Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (3 page)

Farfalla despised Italian putti-flying, winged baby heads. Putti were supposed to be the sweetest, cutest, most harmless things in the world, but Farfalla had never trusted cherubs. Never.

Cherubs were horrid baby ghosts. Alien to the past and future, cherubs would never grow, never become men and women. How could cherubs possibly be good? Even vampires and zombies were at least human for a while.

Thanks to her childhood in Brazil, there were aspects of Italy that Farfalla had never accepted.
Evil
aspects of Italy, mostly. Farfalla had a keen sense of evil because she had so much of it inside herself.

Italy and its swarms of sweet, rosy-cheeked cherubs. Italian cherubs always appeared in the places in Italy where truly dark and awful things had happened. Sites of martyrdom, massacres, torment and hideous slaughter. It took a while to catch on to this fact about Italian cherubs, but it was the spiritual truth.

Farfalla studied the chapel’s faded blue ceiling. The nunnery cherubs, buzzing around like bluebottle flies, circled a king cherub angel — a perverse cherub mafia boss. This decaying angel was obviously very old, older than Italian dirt. Yet, he had a perky, disconcerting, juvenile-delinquent look to him. A boy with a bow, still up to mischief.

Farfalla pulled the iPhone from her knock-off Versace purse. She examined the dozens of applications that she had downloaded and found the one that told her the exact time, atomic time. Local time: ten minutes, two seconds past six p.m. Ten minutes past the start of the big Futurist Congress. It was time to get on with the serious business of foretelling the future.

This Futurist Congress would be a grand event, or so she’d been told. The Congress featured trendy, Brazilian pop-stars, modish European celebrities and high-tech “thought leaders,” mostly American Internet types. A dazzling crowd, fit to do Capri proud. None of them were here yet, though. The future had arrived and no one was here to see it. Farfalla was all alone.

All these futuristic beautiful-people were in Capri already, but none of them were working. Instead, they were off having a Campari somewhere, gossiping with each other, dawdling over the cashews in their five-star hotel bar. Her futurist chapel was as empty as a vampire’s tomb.

Farfalla felt slighted and bitter. Why was her life always like this? Why? Here she was, all the way from Milan after untold risk and trouble.

Her nails were done, her hair was done. She was also dressed to kill, in a creative outfit up to downtown Milanese standards. Farfalla’s gleaming new silk dress featured a vibrant and beautiful Futurist print by the artist Fortunato Depero. Yet, there was nobody there to notice her very apt choice of attire.

Farfalla thought wistfully of her time in the United States. When in Italy, Farfalla often dreamed about distant America. America was a grand, old-fashioned country, where people drove huge cars and ate colossal meals. Americans always showed up on time. If you said six, Americans arrived at six. In Italy, six meant six-thirty. In timeless Capri, “six” was printed on some tourist brochure that nobody bothered to read.

Farfalla stalked across the chapel’s stage, with its translucent podium and giant projection screens.

The niche behind the stage was chaos. The Web people had taken over everything. The backstage was crammed with cascades of multicolored cables, power cords and blinking media boxes. The Capri Trend Assessment conference would be live-streamed over the Web.

The Web people were the worst. Farfalla haunted tech conferences because they paid translators so much to translate computer jargon. Farfalla liked computer jargon, because it was so futuristic, but Web people gave her the creeps. Every year, more people watched conferences on the Web. The Web video made real places go all spidery, until the living audience was mostly distant ghosts, lurking from the Internet. Even undead baby cherubs were pretty wholesome, compared to the Web people.

A pasty-faced Web geek emerged from an unruly heap of glowing hardware. Farfalla put her hands on her hips.
“Dove sono finite le vecchie consolle che c'erano prima?”
²

“I’m from Brazil! Do you speak English?”

“Okay, dude, sure,
onde estão os fones para escutar a tradução do grande evento?”
³

The Brazilian geek grinned in surprise and shrugged.
“Eu gostaria de poder te responder. Estou tentando conseguir os projetores para o trabalho!”
⁴

With a clouded brow, Farfalla left. After this exchange, premonitions were crawling all over her. A wave of bad vibrations. Why had she ever agreed to come here to Capri? She could have stayed safe in Ivrea, in her abandoned typewriter factory.

Farfalla felt her head swimming. Was a thunderstorm about to break? Had they poisoned the apple that she had stolen from the hotel? Something awful was about to happen. An omen was at hand.

Farfalla trusted her premonitions. She had no choice because her premonitions were true.

A stranger arrived in the chapel. He was the first Futurist from the coming crowd. He sat down in a folding conference chair, in a slanting beam of golden Capri sunlight. The bright glow fell on him like a blessing.

The stranger was tall and handsome, ominous and fatal. He was the One.

Farfalla could not believe her eyes. Here in Capri, the island of romance! Here he was, he was the One! Here he was out of nowhere, like a golden mushroom.

Farfalla had been expecting the One to arrive since the age of twelve. In Sao Paolo, her mentor – the fortune-teller – had read Farfalla’s palm, and told her all about the One.

Every woman’s true-romance story had the One. The world might be full of random men dying to kiss you, but the hero of a woman’s romance story was the One that story was
about
. When you met the One, he was your only One. That was
why
he was the One. He was the only One you would ever truly love. He was yours, and you were his. The romance story was the story of your union with him. Romance was destiny.

Romance was the most beautiful story in the world. Romance was believed and beloved by billions-inexhaustible, strong, ancient, divine, evergreen, the ultimate story. Unless you were a fortune-teller, a fortune-telling woman could see her way through any story like that.

As the wise woman told her — after you meet the One, all other men became useless to you. Huge armies of useless men suddenly inhabit your world. That’s a big drag in a fortune-teller’s business, to say the least. The fortune-teller, who had magic powers, understood romance with a terrible, paranormal clarity. Her clairvoyance let her see right through romance.

Because the poor fortune-teller also had a One. She loved her One with an almighty passion, she was the tender-hearted slave of her One, and she had no other One. That was why she was a miserable fortune-teller, instead of having a secure, high-paying job.

Now, the fortune-teller’s prophesy had come to pass, as Farfalla had always known that it would. That feeling that had been ominous, huge, cloudy and fatal. It had lived in the beating core of her heart.

Farfalla turned her back on the One, pretending to study the podium. She turned around again, to sneak another look at the One. The insight of Mother Hepsiba, the great fortuneteller off in distant Brazil, had finally found her here in Italy. No doubt about it, her One was indeed her destiny.

Farfalla’s premonitions of futurity were gone. This wasn’t the future any more, the future had become the here and now. What was foretold had come to pass. Moments ticked by on the clock, and then, the awesome, creepy feeling of déjà vu enveloped her. Déjà vu, cold and numbing, right to the bone. Farfalla was no stranger to déjà vu. Déjà vu was her personal curse. She’d suffered from déjà vu before she even knew how to spell it.

Déjà vu was the feeling that one had been here before, and Farfalla knew in her soul that she had already met this man. He was her One and he had somehow, terribly,
always been around her.
Her destiny had always been a hidden part of her life, and until this strange moment of revelation, she had never been able to see him.

He had to be her One, because he was so different from other men. A normal woman’s One was some lovable guy that she fell for, and did anything for, and just had to be with. Farfalla had it figured that she could probably manage with a guy in her life like that. Because her One would just be some everyday normal guy, and she was a woman who could foretell the future, so, probably, she would be able to deal with him. Somehow. But this guy wasn’t like normal or everyday. This guy was a futurist.

The two of them were both futurists, and they had a future together, because they shared a past together. Farfalla couldn’t quite remember their very personal history, but it lurked in her like a recurring nightmare. It was buried very deep, an ache hidden within her heart. Deep in her soul like a buried splinter, too deep to get her fingers around.

She and this tall man in his pretty beam of sunlight, they had a future together – and they also had a long, colorful history together. They had a too-long, too-colorful history. They had a history like Italian history.

Thankfully, her One hadn’t seen her. Not yet. Thanks to her spiritual powers, Farfalla had foreseen this trouble before it had happened. The romance hadn’t actually happened yet. Her burning, flaming, abject, passionate love, all heartfelt pangs and spiritual torment, was not quite there yet. Mercifully, she was still being spared.

Her knees trembled with the urge to flee.

The One did not realize that she was standing there, trembling, and sneaking awestruck looks at him. He did not know who she was and he couldn’t care less. Camera in hand, he was snapping shots of the evil cherubs. He looked like any Capri tourist — happy and slightly stupefied.

Farfalla made a move to creep out of the place unseen. But it was too late. Suddenly, like a tide, futurists arrived for the conference. They were crowding through the church doors in a mass.

A damp-faced, gangly Goth girl slouched into the chapel, along with the crowd. She saw the One and moved to join him. She sat down in a shadow, next to his beam of light.

From the tender look on his slightly sunburned face, he worshipped this hopeless Goth girl. His urgency and attention was met with an insufferable, teenage glare. She was a mess.

Suddenly, the two of them looked up at Farfalla. They both took full, surprised notice of her. They were obviously brother and sister, because they had the same fatal blue eyes. Eyes that pierced her like ice picks.

Farfalla’s spike-heeled feet were nailed to the stage.

She found her willpower and ran to hide.

1
“What are you doing, bloodsucker? Are you Albanian?”

2
“What happened to all those old chests that were here?”

3
“Where are the headphones to listen to the event’s translation?”

4
“I’d like to know the answer. I’m still trying to get the projectors!”

Chapter Three: Notre Grand Amour Est Mort

It was two in the morning and Gavin was suffering the fiercest throes of his jet-lag. He rustled and kicked under his crisp hotel sheets.

Gavin was a sleep-walker. He’d been walking in his sleep since the age of two, when he had first discovered walking.

Once his sleepwalking ailment had been diagnosed, Gavin had been fully treated by his anxious parents. Their best efforts had made his problem permanent.

As an adult, Gavin learned to anticipate his sleepwalking episodes. Armed with predictive insight, he took practical steps to avert his troubles. The symptoms were obvious. Gavin suffered sleepwalking episodes when he was too worried to relax. He would close his eyes, most of his body would go to sleep, but the distressed parts of his brain would fire up his hands and feet. He would tumble from his bed with a blind, unconscious need to take action.

Sleeping pills didn’t help him. Sleep medication produced a fake sleep that empowered his inner sleepwalker.

Gavin had to outguess the sleepwalker. He had to get ahead of the sleepwalker, anticipate his actions. This was a challenge but he could do it. The sleepwalker was not a disease. The sleepwalker was a part of himself. Self-knowledge was the key to the problem.

Being a futurist, Gavin knew how to worry. Although he was only twenty-six, Gavin had already served as the financial officer for four high-tech companies in Seattle. Small start-ups needed forward-thinking, tech-savvy accountants, people like himself. This was Gavin’s chosen career niche. He was the realistic, responsible, bottom-line guy inside visionary high-tech companies.

Three of Gavin’s start-up companies had quickly gone broke. That was acceptable, because going broke was a part of Seattle start-up culture. Unfortunately, Gavin’s family was also going broke. That part was not acceptable. Gavin’s family was not a Seattle start-up company. Gavin’s family was old Seattle gentry.

The Tremaines were Seattle old money. They were the city’s conservative core, the city’s safest bet, because they had never been gamblers. The Tremaines were descended from Seattle pioneers, the builders, the people of substance, the pillars of the community.

Generations of Tremaines had built Seattle, ever since the 1870’s, when their city was a village beach, full of clams. The modern Tremaines were “socially concerned community leaders with wealth-preservation strategies for a range of diversified investments.” As of today, in the historical year 2009, the Tremaines were probably worth...

Well, at today’s fire sale prices, the Tremaines were worth less than nothing. The Tremaine family fortune was a financial black hole. Because the Tremaines were in debt: leveraged debt, toxic debt, horrible, inescapable debt. The Tremaine fortune was a ghost.