Simply Irresistible (13 page)

“Besides,” Blackstone said, going to a large table, “if we talk out here, we don’t have to worry about my kitchen staff overhearing anything unusual.”

He reached into the pocket of his shirt and removed a box of matches. Then he lit a fat candle in the middle of that table’s large centerpiece.

“Alex.” Another blond woman pushed her way past the group at the door. “You’re not thinking of opening today, are you?”

The woman was tiny and had the cute, open face of a high school cheerleader. In fact, if she hadn’t spoken first, Vivian would have thought she was a high school student. But the woman’s voice had a strength that only came with age and experience.

When Blackstone raised his head and looked at the woman, his expression softened, easing the angles and planes of his face. He suddenly looked approachable.

“I think it would be more suspicious if we remained closed, don’t you, Nora?”

Nora, the blonde, shook her head. “Not with all those cops and news organizations out there.”

“Publicity,” said Andrew Vari. “It’s always good to be open when members of the press are around.”

“Except when you have three Fates in your dining room,” Dex said dryly.

Vari shrugged one shoulder. “We could spell diem so no one saw them but us.”

Dex let go of Vivian’s hand. She felt the absence as if he had left her. “Before we go any farther, I need to know if this place is protected.”

Blackstone’s eyes hooded, and Vivian couldn’t see their expression any longer. “Why?”

“These women have been under assault all morning,” Dex said. “I need to know they’re safe.”

“They’re safe for the moment,” Blackstone said. “We’ll have a problem when we open for business.”

“So you do have a protection spell on this place?”

Vari crossed his arms. “How we protect this place is none of your business.”

The back of Vivian’s neck ached. She wondered if she had twisted it funny when she passed out. She rubbed it absently.

“Right now, it is my business,” Dex said. “I didn’t bring everyone here to make matters worse. I suspect the Fates are up against some pretty big powers, and I am a rather young mage compared to you two. I thought I could use some help.”

“This is the part where you say, ‘But I was wrong’ and then stomp off, right?” Vari’s face, however beautiful, was not kind. Vivian had been right to compare him to a sculpture. He had all the warmth of stone. “You’d like to leave them here with us. You’ve had enough trouble with your heroic tendencies. Better to let bad boys who’ve already served their sentences mess with the Fates, just in case this is some kind of trick.”

Dex’s expression didn’t change, but Vivian could feel his shock. No one had ever spoken to him about his magic like that except the Fates themselves.

“The ladies came to you for help,” Vari said.

“Actually,” Dex snapped, “they came to you first, but you two were unavailable.”

“Actually,” Vivian said, putting her hand on Dex’s arm in an attempt to calm him down, “they came to me first. They didn’t know how to find Dex and they couldn’t find you two either. I did what I could. I’m not able to do any more. I don’t know if Dex can either. So maybe we should just leave this up to the rest of you.”

No one had sat down around the large table. Everyone was standing near it, like houseguests who weren’t sure if the party had started yet.

Blackstone stared at the Fates as if he could see through them.

“I’m not real keen on helping them,” he said as if they weren’t there. “There’s a thousand years of my life spent carting a coffin around that I’d like to get back.”

Vari’s arms tightened, showing the muscles in his biceps. He didn’t look at the Fates at all, but directed his remarks to Dex. “They’re not my favorite people either. They made me look like a garden gnome for nearly three thousand years.”

Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos stood near the swinging doors, arms around each other. As they listened, the hope on their faces slowly faded.

“Your punishments were justified,” Clotho said.

“Particularly yours, Darius,” Lachesis said. “You nearly destroyed true love for everyone.”

“I never had that power,” Andrew Vari said.

“And as for you, Aethelstan,” Atropos said, “you misunderstood our prophecy. That is not our fault.”

Blackstone took a step toward the women, his face filled with menace. Vivian felt the repressed anger in him, now boiling very close to the surface.

She took a step back even though she was nowhere near them. Dex put his hand against her spine, holding her in place. He didn’t want her to call attention to herself.

Nora grabbed Blackstone’s arm. “It turned out all right, Alex. It turned out the way it was supposed to. You know that.”

Blackstone glared at the three women for a moment, then bent down and kissed Nora on the top of her head. “Right as always, my beautiful wife.”

Vari rolled his eyes and Nora glared at him. Even though Vivian got no sense of magical power from her, she suddenly had the feeling that Nora was the strongest person of the three.

“Everything turned out all right for you too, Sancho,” Nora said, obviously using yet another nickname for Andrew Vari. “Better than all right. And you’re usually the first to admit it.”

Vari grimaced, then shook his head. At that moment, yet another woman came through the double doors from the kitchen. She glanced at the Fates as if she didn’t recognize them, then walked around them, looking with surprise at the large group.

She had a sweatband around her forehead, and her red hair was tied back into a ponytail. She was wearing Lycra running shorts, a Lycra top, and expensive running shoes.

She looked very familiar.

“Is my husband causing trouble?” she asked, using a towel to wipe the sweat off her face.

“I don’t cause trouble, Ari,” Vari said. “I prevent it.”

She grinned. “In what world?”

He grinned too, but Vivian didn’t like the expression. It hid scheming, which she could sense from him. She tilted her head sideways, still trying to ease the ache in her neck.

“Ari,” Andrew Vari said, “I don’t think you’ve ever met the Fates.”

He swept his arm toward the three women near the one he was calling Ari. She whirled toward them, her green eyes flashing, her mood completely different.

“You! You’re the ones who hurt my husband. Didn’t you know what a good, kind man he is? Don’t you know what you put him through, how unfair it all was? Do you know what you did to him, making him suffer like that? It’s not right and not fair, and I’ve been meaning to tell you all this for a long time now, but he wouldn’t let me. Now I can, and believe me, if I had magic, you women would pay for what you did. You’d—”

“Ariel.” Blackstone’s voice was sharp. “Don’t ever threaten the Fates.”

“It’s all right,” Dex said, his tone laconic. “They don’t have any power anymore. Or have they forgotten to tell you that part?”

Nora, Blackstone, Vari, and Ariel turned toward him, their shock so overpowering that Vivian would have taken another step backward if Dex hadn’t still been holding her in place.

Vivian had no idea why Dex had told the group that the Fates had no power. She could sense it was important—at least as far as he was concerned. He was thinking that no one would help the Fates if they still had their magic.

Given the anger radiating from the men across from Vivian, she realized that Dex might be right.

“We were going to get to that,” Clotho said.

“It’s not something you announce the moment you come into a room,” Lachesis said.

“Besides,” Atropos said, “it’s not permanent.”

“You hope,” Dex said.

Vivian felt a prickling run up her spine. She glanced at the front door. They were being watched; she was certain of it.

But she couldn’t see anyone standing at the door. She could barely see through the darkened windows. Only shadowy forms existed out there, and none of them seemed to be close to the restaurant Yet she knew that someone was watching. Someone from outside. Someone who shouldn’t have been watching at all.

“Excuse me,” she said.

Dex glanced at her, but no one else seemed to notice. The rest of the group was looking at the Fates.

“No power?” Vari said, a gleam in his beautiful blue eyes as he looked at the Fates. “You mean I can turn
them
into garden gnomes?”

Vivian felt Dex stiffen beside her. He was worried about the Fates. He’d been worried about how they would treat him, and now his innate kindness made him concerned for them.

Vivian wanted to slip her arm around his back and reassure him that everything would be all right. But something in his body language told her that he didn’t want to be touched like that. He wanted to focus on the conversation around them.

“You know,” Blackstone said as Vari came to his side, “they’ve always opted for beauty whenever they’ve changed forms. Maybe we should let them know what it’s like to be at a disadvantage.”

“Like you’ve known,” Vari said.

Blackstone shrugged. “They had me deal with other issues. Prolonged fights, failed spells.”

The prickly feeling grew, and exacerbated the pain in Vivian’s neck. Her sense of another presence, a powerful presence, grew.

“Excuse me,” she said again, but no one looked at her, not even Dex.

He was watching the Fates, who were cringing against the kitchen door.

“You know, I’ve never been one for vengeance,” Vari said, “except, well, when I was young, but—”

“I have, even now.” Blackstone wasn’t smiling. In fact, his expression terrified Vivian. They weren’t going to help the Fates. They were going to harm them.

“Gentlemen,” Nora said, “you deserved the punishments you got and you know it. Let’s move on.”

“I don’t know, Nora,” Ariel said. “I’m not real fond of these ladies either.”

“They did their jobs. They rehabilitated Sancho and they—”

“Stop sounding like a lawyer,” Blackstone said.

“I am a lawyer,” Nora snapped. “And what you’re proposing will get you in trouble with the Fates.”

“Who are standing right here,” said Blackstone, narrowing his gaze.

“But their replacements aren’t,” Nora said. “And believe me, your Powers That Be—”

As she said this, the Fates did half of their genuflection. They spread their arms, but they didn’t lower their heads. They kept their gazes on the men they’d come to for help.

“—won’t allow your magical system to go without its judiciary-slash-law enforcement wing.”

“Actually…” Dex started, but Vivian poked him in the side. She was developing a fondness for the Fates, and she didn’t want this crew to know that they’d been replaced by some helpless teenage girls.

Dex gave her a look, then said nothing more.

“Punishment in this case,” Nora was saying, “might be a lot more severe because you should know better.”

“And it would be your second offense,” said Ariel, tapping a finger against her teeth as she thought about this.

“No, Blackstone’s second. I’m well past three-strikes-and-you’re-out country.” Vari sighed and pulled out a chair with one foot. Then he sat down rather heavily, keeping his arms crossed and glaring at the Fates. “I’m not really willing to help you.”

“I don’t think it matters,” Vivian said. The tingling on the back of her neck had grown worse. “Because—”

“Neither am I,” Blackstone said to the Fates. “I won’t get in your way, but I’m not real fond of you ladies.”

“You asked us for help,” Clotho said.

“At the end, with Ealhswith. And we helped,” Lachesis said.

“We didn’t have to,” Atropos said. “We bent some rules for you.”

The tingling was almost unbearable. “Please,” Vivian said. “Will someone listen—?”

A thick skein of rope dropped from the ceiling and lassoed all three Fates. Ariel reached for them, then backed off as if she had been burned. Dexter dove forward, reaching for the rope as he did, but he seemed to be moving in slow motion.

The lasso tightened around the Fates and yanked them upward, just as Dex reached them. He grabbed for them, but his fingers missed their kicking feet.

The Fates were pulled into the air. They screamed, snapping their fingers, probably trying to do a spell.

Blackstone watched, his mouth open. Vari tilted his head back in surprise.

“Stop sitting there!” Nora shouted as she ran forward. “Do something!”

The Fates disappeared through the ceiling. Dexter slid across the floor, and slammed into the wall, the thud echoing throughout the building. He lay there, hunched, eyes closed.

Vivian hurried to his side. She had no sense of him, and no sense of the Fates either.

They were gone, as if they had never been. The rest of the group was staring at the ceiling, but Vivian looked at Dex.

She couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

She wasn’t even sure if he was still alive.

Chapter Ten

Eris sat on the warm concrete steps and leaned against the metal railing. Anyone watching her would have thought she was observing her anchor describe the changing scene for the camera trained on him.

In truth, she could have cared less how Noah Sturgis described the changes occurring in Portland. She was concentrating instead on manipulating her puppet.

The woman she had chosen had been an elderly schoolteacher (now retired) who had emerged from her apartment to watch the chaos in the streets. She had attracted Eris’s attention because the woman, with her formidable chin, silver-gray hair, and regal manner, looked like a stereotypical witch.

So Eris had made her one just for the day.
Witch for a Day
—probably not a concept show that would work on her cable network, but one that she aired privately every now and then.

Eris smiled. The magic she used to control her puppet, once mastered, was simple and required little energy. What required energy was keeping a mental eye on her puppet’s progress while Eris pretended she was doing nothing at all.

She had sent Strife into the building across the street to see if he could find the Fates. Eris had already known they were gone, but she wanted to keep Strife busy and out of her way. The last thing she needed was her son to distract her at the wrong moment.