Witches in Flight (9 page)

“Ah.”
 
Vero’s eyes
twinkled as she handed back the guitar.
 
“Found yourself a sexy Latin guitar teacher, have you?”

Elsie blinked.
 
Hector was white-haired and rotund and had pictures of his family taped
to the side of his guitar.
 
“Well,
he plays beautifully, but he’s married with eleven grandchildren.”
 
She had learned most of their names.

“Old can still be sexy, my dear, but I take your point.”
 
Vero sat down at the piano,
chuckling.
 
“In that case, let’s
learn a simple melody today.
 
I’ll
write down the chord progression to take to your teacher.”

It might be fun to have sexy in her life.
 
Elsie stroked the neck of her guitar
and frowned, feeling disloyal to the warm and comfortable Hector.

“Ah, sweet girl.
 
I
didn’t mean to make you feel less than happy.”
 
Vero stood up again and walked over to a corner closet,
emerging with a guitar decked out in the sheen of age and long use.
 
“Come sit on the couch with me, and
we’ll find passion with our fingers.”

“Am I still lacking?”
 
Elsie strode to the bay window, guitar in her arms, suddenly needing to
defend her life.
 
“I ride Gertrude
Geronimo with the wind in my hair, and dance in my back yard in four-inch red
heels.
 
I fly through the sky
connected to the earth only by my hands.
 
Is passion really that absent in my life?”
 
She was astonished to find herself pacing.

“No.”
 
Vero paused a
beat.
 
“And yes.”

“No mysteries, please!”
 
Elsie spun around, wondering where her happy summer afternoon had
gone.
 
“Enough witch riddles.”

Vero smiled, apparently not at all dismayed by the temper
tantrum.
 
“You have found many
wonderful sources of passion in your life, my girl, and you will find many
more.
 
But for the most part, they
are the pure, sweet passions of a child—to go fast, fly high, dance in
the midday sun.”

“And those are wrong?”
 
Elsie let her temper flow, even as she wondered why people always lashed
out at the messenger.

“Not at all.”
 
Vero
walked the floor with her now, a circling duet of feet.
 
“But they are the first.
 
You’re going back, making up for lost
time.
 
But tell me—why do you
dance in your red shoes?
 
Those
aren’t the shoes of a child—what pushes you then?”

A dream.
 
Elsie
stayed silent, not sure where the words had come from.

“A child lives her passions, and if she’s lucky, holds on to
them her whole life.”
 
Vero clasped
Elsie’s hand briefly.
 
“But she also
grows up to be a woman, and discovers new passions, a new range of emotion and
experience.”

“That sounds like riddles again.”

Vero’s chuckle rippled through the room.
 
“Well, when I was a young woman, it
involved a lot of late nights in a Paris garret.”

Elsie’s cheeks flamed.
 
“You’re telling me to go have sex?”

Now the chuckles grew into waves of sound.
 
“Well, that’s certainly one
possibility, although it’s not the only one, even in a Paris garret.”
 
Vero stared out the window a moment, a
sure sign she was reliving some past memory.
 
“I’m just saying that you are a grown woman, and one that
has begun to tap her deeply passionate soul.
 
Don’t be surprised if some of what comes out isn’t from the
realm of young girls.”

This was beginning to rival one very uncomfortable discussion
with her mother when Elsie was about fourteen.
 
She looked down at her guitar.
 
“Should we sing?
 
It’s my turn to cook dinner tonight, and I’m trying something new.”

Vero reached out and ran a hand gently down Elsie’s hair.
 
“Passion isn’t comfortable, love.
 
But it lives in you.
 
When it’s time, give it a chance.”

Elsie nodded.
 
And
tried not to wonder what Vero had done in Paris garrets.

It was a restless night—the kind that made fire sing in
Elsie’s soul.

The sort of night where she usually closed the curtains, tucked
her head under the covers, and tried to get a responsible eight hours of sleep.

To hell with responsible.
 
Something in her was itching to be free, and she had no idea what it
was.

She slipped out the front door in her bare feet, and then bent
down to slide on strappy sandals.
 
There was no point waking Lizard up just because her blood was
restless.
 

Moving faster now, Elsie strode down the walkway.
 
She swung automatically toward Gertrude
Geronimo, and then stopped—this wasn’t a night for childish
pleasures.
 
Fast hills and the wind
in her hair weren’t going to cool whatever stirred inside her.

Elsie raised her fingers to the sky, collecting beams of light
from the low-hanging moon.
 
It
called to her, the moon—a wordless invitation to seek whatever lay hidden
in the swirling night.

It felt very much like a walk she’d taken before.
 
Many times before.
 
Which just wasn’t possible—Elsie
Giannotto spent the hours after midnight safely in her bed.
 
Always.

She looked around, surprised to find she’d danced her way onto
one of the main streets of the Arts District.
 
She wasn’t sure which one—they looked much different
in the daylight.
 
Warm air swirled
out of open doorways, and lovers walked by on the street, eyes only for each
other.

They were all lovers.
 
No one else walked the streets alone.
 
It was the garrets of Paris, poured out onto the streets of
Berkeley.

Loneliness, and something uglier, tugged at Elsie’s soul.

The low, straining call of a saxophone pulled at her, moving the
path of her feet off the sidewalk and down a few steps into a low doorway.
 
Smoke poured out, the acrid smell
tangling with the flowered ripeness of summer in a way Elsie didn’t find totally
unpleasant, even as some tiny voice in her brain screamed that smoking was
illegal in Berkeley bars.

A large man in a leather vest came her way.
 
“You got ID?”

His question barely registered.
 
Her eyes were on the trio onstage, the whiskey-rich notes of
the sax blending with a trickling river of piano runs and a drumbeat that
seemed to vibrate right under her toes.
 

“She doesn’t need ID, Rocco.”
 
A man in a silver button-down shirt, open at the collar,
stepped to her side.
 
He oozed
confidence.
 
“Pretty ladies are
always welcome here.”

Rocco stepped back.
 
“You’re the boss, Anton.”

Anton.
 
Visions of
Paris swirled in Elsie’s mind.

Her rescuer slid a hand under her elbow, expertly guiding her
toward a table in a back corner.
 
“I see you like the music.
 
Can I get you something to drink?”

Elsie shook her head slowly, attention divided between the
soul-thrumming music and the delicious curls tangling with the back of his
collar.
 
“No, thank you—I
don’t drink.”
 
And then she
realized that answer didn’t fit the music or the night or the man at all.
 
“Bring me something in a fancy glass.”

His thumb brushed her cheek.
 
“A pretty drink for a pretty lady, coming right up.”

She looked up, suddenly bereft, as the music died away.
 
And then the man on the sax stepped to
the edge of the stage and began to play again, one high, solitary wail.
 
He blew an aria of heartbreak and
loneliness that wrapped around her very breath, pulling air in and out of her
lungs as he sent one aching string of notes after another.

When Anton returned, he slid his chair right up next to hers,
one hand gently brushing behind her shoulders.
 
The other deposited a glass in front of her.
 
“One raspberry Cosmo.
 
Second prettiest thing we have in this
dive.”

It was a perfect match for her new underwear.
 
Elsie’s cheeks flamed as his fingers
traced one of the spaghetti straps of her sundress, wondering if raspberry pink
peeked out and suddenly yearning for the safety of sandboxes and mud-pie
volcanoes.
 
This was insanity.

Anton ran his thumb down her cheek again, eyes gentle.
 
“Moving too fast, am I?”
 
He slid his hand off her shoulders,
lacing their fingers together instead.
 
“Let’s just sit and listen to the music then—we’ll see what magic
it stirs up on a summer night.
 
We
have all the time in the world.”

His voice pulled at her, just like the music and the smoke and
the low-hanging moon.
 
She reached
for her glass of deep pink and let the taste of raspberry-laced courage slide
down her throat.

~ ~ ~

She had no air.
 
Oh,
God, she had no air.

Nat clawed out of sleep, grabbing for her throat.
 
Nighttime panic attacks were always the
worst.
 
She dove under her pillow,
seeking the flashlight she kept tucked away there so her night terrors didn’t
wake anyone else.

And then realized it wasn’t her sixteen-year-old pillow, or her
sixteen-year-old bed.
 
She was
Natalia Sullivan, grown woman.
 
And
she could breathe.

It was only the panic screaming through her soul that felt
exactly the same.

Sleepy arms wrapped around her in the dark—and then a very
awake husband turned on the lights.
 
“Nat.
 
What’s wrong.
 
Is it the baby?”

Steeped in fear, she tried to get her bearings.
 
“No.”
 
The words rasped out of her aching throat.
 
“Something’s very wrong, but it’s not
me.
 
I don’t know what’s going
on.”
 
She sank into her breath,
trying to get a read on the nightmare stalking her.

Jamie reached out his hand, eyes fierce—and wrapped his
fingers around her pendant, power surging.
 

Nat felt suddenly boneless as the terror melted away, leaving
only faint echoes hammering in her heart.
 
And then fear stormed back as she understood what her husband’s magic
had done—and what it meant.
 
“Elsie.
 
She’s in trouble.”

Her husband cursed and dove for his phone just as it beeped, and
then beeped again.
 
He scanned the
incoming messages swiftly.
 
“Melvin
and Jennie are on their way to Lizard and Elsie’s house.
 
Whatever’s going on, those damn rocks
have woken everyone up.”

She reached out, hoping to touch the anger flaring in his
eyes.
 
“It didn’t do me any harm,
Jamie.”

“Bullshit.”
 
His
arms pulled her into his lap, more roughly than usual.
 
“I felt your mind.
 
God, Nat—is that what those panic
attacks used to feel like for you?”

She’d spent five very long years as a teenager having her throat
close in terror on a regular basis, surrounded by family that patted her on the
head and booked her next therapy appointment.
 
Back then, she would have given her soul for the simple
comfort she now found in her husband’s arms.
 
“My pendant doesn’t know all that.
 
It was only trying to wake me up.”
 
She let herself lean into his strength for one last moment,
and then slid away to the edge of the bed.
 
“We should go now.
 
Elsie must need us.”