Boyfriend from Hell (Saturn's Daughters) (9 page)

I limped up to them warily, but they were simple guys. They didn’t read motives into anything. The big lugs hugged me and fought tears and passed me around as if I were a beer can. I was good with that. I was more than good. I let the tears ruin my mascara and accepted their big shoulders as pillows to cry on.
The experience was the catharsis I’d needed to relieve some of the lump of molten lead in my chest.

“If you ever need anything, kid,” said Lance, Max’s closest friend, “we’re here for ya. And we’ve got someone working on getting that car out of impound.”

“Yeah.” Gonzo, Max’s mechanical partner pounded me on the back so hard that I almost fell over. “We’re taking that Escort apart. Ain’t no way Max would have crashed that baby.”

“You’ll let me know if you find anything?” Stupid, but it cheered me to know someone wasn’t writing off the fireball as the result of a domestic dispute. Nothing could bring Max back, but knowing someone was at least looking into his death made me feel less helpless. And maybe a shade less guilty.

“You’ll be the first to know,” Lance assured me. He hugged me and led me into the viewing room as the organ music began.

All the proper citizens were already in place. The family was sitting to one side, what there was of them. I studied a regal, gray-haired woman wearing a hat with a veil straight out of the sixties and wondered if that was his grandmother. She didn’t look up when we entered.

A distinguished gentleman sat at her side, holding her gloved hand. He wore a light gray suit that set off his head of silver hair to perfection. I wondered if he had hair implants. No man of his age should have had that much hair. He looked up with a slight frown as we scraped chairs at the back of the room.

A woman in her thirties, probably a few years older than Max, openly scowled at us. Really, I couldn’t blame her. We represented the side of Max’s life that had taken him away. If this was his family, he should have been up there in a tailored suit and neat haircut, wiping away his sister’s tears, assuming that’s who she was. He shouldn’t have been driving my ancient Escort and cruising too near the edge of nowhere that was the Zone.

Maybe I should have been looking into Max’s background instead of hunting for a diplomatic limo. Why the devil had someone from that family been hanging out with bikers instead of working in a white-collar office?

I couldn’t ask Lance or the other guys, not in here. They might not know any more than I did. I tried to let the organ music drown out thought, but then they let a preacher get up there to bleed over the audience, and his unctuous tones and ambiguous moral prosing made me want to hurl.

I got up and walked out, thinking I could go back in when the preaching stopped. I thought I caught a glimpse of Lily’s weirdo slipping out the front, and I followed, out of stupid curiosity. What would my wacko neighbor be doing at Max’s funeral? And why had I only noticed him after Max died? My paranoia was starting to show, and I decided I’d feel better if I confronted the problem instead of hiding.

The moment I limped down the front steps, my vision disappeared in a blinding flash of cameras.

I was teetering on the brink of exhaustion, frayed
and distraught, with a mascara-streaked face. I’d had enough surprises for a lifetime. I could have reacted very badly. Instead, I swung to beat a hasty retreat to the pillared porch.

Cutting off my escape by trespassing on the funeral home steps, a talking head from the TV station got in my face with his microphone.

“How did the MacNeills react when you showed up this evening, Miss Clancy? Do they blame you for the loss of their son and heir?”

Son and
heir
?

Unnerved and off guard, I did not behave with decorum. Lacking a gun and a fast draw, I yanked the microphone out of his hand and snapped it into wires. A cameraman raced to film the incident. From my position on the steps, I kicked his knee to unbalance him, grabbed his video camera, and flung it against a brick wall, shattering it.

The crowd closed in, suffocating me. Some other jerkwad yelled and swung his mic too near my nose. I grabbed his wrist and may have broken it, from the pained sound of his cry. I was weeping too hard to care. I’d spent two years avoiding confrontation, for this?

The shouts and altercation brought Max’s buddies running.

I was nearly crushed in the abrupt melee of flying fists and boots. Before I could catch my breath, Lance had the pretty-boy newsman on the ground and was unprettifying his face. Horrified, I didn’t want the boys arrested for my sake, and I certainly didn’t need
any more black marks on my record. I wanted a do-over, but fleeing was about the best I could arrange—if I could miraculously limp through the battleground without being noticed.

In a fair world, a tornado would have blown the scrimmage across the lawn like autumn leaves.

Even as I thought about it, an unnatural wind whistled through the stately elms, gusting through the pillared porch and shoving me forward. Huge trees dipped and bowed their heads. Leaves blew sideways and men toppled. With the fearful wind at my back, I fled down a path that amazingly cleared across the lawn. Maybe I was crying so hard, I wasn’t seeing straight. I just ran, head down, tears falling.

Despite shouts of surprise and fright, I reached the Miata, gunned the engine, and got the hell out of there, too terrified to look back.

I
n bed, I cried my eyes out. Even Milo’s purrs and licks couldn’t comfort me. I think it was as much pity party as grief. I didn’t know what was happening to me, and I was terrified.

I needed to know
I
was directing my life. For all my growing-up years, I’d had a flighty Fate in the form of my mother uprooting me from one home after another. Once on my own, I didn’t want anyone tugging my strings. I needed to make my own
decisions. But suddenly, I was being buffeted and redirected by strange winds.
Literally
.

Mini-tornados did not drop out of the sky to aid my escape in any world that I knew. Maybe I’d just imagined my abrupt departure from the funeral home. Or maybe I could go completely around the bend and believe the weird guy I’d been following was a Harry Potter magician. I could take that idiocy further and believe that what had happened to Max had been unnatural, but that wasn’t easing the pain.

And neither incident had happened in the Zone. They’d happened around
me—
unless I was a candidate for that aluminum colander hat, which was a very strong possibility. Maybe stress had fried my brain cells. I didn’t have time—or patience or money—for counseling.

In the morning, after tossing and turning until dawn, I decided I had to confront myself as well as the world. I had to take back my control. I got up, tore the blanket off the mirror, and, pounding the glass, shouted, “Wake up, Max, you bastard! Where are you?”

I nearly had a heart attack when he actually appeared.

Biting my lip to keep it from trembling, I reached out to trace the familiar face blurrily superimposed upon mine. The image looked grouchy and uncertain as I touched nothing but glass. I’d once told Max he looked like Burt Lancaster with black curls. He hadn’t appreciated the sentiment.

So how did one confront insanity? By accepting it?

“Where are you?” I asked mournfully, wishing he was real. My hallucination only provided his face, so I couldn’t tell if he shrugged in reply.

“
I didn’t do it, Justy,
” the voice inside my head said again. “
Help me
.”

Schizophrenia? I’d rather have believed in Max than in insanity.

“How? I don’t even know where you are. Or what you are.” I was surely losing it. Guilt, I self-diagnosed. But I was ready to believe almost anything at this point. “You didn’t tell me you had a family!” I remembered to throw at him.

“
Sorry
.” And then he faded.

In frustration, I whacked my wooden hairbrush against the glass, hard. It cracked.

Well, that was helpful.

Having faced my worst fear and accomplished nothing, I showered and got dressed and had time to check my netbook. Nothing new from Themis Astrology. I ran a Google search and a phone/address search on the company and found nothing. Maybe its proprietor existed on an astrological plane. Wikipedia told me Themis was a Greek goddess, the embodiment of divine order, law, and custom, so I assumed I was dealing with a female with a high opinion of herself.

I sent an e-mail to Boris, the hacker genius named on the card Cora had given me, asking if it would be okay if I dropped by around six. I had hopes of finishing early, since Wednesdays were usually slow.

In the spirit of taking control, I decided that if I
meant to confront my new life, I couldn’t continue hiding from the real world. I Googled a local news station on the Internet.

That was almost worse than confronting Max. A video showing the melee at the funeral home was abruptly cut off, apparently when the reporter’s camera was torn from his hand by a high wind. The camera filmed tossing branches and screams before the screen went dark.

The headlines beside the video shouted FREAK STORM DISRUPTS BIKER BATTLE OUTSIDE FUNERAL HOME. In smaller letters, it went on to speculate about the ghost of a biker lost in a fiery accident joining his friends in attacking guests at the funeral home.

Since I knew at least half that story was lie—those weren’t guests but reporters—I snorted and shut it down. So much for the media. If they couldn’t admit the error of their own ways, they’d make up something. Ghosts!

That was no ghost. That had been me.

Wearing Max’s jacket.

With no better idea of how to research the impossible and ridiculous, I went to where idiocy lurked and Googled
Saturn transit
and
Satan’s daughter.
The first site gave me pages and pages of gobbledygook about Saturn causing negative and positive changes depending on what house the transit occurs in or some illogic like that. I snorted in disbelief, although I did note that a complete transit happens roughly every twenty-eight years. I had my twenty-seventh birthday coming up, which was a little close for comfort.
I couldn’t believe I was that old already and had accomplished so little.

The second search gave me even worse crap about Satan having no daughters because he can’t reproduce, plus a lot of websites for people with unhealthy perversions. Googling
Saturn’s daughters
opened a site that claimed they were ruled by the planet of justice—shades of Themis! But when the blog went on about the daughters not living long because they were either punished for vigilantism or sent to hell for misuse of power, I bookmarked it for further examination and shut it down. One of these days, maybe I’d figure out how to investigate Internet scam artists and fear-mongers.

Deciding I just had to get back into my routine, I drove downtown to school. This was Wednesday. Thursday of next week was my last final. Providing I passed, I was less than two weeks from being a law school graduate. I had no intention of piling up those loans and not finishing. After watching the news, though, I was tense, anticipating trouble.

But my classes were so huge, and I was so totally anonymous behind my black-framed glasses and limp that no one seemed to connect me with the ugly stories. Or maybe they didn’t read newspapers, either. My kind of people. We kept our noses to our books. For a few hours, I reveled in the straightforwardness of rules and regulations, the normalcy of books and teachers.

• • •

Once the last class was done, I heaved my backpack into my plastic car, left the real world, and cruised
home. Maybe the rationality of law classes would end my episodes of insanity.

Milo was growling when I entered my apartment, so I had to assume someone had been prowling in the hall, but they were gone now. I glanced around to see if anything had been disturbed—but who could tell? A carton of old clothes I’d meant to take to Goodwill looked as if it had been moved, but Milo could have been jumping on it. I was nervous over nothing. I’d lived here for two years and no one had bothered breaking in to steal my netbook.

I cuddled the kitty, called him my guard cat, and fed him an extra fishy treat until he was purring happily again. Forget boyfriends. Cats were easier.

To keep up my new proactive attitude, after I grabbed a sandwich, I ran into the bedroom to glare at my cracked mirror. My newly thick hair still startled me, but I was learning to get past it. “Why Satan’s daughter?” I yelled at the glass, hitting it with my fist until shards fell out. “
You
almost killed
me!
I didn’t do anything to you.”

Damn if I didn’t see Max’s image instantly wavering over mine. I could almost swear he was glaring.

“
Did not!
” he shouted in my head.

Okay, definitely guilt talking. I was arguing with myself. “Then tell that to Detective Schwartz. He thinks you did,” I reassured myself.

“
You,
” he tried to say, but he was fading fast. “
Saturn, not Satan.
”