Siren Song

Just stared into space. It reminded me forcibly of my own actions yesterday. As I climbed from the car I saw the track of tears on her cheeks.

“Gran.” I opened the gate and hurried up the walk to the house.

She looked up. “Hello, Celia.” She didn’t smile.

“Gran, what’s wrong?” I knelt down in front of her chair. “What’s the matter?”

“I met with your mother’s lawyer this morning.”

Oh, crap. “Gran—,” I started to say something, anything.

“You were right. All those times when you told me not to let her drive. You were right. They have pictures, taken by cameras at intersections for months. Even though they didn’t pull her over right then, they’re going to show them to the judge. The attorney said there’s no chance we can say this time was a mistake.”

I touched her shoulder, but even then she didn’t react. “Gran, it’s not your fault.”

“If I hadn’t let her use the car—” The tears were flowing hard now and she reached into the pocket of her sweater to pull out a damp clump of tissues.

Sometimes the truth, although harsh, can be comforting. I’m hoping she took it that way. “If you hadn’t let Mom use the car, she would’ve taken it anyway. You know that. I’ll bet she had her own secret set of keys made.” I gave her a wry smile. “Nothing ever stops Mom.”

Gran laughed, but it was more of a croak and it died as quickly as it had come. “He says she’ll go to prison. My poor baby . . . my Lana, in prison.”

I didn’t say a word. Any time my mother served would be richly deserved. She’d driven drunk and without a license or insurance more times than I could count. She’d wrecked cars, and while she swore to us that nobody had ever been hurt, she’d endangered herself and everybody else on the road. But my gran wouldn’t believe that and didn’t need to hear it. She needed comfort. Unfortunately, I had very little to give.

“Does she have a public defender?”

Gran squirmed in her chair and wouldn’t meet my eyes. I just knew what that meant. I sighed. “You hired an attorney.”

“I had to.” A little bit of her old ferocity returned. “I’ve heard terrible things about public defenders. They’re in all the papers and you know it. It’s my money. If I want to—”

Throw it away, I thought, but I bit my tongue. Instead, I said, “It’s your money and your choice, Gran.” I spoke softly. “But I had an idea last night and I want to call her attorney and see what he thinks of it. How do I get hold of him?”

She blushed and wouldn’t answer me. That was never a good sign. When she doesn’t want to tell me something, the news is always bad. Seeing the flush of embarrassment, the stubborn set of her chin, gave me an idea, a really, hideously, awful idea.

“Gran, you didn’t hire my attorney, did you?”

“Why not? He got you off—do you think he’s too good for your mother?” Her eyes flashed with renewed anger.

“Of course not,” I lied. My mom’s case was open-and-shut, no, not shut—slam the jailhouse door. Hiring Roberto would cost everything Gran had and the case was unwinnable. She might as well just flush the money down the toilet. “But Gran, you can’t afford him. It took all of my savings for me to afford him. All of my savings.”

She turned to me then and looked me straight in the eyes, her expression determined. “I told him I’d sell the house.”

It took me more than a few seconds to process the words and even then I couldn’t believe it. The meaning caught me in the chest like a baseball thrown by a star pitcher. I struggled not to gasp, but the great, heaving weight of it made my heart tight and painful. I know I clutched her shoulder tighter and she finally reacted . . . staring up at me with pain-filled eyes. “Oh, Gran.” She could wind up homeless. Broke and homeless, with no place to call her own. It was the ultimate sacrifice for a woman of her generation. She had always told me how proud she was that she and Granddad had owned, even during the war. She wasn’t like Dottie, who could work within the government system.

Any more than Mom was.

We spent the next few hours talking out the details. It became clear early on that I wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of this last-ditch effort to save my mom. Gran knows my mom better than anyone alive. She knows what makes her tick, knows that jail would quite literally destroy her. I now learned that Gran had been working with Mom, trying to dry her out ever since the vampire had claimed her mind a few weeks ago. That had really scared Mom, to have no control over her actions. It had caused an epiphany that Gran had been trying to build on.

Crap and double crap.

I tried to salvage what I could of the situation by calling the attorney handling the probate of Vicki’s will to see if I’d missed anything after the reading was finished and what, if anything, I needed to do to work on getting hold of the money Vicki had left for me. Then I got transferred to Roberto’s assistant to make my suggestion about using a psychological or an ADA defense for Mom because of her siren blood.

Finally, I called my banker to see whether I might be able to get a mortgage to buy my grandmother’s house. It’s not easy for someone self-employed to qualify. Not every year’s income resulted in profit. All a small-business owner can do is save when the money’s good so you can spend when the money’s bad. But banks want to be paid every month. Still, with the inheritance I had coming, I thought I might be able to swing it.

She suggested I fill out the online application and they’d let me know.

At about that point I realized that I was enabling my grandmother to enable my mother. The circle of dysfunctional life. I could almost hear Elton John singing in the background.

By the time I left, Gran had at least stopped crying and was looking a little more hopeful. She really hadn’t wanted to give up the house. She’d have done it. But she didn’t want to.

The sun was setting as I pulled out of the driveway. Almost immediately I picked up a fresh tail. A police cruiser that trailed two cars behind, all along the route from Gran’s to my office. Not Clarke this time; not that it mattered. It pissed me off, but that didn’t matter, either. They would do what they were going to do. I couldn’t stop them. Reacting too strongly would imply guilt where there was none and give them an excuse to dig even deeper. So I counted to a hundred and tried to ignore the cop, with minimal success.

I had about an hour before I was supposed to go to PharMart and meet Creede and the others. I wanted my weapons. Now. I know hand-to-hand. It works well on humans. But there’s nothing like advanced weaponry when you go up against the monsters.

And we were going up against someone willing to traffic with the demonic.

The militant ministries have the best record fighting the demonic. True believers do well, too. I’m not either. I’d just have to make up for it with knowledge, planning, and excellent armament.

I felt the surge of magic as the car crossed the magical perimeter that guards the office and parking lot. It wasn’t as painful as it should have been, which meant the wards needed refreshing. I promised myself I’d write Dottie a note to make the arrangements as soon as I got inside.

I caught the cat before she could slip out the door and was rewarded with a deep scratch on the wrist. She hissed. I hissed right back. It startled her, but she didn’t look particularly intimidated. With a flip of her tail, she pranced off in the general direction of Ron’s office. I hoped she’d leave him a particularly stinky present.

There were messages in my slot and the UPS boxes were still stacked in the reception area. Grumbling, I took a look at the label on the top box. Yup, they were for me. The return address was for the ex-wife of Bob Johnson, a friend of mine who’d gotten killed in the same ambush where I’d been bitten. Vanessa was as nasty and bitter a piece of work as I’ve ever run across, screaming at me and blaming me for his death when I’d called to offer condolences. God alone knew what she’d mailed to me. I decided I didn’t want to know. At least not tonight. Time was a-wastin’ and I had things to do.

I grabbed the message slips and started pounding my way up the stairs. I hadn’t gone far when Bubba’s voice called down to me, shouting to be heard over the blaring volume of one of those reality singing competitions. It must have been one of the early rounds, because the singer was really, seriously bad. I could do better . . . and you do not want to hear me sing.

“Hey, Graves, that you?”