Something Wicked (18 page)

I tensed all over. Other than that, though, I sat very, very still. Was he even real?

“You’re so blind,” he said, laughing with amusement.

So…not Ben? Or a Ben who was still really mad?

“Stratonikea was founded in the third century B.C.,” he continued, as if it were perfectly normal for him to be standing here, lecturing about history. Darkness washed back across him again, but he kept talking, a voice from the void. “Named after a king’s wife. And stepmother.”

Another strobe of lightning showed him laughing at that, like it was some big scandal. Since it was a freaking
ancient
scandal, I wasn’t exactly impressed.

“How’d you find me?” I demanded. My first instinct was to try to find a weapon. The room fell dark again, a darkness that the flickering of my tiny votive candle couldn’t begin to fight. Then again, that was our best weapon, wasn’t it? Victor’s and mine both.

Darkness.
Just of a different kind.

Slowly recovering my senses, if not my ability to, oh,
breathe,
I stopped looking for earthly protection.

I was in a circle. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Managing a tiny inhale, I tried to draw the power of the rainstorm into me in preparation for a battle.

Assuming it even was Victor. How would Victor know all this stuff? But why would Ben be so smarmy?

“Over the first century—that would be later, Katie, the years count backward B.C.?—Stratonikea and its temple to Hekate were repeatedly sacked, wholly destroyed. Eventually a temple was built here to Sarapis, the god of dreams brought by the Greeks from Egypt. This became His city.”

I felt increasingly confused. So was this a Victor who suddenly knew about old gods, or a Ben who’d turned mean? “Why are you here?”

Hey, it didn’t seem as stupid a question as
Who are you?
And my voice barely shook. The mingling scent of cypress and sandalwood smoke tickled my nose.

“
His
city, Katie,” he insisted, his rasp of a voice intensifying from the shadows. “It no longer belongs to your lost goddess. It belongs to Sarapis.
SARAPIS!
”

“Fine, it belongs to—” At the last minute, I remembered the power of names. “To some other god. So are we supposed to ask
him
where the Hekate Grail is hidden?”

Another crash of thunder shook the ground beneath my wet knees. Birds flew out of the rafters in a feathery panic. More light blasted through the windows—

And he wasn’t there. Not Victor. Not Ben.

Adrenaline had me on my feet. Where was he? And where was his voice coming from? Magic wasn’t supposed to manifest this dramatically!

“
Think,
Katie,” the voice instructed, even as I spun in a circle, searched the shadows. “Even you can figure this one out.
They took it with them!
”

Even you…this
had
to be Victor. But even witches as experienced as my grandmothers couldn’t vanish, that wasn’t how magic worked. I couldn’t see him anywhere. Not during the next lightning strike, or the next.

I was shaking now, a bone-deep trembling. The space between each pulse of lightning, as I listened for some sign of him over the rain outside, over the fluttering of the birds, seemed to last forever. And those stretches just got longer. A line of incense smoke stretched, pale, upward. Rain drummed on what was left of the roof, and on the ruins outside. Thunder grumbled, then faded.

No attack came.

Outside, the rain finally began to slow. The sky lightened, and gray began to dilute the shadows of the deserted manor home.

Nobody was there.
Had he been?

And if he hadn’t, what had?

He couldn’t be that good a magic user. I kept telling myself that, in hope that repetition would make it true. He couldn’t be that powerful. Not so quickly.

Eventually I knelt again, thanking and dismissing the elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water for attending my magic—for whatever protection the circle might have afforded me. But my hand shook as I snuffed the candle. As the post-storm light returned, I went to the corner where Victor had stood…and nothing was disturbed on the floor. No dirt scuffed away to reveal the marble beneath. No leaf litter broken or shifted. A few dusty feathers lay atop the mess, along with old poop from the birds in the rafters.

That’s when my head began to swim. He
hadn’t
been here?

“Diana?” I called, and my voice broke. “Diana!”

Nothing. Stupid, unreliable ghost.

So had he been a vision, maybe a dream? Or had
he
been a ghost? And if so…had he really been Victor’s?

Foreboding constricted my chest, rushed my pulse into a thundering drumbeat. I tossed my supplies haphazardly into my backpack, climbed out the manor home window into the now sunny, muddy Turkish countryside, and took off in the direction of the highway.

I had to catch the first
dolmus
heading back to Pamukkale.

I had to make sure Ben was all right!

It didn’t help, when I finally got back to my hotel, that the concierge caught me in the lobby.

“Trillo
hanim,
” he called, with an elegant mix of discretion and urgency. “A thousand pardons,
hanim effendi.
You have had three telephone calls from your cousin. She pleads that you ring her back straight away on a matter of emergency.”

I’d woken up on a freaking train this morning. I’d been caught in a thunderstorm—I
so
needed a hot bath, and clean clothes, and to blow-dry my cast—and I’d come face-to-face with…what? A dream? A
ghost?

Other than Diana’s, I mean.

This wasn’t good. “Could you please help me make a phone call?”

He did more than that, taking me into his private office and having hot Turkish coffee fetched as he made the call himself. It’s amazing, the kind of service you get when people think you have money. Once the call connected, he left me, the phone and the coffee to ourselves.

Not that I could have taken a sip, the way my hand shook. “Eleni?”

“Katie? Thank heavens I find you!” She’d had my itinerary, but I guess those three phone calls had given her plenty of time to worry.

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

Please, not Ben. Please, not Ben.

“There is a murder.” Eleni’s voice barely shook. Never had I wished more strongly that my cousin had a better grasp on verb tenses. Did she mean there would be a murder? Or that there had been…?

Oh, please, no. “Ben?” I whispered, as my world swooped around me.

And Eleni said, “Yes.”

B
en?

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think anything but one stark thought. No, two thoughts.

One thought was just
no, no, no,
echoing through my head with my pounding pulse, louder and louder. Soon the word would tear from my throat—I knew it would, I’d been here too painfully and too recently, and there was nothing I’d be able to do about it.
No!

But my other thought was even worse.

This was my fault.

I’d cursed him. I’d put him at risk. In my need for vengeance, I hadn’t done everything possible to beg Hekate to cancel the spell. And now…

Ben.

I hadn’t even known him, outside of magic.

“Katie? Are you all right? There is a murder!”

Somehow I managed to force out a single question. “Who?” Of course I meant, who did it? It had to be Victor, right? And yet, Ben had been so damned sure his twin brother wouldn’t hurt him….

“A gypsy girl,” said Eleni.

Which was when I started to suspect I’d missed something here. “A gypsy girl killed Ben?”

“No! Ben is arrested for killing a gypsy girl.”

And click. Now I understood. My relief came out as fury. “
Damn it,
Eleni! How could you do that to me? I thought you meant Ben had been murdered.
I thought he was dead!
”

“I do not say he is dead,” my cousin protested.

No, she’d just said…

Okay, this wasn’t helping anybody. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood. Ben’s under arrest? Where—Greece or Turkey?”

“He is in Athens.” Why
would
he have stayed in Turkey after our fight? “The girl, she and a shipping merchant, they are found dead in his brother’s hotel.”

“The Hotel Zeus? Then why did they arrest…oh.”

It’s not like I couldn’t figure that part out.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I told Eleni, and hung up. Only then, as my inhale stuttered, and my exhale caught, did I start to cry. Hard.

I was exhausted from feeling guilty.

Especially feeling
justifiably
guilty.

This had to end.

In half the time it had taken me to get to Pamukkale, I’d gotten myself back to Athens—but instead of a train, this trip involved a bus ride to the Denizli airport and a stopover in Istanbul. What followed was a wild-goose chase with rolling luggage. From the airport, I tried to find Ben at the jail. They told me he’d been released to the consulate. By then it was night, but I finally found someone at the U.S. Embassy who admitted that Ben had gotten permission to leave the country—I guess the evidence against him for the Athens murders was even flimsier than what they’d had in Chicago.

Then again, I hadn’t been there to “help,” this time.

When I called his hostel, he’d already checked out. So I made a late-night rush back to the shiny new Athens airport. Only two flights to the United States remained to depart that night, both of them to New York, so I bought a damned ticket to New York just so I could get through the security check to look for him. I nearly screamed when my credit card didn’t go through. I had to call them and give the company my mother’s maiden name to reassure them that it really was me making all these overseas charges before I could get my ticket.

Yeah, it was a long shot. And maybe illegal, from an international-security standpoint. But I had to try. Ever since seeing that ghostly image in Stratonikea—Ben’s or Victor’s, I still wasn’t positive—I had to try.

I suppose I could have tried a spell to speed up the process of finding him. But…magic was what had screwed things up between us in the first place.

I dragged my rolling suitcase to the first departing gate to New York. No Ben. So I hurried on to the only other departing flight, dodging travelers, breathing hard.

Luckily, all international flights left from the same “hall” of the main terminal, no matter the airline.

By now I was so stressed that I wasn’t even wondering if I could get a refund for my ticket…or if they could force me to take the flight. It was one of those weird effects of travel, that I could only worry about the very next step, instead of several steps ahead. And the only step on my mind just then was that
I had to find—

Al Barker?

My footsteps slowed. I rubbed my eyes with the fingertips of my cast hand—since my good hand still had a death grip on my rolling suitcase. But it was him, all right. As Ben and I had noticed just last week, the tall redhead stood out around here.

What to do, what to do?

Al might be a bad guy. He’d set me and Ben up, at the diner in Chicago. He’d gone to Victor’s hotel room. Then again…

I was a bad guy, too.

So I intercepted him. “Where is he?”

His double take, as he recognized me, would have been funny if I’d had any sense of humor left. “Kate Trillo?”

“Where’s Ben?”

Instead of answering, Al just lifted his gaze. Behind me, a familiar, raspy voice said, “Katie?”

I turned—and there Ben stood, alive and real and okay. Seeing him eased my soul in places I hadn’t thought were alive, until that moment. He looked about as exhausted as I felt, with stubble on his angular jaw and dark smudges under his intensely dark, intensely wary eyes. His hair needed a comb.

A fast-food bag dangled, forgotten, from his hand.

And I’d cursed him.
No wonder he’d been mad. And I hadn’t even said…

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He swallowed. Hard. “Okay.”

So I threw myself at him. Literally. My suitcase went over with a loud
whack
sound as I knocked him back a surprised step. Ben said “Oof!” as my cast hit his shoulder blades when I flung my arms around him. But then the paper bag in his hand hit the shiny floor and his arms cinched hard around me, too. Then he was kissing me, and everything—at least for that moment—was absolutely good.

In fact…

Damn, the man really could kiss.

It occurred to me that this deep sense of connection, even of completion, was still part of the curse’s backlash.

Then it occurred to me to just enjoy it, for once.

I buried my fingers into the loopy black curls behind Ben’s ear, and I caressed his stubbly jaw with my thumb. He nuzzled my cheek, my nose. I arched into him and his kisses. And I felt happy. Happy…

And then I felt surprised, because it had been a month since I’d been happy. Because there were times I’d feared I’d never be happy ever again. And look at me.

But I wasn’t surprised enough to stop kissing him. Not even when Ben’s widening grin made his lips a little less flexible. I just focused on his lower lip, then.

“Uh…sorry to interrupt.” That was Al. “They’ve started boarding our flight.”

Oh, damn. Flight?

Ben cleared his throat, leaning back slightly from me. Very slightly, considering how firmly I’d locked my arm behind him. I liked the press of our bodies too much to give him much slack. “You’re not going home, too, are you?”

“No. I mean—I bought a ticket. But that was to get in and find you. I’m hoping they’ll credit me or something.”

He laughed. “Couldn’t you have tried a courtesy page?”

A…?
Damn.
I hated feeling stupid.

Then again, would a courtesy page have led to this kind of kissing? Even now that the kissing had stopped, I couldn’t seem to stop caressing his warm cheek with my thumb. “I had to make sure you were okay. I heard about the arrest….”

“Eyewitnesses.” He made a face. “Al got me a lawyer, as soon as it happened. Once he proved that we were twins, and the room was Victor’s…I’m fine. Really. Don’t worry.”

But he seemed adorably pleased that I’d worried at all.

I had a curse to lift, didn’t I? “I guess I’ll stay here, then. Or go back to Turkey. I need to track where Hekate’s priestesses would have gone after they fled Stratonikea.”

You could practically see Ben’s ears perk up. “Where’s Stratonikea? What did you find out?”

“Ben,” urged Al in that deep, dramatic voice of his.

Ben waved him off. “They’re still boarding the first-class passengers. Come on, Katie. Talk to me.”

He collected the things we’d dropped and drew me over to some plastic seats. But he didn’t let go of my hand even as we sat. We bent close to each other, and not just because of our subject matter. Our jeaned knees pressed against each other, and that was good, too.

Comforting, even. Halfway around the world, but not alone.

While the gate agents called out the different groups of passengers to board—in a whole list of languages—I filled Ben in on the basics of my encounter in Stratonikea.

“Fascinating,” he murmured, his intense gaze tracking the invisible progress in his head. “You know, it might not have been me
or
Victor who spoke to you. It could have been a vision or, considering your recent brush with parasomnia, even a waking dream. This figure spoke of Sarapis, right?”

“God of
dreams.
” Okay. I got it now. “Are you saying that ancient gods and goddesses are having some kind of turf war over a deserted village?”

“I wouldn’t begin to presume, but…things don’t have to be one or the other in dreams. Maybe the person you saw was both me
and
Victor. And neither of us, at the same time.”

I stared at him, and he ducked his head, winced up toward me. “Too abstract?”

Yes.
And it was damned sexy. “I just need to know where to go next. We’ve been so busy looking backward, it never occurred to me to track the cup forward, but my visitor had a point. If the women who worshipped Hekate took her cup somewhere else, where would it be? I mean, there’s a whole lot of—”

Ben sat up. “Italy.”

“Benny,” said Al again. This time, he had a point. Few stragglers still stood in line with their boarding passes. The gate agent glanced meaningfully at us, to hurry us up.

“Where in Italy?” I asked, and Ben laughed again. Apparently, kissing had a good effect on him, too.

“I doubt I could come up with a location in just—no, wait. Rome! Or Naples. They’re ancient. I bet it will be one or the other.”

I blinked at him. Damn, he was smart. But…“Rome
or
Naples?”

“Oh…hell. Come on.” And,
still
holding my hand, he shouldered his carry-on, snagged my rolling suitcase, and led me over to the desk by the gate. “We can’t go to New York,” he told the ticket agent, quietly but firmly. “We need to go to Naples.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but once you’ve checked luggage, you’re committed to boarding the plane.”

“But I haven’t checked luggage.” He turned to me. “Did you check any luggage?”

“No. I’ve only got the one bag.”

The ticket agent asked for our passes and started typing in information, probably accessing records to make sure we weren’t lying. In the meantime, Al pulled Ben backward by the shoulder, forcing us to let go of each other’s hands at last.

I strained to hear…but it didn’t work.

“Sir?” interrupted the ticket agent. “Ma’am? Although we can give you credit toward future flights, we don’t have service to Naples.”

“What about other airlines?” I asked, like I was rolling in money. The ticket agent typed a little more.

“Another carrier has a flight out to Rome in half an hour. They would have to tell you if there are still seats.”

At the same time, the gate agent got onto the loudspeaker. “Will a Mr. Alister Barker please report to Gate 13? Your flight has boarded. Alister Barker, please report to gate 13.” She repeated herself in what I assumed was Greek.

Al quickly leaned close to me. “Just try to keep him away from his brother, okay?”

Turns out Al
had
checked baggage. It was time to either board, or give them a damned good reason to delay the flight and pull his suitcase.

Which is how Ben and I ended up spending the night alone together, in Rome.

True, it was after midnight when we checked into our double room at the hotel. And we’d talked so much on the plane, about my grail quest in Turkey and about his brush with the law in Athens. He insisted that Al had been in Athens only to pursue the story—“sell his mom for publicity, remember?”—and I wasn’t convinced. By the time we got to our room, we were kind of talked out. Or shy. Or both.

Ben put his duffel bag and my suitcase down against the wall, leaving the choice of the two beds to me. “So…” he said, holding my gaze in a way that felt a lot like him holding my hand had. Meaningful, I mean. Solid.

My throat closed up with something that felt a lot like…panic? I’d been shattered when I thought he was dead, elated to know he lived. And it felt wonderful, traveling with him. Rome—the Eternal City, Ben had called it in the cab—was seriously romantic at night, its monuments and fountains lit with colored floodlights against a nearly full moon.

Then again, we didn’t know each other that well. We were exhausted. And I’d only had two other lovers in my life—or four, depending on how you define sexual relations. With only mixed success. But my biggest hesitation?

Instead of calling dibs on one of the beds, I asked, “How much does it bother you? That what we’re feeling might not be real, I mean. That it might only be the magic?”

“Not so much,” he admitted, his voice hoarse with desire. “How about—?”

But by then, I’d crossed the few steps between us and tipped my face up for his kisses, which he right away gave—with the same intense focus Ben gave everything.

And I mean,
everything.

Kissing upright became kissing on the bed became increasingly heavy petting—and don’t forget, he had two good hands. The hotter it got, the more clothes we took off, and his dark gaze was a caress on my naked body, and his body…

He was tight, and lean, and wonderful.

The sensations of body against warm body, breath across hot breath, became everything. Our whole conversation consisted of me gasping, “My toiletry bag,” which he got for me—I felt so horribly cold, during the few seconds he was gone—and, after I’d dug out a two-year-old condom, him holding my face long enough to ask, “Are you sure?”