The Demon Lover (43 page)

I
t took a long time to get out of the woods that day. Frank couldn’t put any weight on his right leg (it would turn out to be broken in two places) and he wouldn’t leave his baseball bat behind.

“Are you kidding? It’s signed by Bucky Dent!”

“Okay,” I said, lifting the bat in my left hand while using the right to support his weight. “How did you get it, anyway?”

I meant how did he happen to get it before chasing Mara and me into the woods, but he responded by telling me a long story about how the bat had been signed by Bucky Dent outside Fenway Park after he hit his famous three-run home run to beat the Red Sox in a one game playoff to end the 1978 season.

“Jeez, Frank, you being a witch and all, couldn’t you have brought something
magic
to save me?”

“Magic? Weren’t you listening, woman? The bat’s signed by Bucky fucking Dent. It
is
magic!”

He continued to splutter about the magical properties of sports memorabilia, distracting himself (as I’d hoped) from the pain. Only when we were in sight of the house and Brock, Dory, and Diana were running toward us did he add: “The Bucky Dent bat was in my trunk. I carry it in case I run into any crazies on the road. I grabbed it when I saw that giant bird chase you into the woods.”

His remark was loud enough to be overheard by the others and he repeated it as Diana drove us to the hospital. Frank repeated it so many times that I thought he might be going into shock, but then I realized he was just trying to preserve his cover by adamantly denying that he’d witnessed anything supernatural. When he was wheeled into surgery he winked at me and made me promise I’d make sure his Bucky Dent bat was safe.

I stayed at the hospital until Soheila showed up. “Tell Frank I went back to make sure Bucky Dent was safe,” I said, getting up to leave.

She looked at me strangely but settled in to wait for Frank to regain consciousness.

Everyone looked at me strangely for the next few days. I think they were afraid I was in shock and would soon lapse into the depression I’d wallowed in after I’d banished Liam. When I told Liz and Diana what had happened they both looked guilty. “So it wasn’t Liam who was feeding on the students,” Diana said. “Or on Liz.”

“I should have realized that I was always more tired after Mara had been with me,” Liz said. “I
should
have realized what she was.”

When I paid a visit to Soheila after break, she told me she felt badly that she hadn’t recognized Mara for what she was.

“You shouldn’t feel bad,” I told her. “She told me herself that even Liam hadn’t recognized what she was. What exactly was she, anyway?”

“A liderc,” she told me, taking down Fraser’s
Demonology
from the shelf and opening it to an illustration of a chicken with a woman’s head. “It’s a sort of Hungarian succubus, distantly related to us lilitu. They shapeshift into birds—chickens, usually, but sometimes crows—in order to hunt their prey and then feed on the life force of their victims through close contact. Not through sex, as a rule.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” I hadn’t liked the idea of Mara having sex with all her victims. “So she could have been the one making me weak, not Liam.”

“That could be, but the fact remains that Liam was an incubus and you were having sex with him. Sooner or later he would have drained you.”

How much later?
I wondered, but didn’t ask aloud. I knew Soheila—as well as Diana, Brock, Dory, and Liz—were afraid I’d have some sort of breakdown if I thought that I’d banished Liam for nothing. But I wasn’t going to have a breakdown. At least not if I kept busy.

As the days grew longer and warmer I subjected Honeysuckle House to an orgy of spring cleaning. I packed up Liam’s clothes and books and stored them in the attic. I dusted and scrubbed and washed all the windows. While dusting my desk I found a key that fit the locked drawer. Inside was another key—an iron key identical to the one Brock had made for me to send Liam back to the Borderlands. So he’d been sent there before—and then released. I wondered why and when.

While cleaning out the pantry I dislodged a shadowy lump with the mop and quickly recognized it as the shadow-crab. I poured a bucket of bleach over it and it shriveled up into a gray film that I briskly mopped up. Then I ran upstairs and found Ralph sitting up in his basket, cleaning himself.

“You’re back!” I ran down and got a whole mini Bonbel for him to eat. While I was gone he found his way onto my laptop and typed,
Is the incubus gone?

So Ralph had known all along.
And
he knew how to type! No wonder he’d always been trying to hop on my laptop. I told him the whole story while he ate enough cheese to bloat his stomach. Then he typed a single word on the screen.

Sorry!

I rubbed his little bloated belly. “It’s okay, fella, at least I’ve got you back. I don’t suppose you would have liked sharing the house with an incubus.” But Ralph was already asleep, snoring loudly enough to reassure me that he hadn’t lapsed into another coma.

After I scoured the house and made a list of more substantial outdoor repairs that I would need to tackle in the summer, I turned my attention to my students. I’d taken over the creative writing class again, so I had plenty to keep me busy. I was afraid they’d spend all their time bemoaning Liam’s absence, but the first time Scott Wilder (back from his medical leave looking drowsy as ever) mentioned Liam’s name, Nicky shot him an icy stare and no one ever brought him up again. Still, I saw Liam’s influence in their writing—in a new openness and sensitivity to language I hadn’t seen when I’d taught the class in the fall. He’d given them the confidence to experiment and find their own voices. Especially Nicky.

She had written a beautiful series of poems on the theme of a young girl trapped in an ice palace populated by frozen guardians. Each one had a story to tell. I recognized in each story a bit of Nicky’s family history, a bit of the Romantic heroines we’d read about in class, and more than a bit of Nicky’s fears about her future.

When I see how their dreams have gone awry
, she wrote,
I wonder how I will my fate mollify
.

May 2, Nicky’s birthday, was fast approaching, and I was no closer to averting the Ballard curse. To keep her close to me I hired her to take Mara’s place as my assistant. I showed her the charts that Mara had been keeping on Dahlia’s notebooks and she laughed when I explained Mara’s asterisk system.

“She was a strange one,” Nicky said, shaking her head. “Kind of a prude. She was always so shocked when I stayed at Ben’s, but then she’d always sit too close—you know what I mean?—and ask the most embarrassing questions. I figured she was trying to understand our culture, but sometimes it felt like she was trying to suck up all my experiences. Anyway, it’s too bad her visa expired. Do you think she’ll come back?”

“No,” I told her, hoping it was true. “I think she got all she could out of Fairwick.”

Nicky completed Mara’s charts, but she also made her own discovery from the notebooks.

“I think Dahlia LaMotte based one of her books on my family,” she told me in the last week of April. “It’s not one she ever published. It’s called
The Curse of the Bellefleurs
.”

When I read it I thought I saw why it hadn’t been published. It had little of the romantic tension that LaMotte was known for and it didn’t have a happy ending. It told the story of two ambitious men who join forces to gain control of the railroads in a small upstate town. Andre Bellefleur proves the more ruthless of the two and drives out his partner, Arthur Rosedale, and Rosedale’s wife kills herself. Before Rosedale leaves for the west he curses the Bellefleur women with an urge to kill themselves after they’ve given birth to a successor.

“It’s just like my family,” Nicky told me. “Except for the suicides. We Ballards prefer to decay slowly. My grandmother once told me when I was little that there was a curse and that’s why my mother acted the way she did. I never believed it … but lately … Well, there are a lot of strange things that go on in this town. A curse would be one of the
less
strange things. I just wish I knew how to make it go away.”

Nicky also noticed a marked number of correlations between the Bellefleurs and the Ballards—a wolf’s-head cane sported by Andre Bellefleur that she said was identical to one that had been in her family until her grandmother had pawned it, the antique pink sèvres
secretaire
with its pattern of frolicking cupids that still stood in her grandmother’s room, and the same brown freckle in their light blue eyes. I, too, found a family heirloom in the manuscript. Arthur Rosedale sported a black onyx intaglio watch fob inscribed with a tree which sounded remarkably like the brooch my grandmother wore. Once I’d thought of my grandmother I noticed some other similarities between Hiram Scudder’s story and my own family history. Hiram Scudder had gone out west to seek his fortune—so had my grandmother’s grandfather. Frank had told me that one of the aliases Scudder had used was Stoddard. I looked through my old copies of Dahlia LaMotte’s books and found the name Emmeline Stoddard written on their flyleaves.

It didn’t take a genius to make the next deduction. My grandmother was descended from the witch who had cursed the Ballards. Which meant she could uncurse them. If only I could convince her to, after telling her off the last time I saw her. The last person I felt like talking to right now was my grandmother. If her informants had told her about the incubus invasion on campus she wouldn’t spare me an embarrassing interrogation—or a gloating “I told you so.” But what choice did I have? Fate was offering me an opportunity to lift the Ballard curse, something Fairwick witches had been trying to do for decades. I’d just have to swallow my pride.

I recalled that my grandmother usually came into the city around the first of May for a board meeting at the Grove. I emailed her and asked if I could meet with her when she was in the city. She took so long replying that I thought I wasn’t going to get an answer, but then, a few days before the end of the month, I received a formal invitation in the mail inviting me to attend cocktails at the Grove on the evening of April 30. Overnight accommodations and all meals to be provided by the Grove at the request of Adelaide Danbury. My grandmother had written a note at the bottom:
I’ll be free to meet with you half an hour before cocktails in the library
. Staying overnight at the Grove was the last thing I wanted to do, but I understood that refusing wasn’t an option. Not if I wanted my grandmother to lift the Ballard curse.

On the drive down to the city I wondered what else Adelaide might ask in return for lifting the curse and how much I would be willing to give. The “request” Adelaide was most likely to make would be for me to leave Fairwick.

Fine, I thought, passing the big hex sign outside of Bovine Corners, I could live with that. In fact, it would probably be for the best. Although I’d finally gotten to the stage where I didn’t weep at every reminder of Liam (his favorite coffee mug, the last drop of Irish whiskey, the smell of honeysuckle) I was still sleeping in the downstairs bedroom and I still woke in the middle of the night reaching for him. I still hadn’t gotten up the courage to go into his study and clear it out. Just driving past the general store where we’d bought cheese, or the antiques store in Glenburnie where he’d bought me my ring, made me almost drive off the side of the road. Wouldn’t it be better to get far away from all reminders of him? Away from any temptation to go out into the woods, to the threshold between worlds, and release him? And wouldn’t it be better to teach at a college that didn’t attract life-sucking creatures? Although I’d told Liz Book she shouldn’t blame herself for failing to realize that Mara Marinca was a liderc—or that Liam was an incubus—shouldn’t the school monitor its faculty and student body better? Adelaide had been right; it
was
irresponsible not to let people know what they were dealing with. So, I decided by the time I got onto Interstate 17, if my grandmother asked me to leave Fairwick as a condition of lifting Nicky’s curse, I would agree. No matter how much I would miss it.

Having made my decision I popped in an audiobook of the new Charlaine Harris novel and didn’t think of anything but Sookie Stackhouse’s troubles until I reached Manhattan. (At least I hadn’t fallen for a vampire! I congratulated myself, realizing that it had been four months since I’d made my deal with Anton Volkov and he’d never bothered me once.) Then rush hour Midtown traffic occupied all my attention until I pulled into a parking garage on Forty-third Street.

I wheeled my suitcase into the lobby, checked in, and was escorted upstairs by an elderly bellhop to a small but elegant room papered in blue toile and upholstered in a watery blue moiré. The mirrors were old and spotted, tarnished to faded silver. My reflected self looked like a stranger in them—a person I only half remembered. Was that pale thin woman with rust colored hair hanging loose like a drowning victim’s really me? I looked like an old photograph of myself that had faded in the sunlight. When had that happened? And when was the last time I had looked at myself in the mirror? I had been avoiding meeting my own gaze for so long it was as though my reflection had faded with disuse.

I looked at my watch and saw that I had a few hours before I was due to meet Adelaide. Then I called my old hairstylist, Elan, and asked if there were any way she could fit me in even though I knew that she was always booked solid months in advance.

“Oh,” she said, “but someone just called to make you an appointment. A Miss Danbury. I told her there were no openings, but she left word to call you if there were any cancellations and we just had one … I was just about to call.”