“What do you see?” he asked her, stepping through the door.
She shook her head. “Just checking out an idea. It’s nothing. Ben?” She ran to him and put her arms around him, squeezing him until the shivers between them calmed to a steady tingle. “I need you,” she said.
He hovered between excitement and fear. “You’ve got me. We’ve got each other.”
“I just saw something happen,” she said, looking up at him, her hair a crimson nimbus in the light from inside.
“It could have been anything,” Ben said. “Maybe the door swung open more and—”
“Not that. I saw a woman. It was dark and she was being dragged into a hole. She couldn’t cry out, but I saw her struggle. I think it was me.”
Chapter 20
Willow had found Mario outside the upstairs room at the Brandt house and had scarcely let him go since. “Sykes is a teddy bear,” she said as she and Ben walked through the few neon lights still on in the Quarter.
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Ben said, smiling in the silver-green glow of early, early morning.
“I don’t expect him to remember little things,” Willow said, kissing the dog’s head and smiling at the tickle of his sprouting whiskers against her cheek. “He must have known how much I needed my buddy here.”
At Ben’s suggestion—to keep them away from the police station—Nat had conducted their interview in a comfortable office at Fortunes. After they had talked for three hours, Nat told Willow to keep herself available and suggested Ben get her home.
“My place or yours?” Ben said with a laugh while they strolled through the barely active streets.
Willow yawned, and clapped a hand over her mouth. “We’re exposed out here,” she said. “Any second one of these, whatever they are, could attack.”
“I think they’re more subtle than that,” he said. “Sykes suggested we go to his studio. We’d be in the Quarter, but Molyneux and his gang couldn’t find us so easily.”
“I’ve never been to Sykes’s studio.” Her sculptor brother, who had a solid reputation for his pieces, kept his whereabouts quiet unless he chose to show up on Royal Street.
“Do you know why he’s so secretive?” Ben asked.
“I’ve got a good idea.” But she didn’t know how much Sykes had explained to Ben.
“Do you really believe in the Millet Curse?” he said.
She paused, watching cut crystals rotate on pieces of fish line in a shop window. Myriad brightly colored spots spun in the semidark recesses.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “When I was a kid and my parents first took off, supposedly in search of a way to circumvent the curse, I believed in it then. But that was twenty years ago, and Uncle Pascal is still running a business and family he never wanted to take on in the first place.”
“And if your parents didn’t have this conviction that the original reason for the Millets running from Bruges was because some poor innocent baby was born with dark hair and blue eyes, rather than the red-green combination, they would be here taking care of things?”
Willow thought about it. “Would they? Or are they free spirits taking advantage of a load of old bunk to shirk their duties?
“Three hundred years ago a Millet with dark hair and blue eyes married a woman who turned out to be a witch—or people said she was. And our family was chased halfway around the world. When do we get to let go of that and get on with our lives?
“I saw Dad a few months back when he heard about Marley and Gray getting together. He came to play the patriarch, and couldn’t wait to get away again.”
“But the reason Sykes is so private is because he knows he isn’t considered up to the task of taking over the family,” Ben said thoughtfully. “He’s the first dark-haired Millet in direct line to take over since the famous ancestor. Your folks have as good as told him he’s dangerous to the rest of you. Don’t you wonder how he felt when your father handed the reins to Pascal? That was the same as telling Sykes he’d been disinherited. Bypassed.”
Ben could have no way of knowing how often Willow suffered because of this very unfair situation, or how often she and Marley talked about it and tried to figure out how to put things straight. “Uncle Pascal doesn’t agree with it,” she said. “He’s always looking for a way out. I’m grateful Sykes is so strong. But he’s not superhuman.”
With a laugh, Ben said, “Isn’t he? I don’t think you’re right about that. Should I take you to his place and tuck you up?”
The sensation Willow got in her tummy and legs didn’t seem the right reaction to being offered comfort from a big brother figure. “I can just go to the Court of Angels.”
“We both know that.”
“Will Sykes be at his place?”
After too long a pause, Ben said, “No. Not tonight.”
“He gave you a key?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And told you to take me there for the night?”
“If we wanted to go,” Ben said.
“That’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?”
He looked at her without a suggestion of amusement. “It can be anything we want to make it.”
Willow walked on, slowly.
“It’s on St. Peter Street,” Ben said. “Near Dauphine. Why don’t you know that?”
“Sykes never volunteered the information. Things were strained when he found the studio and started spending a lot of time there, so I never asked. We’re going the wrong way.” She swallowed.
“Yes,” Ben said, turning her around. “So we are.” He didn’t keep the pleasure out of his voice.
He wanted her to himself tonight—but then, he’d wanted that for a long time. What hadn’t changed was Willow’s own uncertainty about whether they could be happy together for very long.
“I’m going to call Nat first thing and find out if Blades came to any conclusions about Chloe Brandt’s wounds. And the cause of death.”
“Yes.” She wanted to know, but wished she didn’t have to think about it constantly.
Even passing drunks were subdued. A man sat on the curb with his feet in the gutter, a bottle hanging between his knees. Stillness blanketed the Quarter, still heat. A storm could be brewing.
“We’ve got the same issues between us, Ben,” Willow said.
“I wish you’d let me in on exactly what they are. It’s time we didn’t have any issues at all. I’m thinking of getting us both away from here. Start over somewhere. White picket fence, a couple of kids—”
“Don’t joke.”
“Who’s joking? I want to see if you like Kauai, too. My house is on the beach at the most secluded spot in an amazing bay. If I see someone nearby, it’s an event.”
He turned her left on Dauphine.
“How long would it take you to get bored?” Willow said.
“Go there with me and ask that.”
“Maybe I will one day.” She glanced up at the side of his face, all angles in the shadows, his hair shining black and tied at the nape. She couldn’t imagine a woman who would get bored being with him in a secluded Hawaiian cove.
Power moved with Benedict Fortune, and grace, but most of all, mysticism.
“You’re coming into your own fast,” he said as if he heard what she thought.
That wasn’t beyond possibility. Willow frowned.
Out of the stillness came a current of air. Strong, direct, aimed where it tossed Willow’s hair aside. She looked at Ben again, but he hadn’t noticed. She took a deep, calming breath and carried on walking without so much as a check in her pace.
