called up zombies from a nearby cemetery. She was powerful enough to call them but didn’t have the knowledge or experience to control them. The thugs died a gruesome death. My sister did, too. The only reason I lived was that I’d been tied to a table and couldn’t move. Movement draws zombies like honey draws flies.

I sat on the rock, tears flowing so hard I couldn’t see the picture in my hand.

For years, my memories of those horrible events had been magically suppressed, my emotions blunted so that I could function, if not heal. Unfortunately, the magic that had suppressed them had been negated by something that had happened to me a few months ago. And I got to experience my feelings for the first time in years. So though these wounds were old, they were still raw.

I blame myself. I always have. They call it survivor’s guilt. Why did I survive when she didn’t? She was my baby sister. I was supposed to protect her.

An icy breeze blew against my face, freezing the tears on my cheeks.

“Ivy.”

My sister’s ghost was here. She comes to me often. Well, less often lately. In the eighteen months or so since my mother went to prison, Ivy’s spent a lot of time there instead. But she seems to sense when I’m most upset, and then I can count on seeing her.

Ghosts are the spirits of the dead who remain tied to something or someone until they can achieve some specific purpose and move on to their eternal reward. It’s pretty typical, for example, for ghosts of murder victims to stick around until the murderer is caught and convicted.

I don’t know why Ivy’s ghost is tied to me. I suspect that she’s waiting for me to forgive my mother. If that’s the case, she may be with me until I die. Because try as I might, I can’t seem to let go of the past. I love my mom. But the guys who took us were her friends. They wouldn’t have known about Ivy and me if she hadn’t blabbed about us at the bar; wouldn’t have been able to kidnap us if she hadn’t been fucking passed out from booze and drugs in some dive somewhere, leaving us home alone. They’d even used her keys to get into our apartment.

No, I was not ready to forgive my mother. Not now, maybe not ever. I just don’t want that to cost me my relationship with my grandmother. Gran has always been there for me. But she refuses to see or hear anything negative about my mother. She’s a classic enabler. Our conflicting attitudes about my mom have come way too close to destroying our relationship. The only reason I agreed to family therapy was to try to save my relationship