Trouble with Gargoyles: an Urban Fantasy (Moonlight Dragon Book 3) (2 page)

The hostess still hadn't broken her obsessive fascination with whatever was beyond the front doors. It occurred to me that she might be mesmerized, spelled to put up no defense against whatever was heading for the door. Or worse, she was petrified with terror by what she could see.

"Anne!"

I heard Melanie calling for me from deeper in the restaurant, shades of concern in her voice. It prompted me to hurry the last few feet to the hostess stand. If there was danger I wanted to be the one to face it, not my little monkey shifter friend.

"Hey," I said to the hostess, though my eyes were on the front doors.

Someone
was
approaching.

"Hey!" I said in a louder voice. I slapped the knife on the top of the podium.

She snapped out of her moony gaze to blink wildly, first at the knife, then at me. "Oh! I-I'm sorry. I don't know what—m-may I help you?" She took a nervous step back from the knife.

"I'm looking for toothpicks." Now that she was paying attention to me, she couldn't seem to tear her gaze away from the lower half of my face.

"Oh, uh, yes, right here, ma'am."

Ma'am
. I was twenty-four years old! Grinding my teeth only a little, I accepted the three wrapped toothpicks she handed me. As I did so, the front door banged opened.

Vale stormed in. He did that a lot, storming. I liked it a lot, too. Brooding, mysterious, a sucker for having his hair pulled—Vale was a boyfriend I probably didn't deserve. But everyone got lucky once in a while in Vegas. It was apparently my turn.

He wasn't classically handsome; that award went to his best bud Christian. But Vale was compelling. I'd never looked into a guy's eyes before and believed that he was thinking about things that mattered. Maybe Vale liked sports—I'd never asked him—and maybe his secret hobby was comic book collecting, but I doubted it. He wasn't trivial and he wasn't shallow. Vale was as ancient and multi-layered as a Redwood. When I was with him he made me feel that everything I said held significance, and that every action I took affected the world.

I liked that. Before meeting him I had thought relationships were all about holding hands and staying in for pizza and being intimate. And it
was
those things at times. But Vale made me believe that us coming together could mean more than a new relationship status on Facebook. It could mean making a difference to someone. Maybe to everyone.

The hostess beside me didn't bother hiding how she checked him out from his motorcycle boots and scuffed jeans to the dark hoodie that was one of his favorites. She saw only the surface, the sparkle that meant nothing. If she was able to sit down with him and talk to him she'd either want to marry him or she'd run away, claiming that he was too "heavy". The only reason I didn't burn down the hostess stand was because Vale's dark eyes didn't acknowledge her even for a moment. He had eyes only for me.

"Moody," he said.

I shivered at that deep voice. One of these days I was going to ask him if he practiced it. That was kind of a sexy thought, but I put it away for later because I'd picked up something else in his voice that wasn't associated with canoodling.

I stepped toward him. "What is it? What's wrong?"

He opened his mouth to reply and abruptly frowned. "What's that all over your face?"

I reached up. Did my best not to cringe. "Oh, you know. Just bobbing for hot wings. It's a new sport. You should try it."

I reached over the edge of the podium and grabbed some tissues from the box there. I hastily mopped the sauce off my mouth, cheeks, and chin so I no longer looked like a sloppy cannibal. I also belatedly noticed I was still wearing my plastic bib. With a curse, I yanked it off and balled it up. Vale might be deep and sophisticated, but I was still a work in progress.

"What is it?" I asked, frustrated. Worried. My lips and tongue were on fire. It hurt to speak.

Vale caught my arm and pulled me to the door. "It's Christian."

My heart dropped. I looked back for Melanie. Christian and she had an on-again, off-again thing. I think they were currently on, but it didn't matter either way. Vale's demeanor told me this would affect Melanie, too. She was making her way toward us but kept getting waylaid by congratulatory diners. Everyone wanted a piece of the hot wing queen.

"Don't tell me he's dead," I whispered to Vale. "Just don't."

I liked Christian, which was a surprise because I normally distrusted super good-looking guys who were aware of how gorgeous they were. Christian fit that bill, but it turned out he was an okay guy. He'd probably saved Vale's life.

"Something's happened to his mother."

"Diana," I breathed.

Another candidate for someone I shouldn't like and, well, I actually didn't like her, come to think of it. She'd insulted my heritage and even though she'd been under a compulsion cast by Vagasso, she'd still tried to kill me and my friend Orlaton in order to help Vagasso overthrow Las Vegas.

But disliking someone didn't mean I wanted them to be hurt.

"She's dead," Vale confirmed, a bit loudly. He looked deep into my eyes for something. "Did you feel it?"

I cocked my head, surprised. "Did I feel it? How would I—" I paused, recalling what I'd just been experiencing. "Did it happen just a few minutes ago?"

He nodded. "She took her own life."

I clapped a hand over my mouth, genuinely shocked. Diana had been a witch and a pretty tough and bitchy one. She'd survived her encounter with Vagasso and that had to count for something. She hadn't struck me as depressed or as a quitter. It didn't make sense.

"Why would she do that? Wasn't she in California?" I had a thought. "Was it because she missed Christian? She couldn't have been too thrilled with his decision to stay in Las Vegas when Vagasso is still here."

"You're closer to the truth than you know," Vale murmured and then he was stepping past me and drawing Melanie into a hug.

She gaped at me from over his shoulder, mouthing "What's going on?" at me.

Vale straightened and leaned away from her so he could see her face. "I need you to come with us to see Christian. He could use a friend right now. His mother just passed away."

There was more to it, though. Even the death of the world's most powerful witch, which Diana wasn't, wouldn't have made the magickal impression on me that her death had. Something else was going on and I was dying to know what.

Melanie parked her Prius at the sidewalk between my shop, Moonlight Pawn, and my friend Celestina's fortune teller shop. The lights in my shop were dark and the gate on the yard was closed. Everything looked quiet and peaceful, but I was suspicious. After all, a fairy looks sweet and pretty up until it flies up your nose.

I was glad to turn away from my darkened shop and follow Vale and Melanie to Celestina's. From the outside, it looked like a regular home. The neighborhood was zoned for both commercial and residential use. The traditional palmistry hand painted in the front window, surrounded by Christmas lights, was Celestina's single, effective advertising for her services.

I always got a real kick out of stepping inside the place. For as ordinary as it looked from the outside, the house was a complete shock on the inside. It was the closest you'd get to entering a Haitian mambo's Vodou shack, even if some liberties had been taken for the sake of theatricality and sales. Candles burned in tall glassware that was decorated with images that represented the spiritual Lwa, or gods. New Orleans-style Voodoo dolls, stick dolls, and altars overflowing with colorful offerings to the spirits combined with rattan-covered walls and a soundtrack playing chanting and drumming. It was all super cool. Celestina had done an awesome job creating a mood where you believed she could read your fortune. Which, incidentally, she absolutely could.

She wasn't doing a reading now, though. She, Christian, and a big black wolf were currently standing in the center of the room beneath the dozens of Voodoo dolls that hung from the ceiling by fishing line. The Voodoo dolls were purely for sales. Celestina's family had practiced Vodou, which didn't utilize the classic dolls that most people in the West, thanks to New Orleans and Hollywood, associated with the religion. The dolls were still fun. My friends and I got together once or twice a year to make them. The more primitive the better, because that read 'authentic' to the kinds of people who bought them. The result was a bunch of fairly raggedy-looking dolls. Mine always sold the best, and I refused to read anything negative into that honor.

When Christian turned to face us, I expected to see certain emotions on his face. To my confusion, I saw none of them. He grinned handsomely at us. "Thanks for coming so quickly."

I had to glance uncertainly at Vale, who looked uncomfortable as he strode forward to his best friend's side. "They need to know," I heard him mutter.

"Yeah," I said loudly for all concerned. "We need to know. What's going on?"

"Is your mom really gone?" Melanie asked in a tremulous voice, her eyes already shiny.

The black wolf, who was actually a wolf shifter named Lev as well as Celestina's boyfriend, trotted over and butted his head against Melanie's hip to comfort her. She absently patted its thick fur as we all waited for Christian's response.

His smile had dimmed as he'd evidently recognized that we were on a different page of the play than he was. "You're sure it's safe here?" he asked Celestina.

I thought it was a strange question. Safe for what?

Celestina, decked out in so many fabrics of varying lengths that I wasn't completely convinced she hadn't simply tied a dozen dark scarves over a bikini and called it a day, nodded emphatically. "It's why she came here in the first place, remember? No one associates you and her with me."

All of this secret talk was getting on my nerves. "Christian, the question is a simple one: how is Diana?"

He tried to charm us with a smile, which was probably his default response to all of life's challenges. He could have been a red-haired male model. Normally that would put me off. Beautiful people made me suspicious. To be fair, though, Christian had proved himself to be a reliable ally. I guess it wasn't his fault that he was gorgeous.

"My mother is gone, yes. Technically," he added, which made me narrow my eyes. "But she's not officially dead. She's gone into, er, a state of hibernation, I guess you could call it."

I rubbed at my forehead. While I was glad to hear that Diana wasn't dead, this still sounded complicated. "What does hibernation even mean? She's a witch, not a bear."

He shuffled his feet, now looking as uncomfortable as Vale did. "Maybe I should let her explain it."

I looked warily between him and Celestina. "Who?"

"Me," said a faint, breathy voice.

The voice had come from directly overhead. I raised my eyes reluctantly. To the hanging Voodoo dolls.

Where one of them was waving at me.

"What the hell is
that
?"

Celestina replied with a smirk, "
That
is Diana. Her consciousness, anyway." She motioned at the other unmoving dolls, making the bangles on her wrists clank musically. "They're not possessed or alive. It's only that one doll."

"Okay, so a better question might be
why
?" I wanted to back away. I didn't like dolls that moved. I'd had one or two in my shop that periodically repositioned themselves or blinked or wept blood. Every last one of them creeped me the hell out.

"Something was hunting me," said the breathy voice that came from the Voodoo doll. The effigy was about six inches tall and designed to look vaguely like a woman. It had bright, fuschia-colored yarn hair and a rough burlap dress tightened at the waist with a bit of string to give it the illusion of hips and a waist. Its eyes were a pair of mismatched buttons attached with thread and the mouth was a slash crudely drawn on with a paint pen that had been nearly out of paint. I knew this because I'd made the doll last year. I'd tried to give the doll a smirk so it would have attitude. But thanks to the old pen the doll just looked like it was grimacing or had recently suffered a stroke.

"Some kind of creature attacked me," Diana-doll said, "and it demanded to know what was happening in Las Vegas."

"That's not vague at all," I said. "What kind of creature? What did it mean by 'happening'? Was it asking about the party scene? Table games odds? Rates on buffets? I need more, Diana."

"Moody," Vale murmured, slashing me a look that told me to back off. He was probably right and I was being unnecessarily snarky, but I didn't like being led here under false pretenses. That was how Little Red Riding Hood ate it. Or make that, was eaten.

"I don't know what it was," Diana-doll replied. "It cornered me in my apartment tonight after I'd come home from dinner. The lights were off. It kept to the shadows." The doll's slash mouth didn't move, but its poorly sewn little arms waved about for emphasis. It should have been funny seeing this small doll gesturing as it hung from the ceiling but it wasn't. It really, really wasn't. "It asked about you. And Vale and my son. All of you." Diana-doll hesitated. "It wanted to know what we'd done to Vagasso."

"Vagasso!" Melanie hissed.

She'd crept up to my side while I wasn't paying attention and grabbed my arm as she said this, nearly making me jump out of my shoes. She and I smelled like chicken wings, which likely explained why Lev the wolf periodically poked my bare legs with his cold nose as he hungrily sniffed us.

"So it knew about the demon summoning." I found that extremely interesting since it narrowed our list of suspects. "It had to have been one of the people who participated in the ceremony. Someone you didn't know was a shifter."

"None of them were," the doll insisted.

"Well, outside of us and Orlaton, no one else knows what happened that night. And Orlaton isn't a shifter and he's not one to blab."

"It wasn't anyone who'd been there," Diana-doll confirmed as adamantly as her breathy voice would allow. "This was a creature. And it…spoke to me telepathically."

Oh. I threw a glance at Vale, but his expression told me zilch. That was odd.

"It was probably a shifter," Diana-doll went on, "but it could just as well have been a monster of some sort, I suppose."

Supposing was the best that any of us could do. All sorts of critters ran around Vegas and no one really knew what they all were. Hell, I don't think some of the creatures even knew what they were. Some of them were the results of dark magick accidents: a ritual performed incorrectly, or a curse taking on a particularly gruesome or unexpected turn. For as many fascinating and truly 'magickal' beings that lived here, there was probably an equal amount of things you didn't want to encounter without an elephant gun and a gallon jug of holy water.

But the part about the creature speaking to Diana with its mind…that part bothered me more than anything else could.

The doll waved its munchkin arms. "It wanted to know what we'd done but I refused to say anything. Then it threatened to torture me! Well, there was no chance of me holding out. This thing would have torn me to shreds. So I did something I'd studied long ago: I left my body behind and fled here."

Something tightened on Christian's face. Melanie saw it, too, and dashed over to curl around his side. If the two of them had been 'off', they were now currently on because a monkey didn't let go until she wanted to. Melanie was in protective and nurturing mode, just like she'd been after Christian was staked out in his backyard. He'd be lucky if he got through the night without her spoon feeding him Jell-O.

"You shouldn't have resisted it," he said in a tight voice. Finally he exhibited the emotion that I'd expected to see when I'd heard he'd lost his mother. "It's not your job to protect me. You should have told that creature everything it wanted to know. I can protect myself. So can everyone else."

"I'm not interested in advertising our efforts against Vagasso," Diana-doll said with a touch of parental authority in her voice. Six inches tall or no, Diana was still a strong-willed mother. "We don't know who that creature is in league with. And by the way, Christian, you are
not
invincible. Case in point, I went to Anne's shop first before coming here. The curses there have become intolerable. How does that happen? Any one of you could be infected. You could find yourself growing hair in embarrassing places, or have something affect your pee-pee."

"Mo-other," Christian groaned, slapping a hand over his face.

"Pee-pee," I whispered to myself, horrified on his behalf.

"How
did
you know to come here, by the way?" Celestina asked the doll. She shared a brief look with me. "You and I have never met that I'm aware of."

"We have not met, young lady. However, back when Vagasso ordered me to track down the gargoyle statue I'd noticed this…establishment. I was aware that you were friends with Anne, so I hoped your friendship meant that you were trustworthy. At any rate, remaining in the pawn shop was not an option. The curses there are out of control. One tried to attack me the moment I arrived there."

That would explain the weird feeling I'd felt at the restaurant: something at Moonlight wasn't playing well with others.

"It was a good choice," I said quickly, hoping to deflect everyone from Diana-doll's comment about the increased curse activity in my shop. "Celestina is absolutely trustworthy, and Christian isn't associated with this place so no one would think to look for you here."

"But she's not here," Christian gritted out. Melanie patted his flat stomach soothingly but he didn't notice. "Her body is back in California and she can't return to it, isn't that right, Mother?"

The Voodoo doll performed a close approximation of a shrug. "A concern for later. The important thing is that I didn't give the creature the opportunity to use me against you, and now you've been warned that something is after you. I did my motherly duty."

We all looked at each other. Without knowing who was interested in us and why, we had no real defense to put up against them. But I would guess that if this shifter or monster, whatever it was, intended to torture Diana as she'd claimed, then it was bad news.

"After what you've told me, I'm thinking this creature that attacked you in California, isn't associated with Vagasso or his pals," I said. "All the information it asked for it can get directly from Vagasso. This thing might be a completely new threat."

"Why?" Celestina asked. "We're not currently involved in anything that would draw the attention of other magickal beings."

"Friends of Dearborn?" I suggested. "Wanting to know if their buddy's BFF is planning revenge?"

Vale shook his head, dislodging a lock of brown hair to curl above his eyebrow. "His creations died with him, and from what I know, he worked alone except for his interactions with Vagasso."

That was all good news, but it still left us hanging as to why a creature had been willing to torture Diana to learn more about us.

"Unfortunately the creature gave me no hints as to its motive," Diana-doll said. The doll's arms suddenly jerked straight up, like she was cheering a field goal. "No! I'm mistaken. There is one thing…it didn't ask about Anne first, which you would expect, considering that she's descended from dragons and we all know about
those
."

I gritted my teeth, telling myself Diana simply didn't realize how insulting and condescending she sounded when she talked about my heritage.

"It asked what I knew about Vale," Diana-doll went on.