“Lift your right arm.” The slick male voice from Nerissa’s house and the fair paralyzed her with fright.
Though she’d all but forgotten about him, he hadn’t disappeared. He’d been dormant, lying in wait. Plotting.
“No,” she whispered, clamping a hand over the arm in question for good measure.
A string of words in an unknown language followed. Helen’s fingers and toes numbed, becoming as dead and heavy as rubber. A rumble quaked inside of her, and black horror bobbed to her surface.
“Lift your right arm.”
“No.”
A flash of movement and the outline of a person attracted Helen’s attention to the window overlooking the city. Fear zipped around her system, making her surroundings crystal clear and sharp as sizzling tingles piqued her nerves.
The petals of the lilies, tips as pointed as forked tongues, popped into ominous relief.
Rain beaded glass, slashing diagonal splatters. Watery streaks painted an apparition in the window. The double of Helen stood there, smiling like a maniac.
This was no simple reflection. Though she wore an identical outfit of jeans and a T-shirt, she stood while Helen sat.
The male voice grunted more of the spooky language. “Raise your right arm.”
The double in the window complied, bringing her limb to hover at hip’s length in a creepy, zombielike pose.
Clicks, snorts, and harsh syllables lacking the harmonious curvature of vowels bombarded Helen’s ears. “Lift. Your. Right. Arm.”
Unable to look away from the clone, Helen lost a battle to hold on to her faculties. Zoned out, she watched in shock as her arm shot up into the air.
“Excellent, excellent, excellent. Now we find something sharp to put in our hand.”
Hysterical laughter followed the male voice’s declaration. The clone joined in, adding to a cackling frenzy, and dematerialized.
Helen snapped back to clarity. Her arm flopped to her side.
“You alright?” Brian walked into the living room.
Nope, but no point in alarming him. She’d spoken too soon when allowing herself to slide into fantasies about beating this thing with her wits and moxie. No, an opponent of this magnitude called for heavy-duty witchcraft. Big-ass spells.
As soon as she got back to Minneapolis, she’d get to work on levelling up her skills, but for now she’d have to wing it. In the meantime, she could team up with Brian on the hunt for clues—anything they could dredge up that could lead her to a stopgap.
“Fine. Let’s find some ammo to help us beat this thing.”
Ten
Brian thumbed through a few pages of Helen’s arcane book, pausing on a fascinating yet foreign illustrated portion before moving on. The research session reached a lull, the sort of comfortable silence he hadn’t enjoyed with another person in ages.
Typing on her laptop with soft clacks, she lay on her stomach, stretched across the floor of his penthouse suite with her legs bent in the air and crossed at the ankles. Her posture of comfort and ease mellowed him.
His back resting against the couch as he sat on the floor, he watched with respect as she worked. Outside, rain tapped a calming drumbeat. A realization hit. In this moment, he didn’t need to move or hustle or plan. Didn’t need to order anyone around. Didn’t need to worry. He could unplug from the fame circus and be, if only until they spoke of their problem again.
His thoughts drifted to his past, before everything went sideways and barking mad with the soon-to-be-fired Joe. His mind open, the sensation serene and thoughtful, he considered new possibilities. Not everyone who was into esoteric things was like Joe and his goons. His mum certainly wasn’t.
And now, cozied up with the mysterious woman who’d taken control of his emotions with her passionate kiss, Brian craved understanding about what made her tick as much, if not more than, he wanted a solution to his predicament.
Helen rolled to her side and stretched. The mermaid pose highlighted her voluptuous curves, and craving stirred below his belt. Where was his restraint? On most days he possessed sexual continence in droves, but on this one his hormones wrestled control out of his erstwhile iron grip.
When they’d kissed, he’d felt more than lust, though he’d felt plenty of that. But their kiss left an impression on him, one that transcended the ranks of sex.
He’d escaped with her to someplace he’d never been. Not with any other woman, even his wives. With her, he escaped from himself, from a certain cold inaccessibility he projected to keep other people at a safe distance. When Helen melted his defenses with her kiss, his heart grew.
And for that, despite whatever she’d done or thought she’d done, he would remain in her debt. Whether they—or, rather, she—needed to talk about the kiss or forget, he couldn’t say. For now, the pleasure of her company sufficed.
“How long have known you were different? In possession of these abilities?” he asked.
“Since I was a teenager. But back then I didn’t have a name for it. I thought I was a mess, broken in some fundamental way, and so did the families. Therapists said I had episodes of disassociation and depersonalization related to Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but that never felt like a complete explanation. I’m sure trauma was a factor, but I suspected more.”
Interest in her history took the place of an urge to get her naked. “Families?”
Her posture stiffened. She flipped back to her belly-down position.
“Foster families,” she muttered, fingers clacking over keys like she wanted the sound to muffle her words. Her shoulders cranked up to her ears.
“Sore subject? I don’t mean to pry.” And he didn’t. She’d open up when, and if, she felt ready. The woman didn’t owe him her life story.
“Ugh, it’s fine. Yeah, it’s sore, but that’s on me. I really need to let that wound heal.” She typed, poking a key a bit too hard.
He slid along the front of the
