Baz had given me one of his last-minute passes to the concert at the Arie Crown Theater. At about the hour when Mme Vulcaine must be touching down at O’Hare, I entered the theater, appalled at the size of the crowd.
I had boasted to Baz that his French stalker would find me. I hoped that were true. Here I stood, among nearly four thousand fans jostling for a sight of the biggest rock star since Madonna, looking for one small Eurotrash stalker.
I sidled along the back wall, frustrated.
The music started. Two enormous screens lit up on either side of the stage. Here came the lady herself: slender, agile, her features divinely perfect, her voice assured, her hips moving. I stopped examining the crowd. My mouth fell open.
Yoni glowed with polished power. Also glory, for she celebrated love and joy, and, even while writhing with the microphone in her hand, she radiated dignity. I didn’t wonder that Baz was putting himself out for her comfort.
I did wonder if Baz had noticed her divine strength. Yoni sang like a goddess.
Someone tried to climb up onto the stage. Burly security guards ran forward and shoved him back.
I remembered my mission.
If the French stalker girl was present, and if Jake had hidden my navel string—my leash, as he had called it—among her possessions, then I might be able to draw myself to her, like a fish reeling itself in to shore.
Yoni sang of love everlasting. The crowd around me sorted itself into embracing couples.
I placed my hands over my navel. We were connected through my leash, the stalker girl and I, even if she didn’t realize it.
I closed my eyes in concentration.
Find the one who holds my leash. Amid the noise of the music and the cheering crowd, I pictured my quarry.
She would be small and bright, an unignorable presence, a cloud of sparkling energy. I had resented that when she hung about the botánica, especially while she watched Jake die. Now I thought she might as well wear a crown blazing with colored lights. I couldn’t miss her, even in a room dominated by Baz’s singer.
Yoni crooned, When I find you I will never let you go. The couples around me clung to one another. Surely everyone who heard her must be falling in love. A sense of peace and satisfaction overcame me.
I touched my navel and closed my eyes, feeling for the tug on my leash.
When I opened my eyes, the song had ended, and I was startled to find a woman in my arms. She snuggled close to me, her face against my chest, her perfumed curls soft on my cheek. My fingers locked together behind her back as we swayed.
I stiffened and leaped away.
“Why, hello!” she cried sunnily. “I thought you didn’t like me!”
I stared slack-jawed, astonished at how close she had come to me without my noticing.
Then the music started again. Couples reluctantly pulled apart around us. Yoni’s enormous, glowing, divine face appeared on the screen. Soon her magic would resume.
The thought filled me with panic.
“Come.” Taking hold of the stalker girl’s wrist, I backed to the door and towed her toward the exit.
In the corridor I faced her. She was heart-stoppingly pretty: short blue-black curls, bright sapphire eyes, milky skin, kittenish nose, smiling mouth.
She commanded, “Show me how you did that last night, turning from old to young.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sophie,” she said, and shook her curls impatiently. “Show me.”
She had my leash. Could I wiggle out of it?
“What do you mean? It was very dark.”
She stamped her foot. “Show me!”
“Not here,” I countered, and led her outdoors onto the plaza facing the lake. The summer’s night air was thick and hot, even near the lake. Faint pink smog from Lake Shore Drive drifted east toward us.
Sophie pulled free and plopped down on a bench.
“Now,” she said, “show me how you become old checkers guy and then young scary tattooed guy.”
I rolled my eyes at the nicknames. “Very well.” Scary, was I?
I stood facing her. I pictured who I wanted her to see—
I extended my hand, dark, wrinkled, and heavily veined, my palm worn whiter as if from work.
The girl Sophie gasped. “Remarkable! Now go back!”
Obligingly, I returned to myself.
“And which one is you? Truly?”
I shrugged. “Who knows what he truly is?”
She shook her head wisely. “Bon. This will be very useful, I think, if I decide you should impersonate the vicomte for my father.”
“I—what?” I went cold. “What vicomte?”
“Don’t play dumb. You and Jake have been taking my family’s money for decades.” She didn’t seem outraged. “It’s good that you knew Jake, because you will need to look and sound like him.” She looked at me sternly. “Papa must never know that Jake has died. He would win without a fight. Whatever you do not know, I can coach you about it, so that you can answer all Papa’s questions correctly.”
My mouth moved like a fish’s. “Who are you?”
She dimpled and curtseyed. “I’m Sophie de Turbin. Jake’s cousine.”
The blood stopped cold and sluggish in my heart. “Impossible.”
“Silly! Jake was Clarence Gide Sans-Souci de Turbin, le Vicomte Montmorency.”
She knew—she thought— “Then your father is—”
“Papa is the current heir to Jake’s vicomté, his title and his property. It would be very bad for my papa to inherit them.” She nodded decisively. “We will stop him.”
I felt breathless. I had planned to pursue my inheritance, and my inheritance had come stalking me.
I said, “Did Jake know all this?” Of course he did. That was Jake. Had this girl child come to the U.S. to find me? Baz had reported that her father was here, so that much must be true. But her father believed she was stalking the singer. She’d found Jake, and Jake had told her . . . what? I doubted that she knew much of her father’s plans. Who would trust her in any weighty matter? Jake had done so, but Jake had been mad in his own way. “Wait. Who do you think I am?”
“I don’t know. What’s your name?”
“You can call me Clarence,” I said.
“No, really.”
I shrugged. “My friends call me Veek.”
“Veeeek,” she crooned. Her conversation flitted away again, butterfly-brained. “Don’t you love Yoni’s music? She is a great one. She is la sirene whose song cannot be refused.” I started at her use of this name, La Sirene, the vodou name of the queen of the sea.
She seized my hand. “Let’s dance like we did before.” She began humming Yoni’s song of love everlasting.
As she pulled me to her, I jerked away. “Don’t you know what I am?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of vodou demon Jake captured, I imagine. Why, what are you?” Her head cocked.
In frustration I cried, “I’m a scary black vodou demon with tattoos! I am not nice for you to know!”
She dimpled. “You’re adorable. I don’t think you’re mean at all.” She swaggered her hips against me and twined her arms round my neck.
She was warm. I felt burning hot.
“I think,” she said softly, pulling my head down until her lips touched my ear, “you’re gentle and good. Such a good, good boy,” she whispered.
I couldn’t fight her combination of scent, softness, and trusting kittenish charm. My arms, rigid at my sides, relaxed.
She rubbed her cheek against mine. “You can touch me, you know.” I let my hands come up to rest lightly on her hips. “So tell me,” she whispered, “what you think you are.”
“I’m a sex demon,” I blurted.
She pulled back at that and looked at me, reproachful but kind. “No, you’re not.” Her eyes grew bigger. “Why do I feel like you own me?”
She was like a small, fragrant freight train—one that runs off the rails, in circles.
She tossed her head as if shaking off her thought. “Tell me about you and Jake.”
I turned away from her to look at the acre of prairie, and beyond it the lake, immense and silent and smooth, the gulls asleep on its bosom like so many floating white smudges, and the stars trying to poke through beyond the lights of the city. Suddenly I was filled again with the pain of Jake’s passing.
“He was my oldest friend. He stood by me through many troubles, ever since I was fifteen and he was twenty. Of course, he caused many of them. He was a trickster, always up to some game. I was a sober boy,” I admitted.
Sophie had me there. Such a good boy. I smiled at the memory of my sober boyhood, so much safer and saner than my mad old age, and so much colder and emptier.
I said, “Jake brought me to love life for the first time. He taught me everything I know. Without him I would never have become drunk, or seduced a woman, or sung a song in a back-country jail at three in the morning. He was immensely generous by nature.” How to explain Samedi? “But he was possessed, how shall I say, by a spirit of mischief.”
She nodded. “So I perceived. He gave me your leash.”
I turned cold. I met her intent, sparkling eyes. Here it came. Now I would know what kind of creature had power over me.
She said, all business, “I will make you a bargain, M’sieur Sex Demon. Help me to defeat my father. In return, when I find it, I’ll give you back your leash.” Her head cocked again.
I scowled. “What do you know about the vicomté claim?”
She dismissed that with a shrug. “I’m way ahead of you. And I’m ahead of my papa, as you will see. Why did Jake give the leash to me?”
“I have no idea,” I snapped.
“Nice friend.”
I knew an urge to jump from a high place. “Look, he was the only living person who knew me. Do you know what that means to—?”I stopped. To a man who may end up living forever? “To someone no one ever wanted to know?”
“How sad! Is it so lonely to be a sex demon?”
“Is it so lonely to be a child of Montmorency?” I returned.
A stricken look crossed her face, as if she were remembering that cold nursery, high in the old chateau. My heart jerked. Yes. You do know.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
“I’ve lost everyone who ever loved me.” I told myself she was forcing these confidences from me with the power of my leash.
“And who was it who loved you?”
My tongue touched my lips. “My nurse when I was very small. My mother, presumably. She died shortly after I was born. Jake. There may have been someone else.”
“I see.”
Swallowing jagged truths, I looked down at her. There was no mistaking her dilated eyes, her scent, her soft mouth made into an O.
She was attracted.
My pulse leaped.
I had this one chance to balance the power between us, before she located my leash and learned better how to use it.
Leaning forward, I pushed the blue-black curls away from her cheek with my forefinger. Her lashes fluttered. She turned her face toward my finger like a baby seeking the nipple.
I murmured, putting the sex demon into my voice, “Let me buy you a coffee.”
She blinked slowly and smiled.
We walked in silence back toward the theater and through the white marble caverns of McCormick Place. She held my hand. It was very pleasant. I knew the questions would start again soon.
On the escalator, she said, “Tell me more about you.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because you’re so romantic!”
I sent her a cut-eye. “I?”
“You. You’re all inked up like a truand, but you wear starched linen and custom-made shoes.”
She danced sideways off the escalator, holding my hand, her vivid little face hungry for my secrets. That black curl dangled across one blue eye. She’ll eat me, I thought.
I led her into the hotel bar at the Hyatt and took a booth at the back. We ordered espresso. “Some fruit?” I added.
“I’m not hungry,” she announced. “Wait here.” She bounced up, snatching her little handbag, and sprang away in the direction of the ladies’ room. Our coffee came. I paid.
In that moment I heard her scream an angry, chopped-off scream.
I bolted toward the sound.
She could not have gone far. I burst round the corner into the corridor to the toilets. Sophie was there, struggling with one man while another was trying to open the back door.
Her captor wore a brown tee shirt and blue jeans. He hoisted Sophie under the arms and threw her over his shoulder. She bit him on the ear until blood came. He swore.
Red fury filled me. I nearly tore a mirror off the wall to throw at him. Then my years of training took over.
The other man, in a hooded blue sweatshirt and jeans, was pushing open the exit door ahead of them, saying over his shoulder, “Get her outside, for God’s sake!”
They didn’t see me.
Sophie did. Her eyes widened. “Veek, help!”
I struggled, too—with myself. I wanted their blood. I paused, frozen, with my hand on that mirror. I looked monstrous, my eyes starting, my jaws full of white fangs like an angry mastiff’s. I took a deep breath and commanded myself to calm.
The man in the tee shirt was trying to bustle Sophie through the doorway. She made this as hard as possible, bracing her legs on the doorway, scratching, using her elbows, smacking his face with the back of her head.
In my most educated voice I said, “Have the goodness to unhand my client.”
Sophie’s captor swung around at the sound of my voice, whacking her head against the doorway. She yelped.
That broke my calm again. I leaped forward. “Miiiiine!” I roared.
He dropped her. His companion came back into the building and stopped, looking at me.
I lifted Sophie to her feet. As I did so, I caused my tattoos to fade and vanish. My heart thundered unpleasantly. I passed one hand across my face, drawing in those fangs that had sprouted so instinctively, imagining an illusion of a pair of studious horn-rimmed glasses.
“Mademoiselle, you are all right?” I murmured to her, keeping my eyes on the two men.
“Ow, my head.” She touched it and winced. Then she pushed me away. “I can stand.”
The man in the brown shirt hissed, “Let’s go!”
“You’re already on camera, gentlemen,” I said, my voice still hoarse with bloodlust. I nodded toward the corner behind them, as if I could see security cameras in this darkly-shadowed corridor. They looked. I snapped my fingers to draw their attention back to me. “Let us have the meaning of this outrage, if you please.”
“Yes, let’s,” Sophie said. She appeared undisturbed. “Come on. Tell my attorney M. Castile this, did my father pay you to break my head?”
They stood sheepishly by the door, but they did not flee.
I looked at her in surprise. “Surely he would not. I’ll call the police,” I said, taking my phone from my pocket.
“No!” said the one in a hoodie. “No, we—yeah, he—”
“Shut up,” said the other. He squared off to us. “He hired us to take her to the airport. Said she would fight. Said, use what methods were necessary, unquote.”
“M. Castile is before you,” Sophie said coolly. “And he did not see fit to break my head.”
“Your father hired these men?” I said, truly incredulous.
“Maybe not.” She shrugged. “Call the police, then.”
“If this is true,” I said soberly, like a slow-witted but determined functionary of the courts, “then you will not object if I take your photographs.” I held up my phone and did this, while they looked anything but pleased. “You have credentials?”
The man in brown produced his wallet and showed me a detective license from Louisiana. I photographed this, then the other man’s license.
“He didn’t say you were meeting with your lawyer,” said the man in brown, putting his wallet away. “We just got here from the airport ourselves.”
“Did you accomplish your other tasks?” Sophie said sharply.
Now what? She knew much more than she had told me. This was exactly like being on one of Jake’s rollercoaster adventures. I maintained the dignified silence of one who knows all but need not tell all.
The detectives looked at one another. “We talked to the vodou lady in New Orleans. Followed her to Louis Armstrong Airport. She got off the plane all right,” said the man in brown.
“And then?” Sophie prompted him.
“Then we lost her,” he mumbled.
“Ah. I see.” To me she said, “It is so very expensive to hire bad help.”
“We called your daddy and told him and he sent us to pick you up at the concert before you could, uh, to pick you up. Followed you here. The client din’t say nothing about you was meeting your lawyer there.”
“That is no excuse for assault, messieurs,” I said severely.
“Say, if you’re her lawyer, how come you’re French?” asked the quiet man in the hoodie.
I lifted my brows. “I am not a U.S. attorney,” I said haughtily, as if I would rather be a cockroach. “We’d better call your father,” I said to Sophie.
A cell phone rang at this moment. The detective in brown took his phone out, looking apprehensive.
Sophie folded her arms and tapped her foot. “Let us see what excuses they give my bon papa for their behavior!”
The detective wilted rapidly as he listened. If I stretched my ears—if Sophie would be quiet—
She tugged at my sleeve and hissed, “They will tell him where we are. We must not stay long. Now do you believe?” she hissed.
“Hush,” I said.
“That was well done, with the photographs. I don’t think I will see more of these two, anyway. I am very good at getting my bon papa’s spies fired,” she added gleefully.
“Will you hush?”
But the detective had ended his call. The quiet one said, “We fired?” and the other nodded dismally. They blundered out the rear exit.
“Bon!” Sophie sighed. “We have time for coffee, I think. We have much to discuss.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Nothing surprised this child. I examined her scalp, but there was no blood. “Very well. Coffee.”
I bent and picked up her handbag from the floor, and put one hand on the small of her back, gently moving her ahead of me. While her back was turned, I opened the bag, found a comb, pulled a few hairs from it by feel, and thrust them into my trouser pocket. Then I handed her the bag.
Our coffee waited at our booth. Sophie chattered of how marvelously I had fooled her attackers. “That was a vodou demon thing you did, yes? You looked so fierce! And the spectacles—” She leaned forward and touched my face. “They are not there!”
“They?” I remembered the illusion of horn-rimmed spectacles. I banished it. When I reached for my coffee, I saw that the tattoos had reappeared on my arm.
This would take some explaining.
But Sophie was off on another topic already. “I’m so glad I found you first, before my papa!”
“Doesn’t it bother you that he sent thugs after you?”
She shrugged. “It shows he cares.” She seemed alight with satisfaction.
We drank our coffee and watched one another, she no doubt thinking like a string of firecrackers going off, and I assessing the way she weighted the dim, noisy room like a cannon in a garden, so heavy that I felt anchored to her.
She wasn’t lying about one thing.
Her springy black curls were mussed from her struggle with the detective, but they were beautifully cut. Her simple gray tee shirt, which exposed a strip of her exquisite belly, had no sparkles or insignia or extravagances of style such as betray cheap clothes. Her blue jeans fit every inch of her perfectly. Expensively.
She was rich.
I said, “What makes you think my shoes are custom-made?”
She reached under the table and put her finger on the toe of my wing-tip brogue, then sat up and smiled at me. “The shoemaker owns the patent on this pattern of airholes. My papa gets his shoes there.”
I knew they were the most expensive shoes money could buy. “Your daddy must be very rich.”
She smiled. “And my maman was good looking.” Her teeth were perfect. Trust fund baby. Child of privilege.
She’d been raised like me.
She set her chin on her hand and her elbow on a spot of beer on the table. “You can’t come from such humble origins as your tattoos suggest. Yet you work in that grubby botánica.” I opened my mouth, and off she went on another tangent. “That was not Jake at the end. I thought you had to do a thing with chicken blood and the drums and things, to make the gods possess you?”
I frowned. “Not for some. Some are natural serviteurs. That was Baron Samedi, Jake’s met-tet.”
“Natural?”
I pushed back with my own question. “Does he do this often, your father? Send detectives to kidnap you?”
She shrugged. “I have run away from school five times now. He can’t stop me. Are you on the run from the authorities anywhere?”
“No!”
She put her head to one side like a hunting kitten. “It doesn’t matter. It’s enough that you’re a troublemaker.”
“You won’t report me?”
“To my father? Of course not!” she said indignantly. “I’ve come to find the long-lost vicomte so that I can help him! Last night I copied all my father’s files. Tomorrow we will see where you might need coaching. He must not meet you until we are ready.” She clapped her hands. “Oh, this will be fun!”
“I thought you said Jake was the long-lost vicomte. Jake is no more.”
“It is a problem, not insurmountable. But we must work systematically. My father is only days behind me. Perhaps hours.”
“I see. It is you who have escaped the authorities.” I gave her my best sex-demon look, appraising, flirtatious, questioning.
She slapped the table. “Pay attention!” She leveled her forefinger at me. “You must pose as the lost vicomte. My papa filed a suit claiming he is dead. So. We have two weeks to get you to Paris, where you must file a countersuit, or you forfeit the title.”
The air stopped in my lungs. Two weeks!
“My papa has come to find the American vicomte-claimant, to prove that he is an impostor. Hélas, Jake is dead. So now you are going to help me convince my papa that you are he.” She sat back triumphantly.
I had only two weeks? My eighty-year waiting game with the family had become suddenly a bomb on a very short fuse. If this child hadn’t turned up, I would never have known. I’d have sent my own claim to the Ministère de la Justice too late.
My brain churned.
I had to get control of her, to neutralize her hold on my leash. And I must keep her away from Yoni for Baz. And I must learn everything she knew about her father’s case. And I had to bury Jake—and deal with this priestess! I gnawed my lip.
I said, “Why would you want to cheat your papa of his claim?”
She shook her head gravely. “It would be very bad for him. He becomes more unstable every day, yearning for the title. My great-grandfather was only heir-apparent all his life. He didn’t care. Then he died and his son was the heir, and he didn’t care. And now my papa is the heir and he wants the title more than anything. He has too much power already. It’s going to his head. He’s cracking up. I think he will go insane du vrai if he can make himself Vicomte Montmorency.”
Now it came tumbling out, the angry teenager’s resentment, her absentee father, his efforts to control her, then, how he inexplicably gave that up, as if he no longer cared what trouble she might get into. Why? Why? she wailed, an abandoned child.
I knew her story already—the high birth, the mother dead young, the correct upbringing, the cold, powerful father, the loneliness—and then, rebellion.
It was my story too.
“—never listens, he merely ordains! He thinks he knows everything! But he doesn’t care! And—and I fear for his sanity.” Sophie caught herself up on a gasp. Her composure returned. “No matter.” She gestured to me. “Now tell me what you plan to tell him.”
“Why must I tell him anything?” But I had to tell her the truth. The leash was shortening.
“I know! Pretend to be the vicomte. Tell me his history. It must be perfect. When you sent the letters, where the postcards came from, what papers you signed, everything.”
I stared at her, feeling odd. No one had ever heard this story. Not my roommates—we slacker demons kept our histories to ourselves. Not Jake—Jake had been my only companion all those years, so he hadn’t needed to be told. But now it would be said aloud to a bratty poor little rich girl, out to ruin her father’s claim on my title, either from revenge, or in an effort to seize his attention.
She would be easy to control, if I made the effort. Not for nothing had I served as Jake’s tame sex demon. I knew what buttons to push.
They were just like mine, after all.
And then I could find the leash and destroy it.
The waiter came again. “More coffee?”
Sophie said saucily, “I’ll have a vodka tonic, twist of lime.” To me she continued, “When were you born, and where?”
She was too young to drink. I didn’t say so. I ordered two vodka tonics.
The waiter left.
“I was born in France in nineteen-seventeen.”
“Your parents?”
“My father was second son to the Vicomte of Montmorency. He was living in New Orleans with my mother, where he had married her. Then he learned of his father’s death and his brother’s illness. He took his pregnant wife back to France to await his brother’s death and his ascension to the title. This occurred within weeks of his return.”
“And your mother?” Sophie said avidly.
“My mother was a mambo. A vodou priestess.”
Sophie gave a shudder and then wriggled, as if to enjoy the thrill a little more. Tourist, I sneered mentally. Little white day-tripper in the dark world of your dusky ancestors. She was remarkably pretty, for an idiot.
“Bon. Now, your upbringing. Where were your homes, your schooling?”
I looked at her with growing dislike. “I was born on the family estate in the Vendée. My mother died four days later. My father was the vicomte by then. He consigned me to the care of a nurse.” Into her shining sapphire-blue eyes I said deliberately, “My first memory of him is of him beating me for wetting myself. I was three years old. I had been standing in a corner for two hours already, being punished for something I cannot now recall.”
Sophie’s smile faded.
“Until I was ten I was educated at the Montmorency estate, in the nursery in the east wing of the chateau. Every two months I had a new tutor.” I showed my teeth again. “My father sent my old nurse away also. He did not like me to become attached to servants.”
Sophie shuddered again as if she understood.
So that hadn’t changed. Montmorency still forced haughty isolation on its children.
I took her vodka tonic from the waiter. As I handed it to her, I made certain passes over the lime with my left forefinger, transforming it into a love philtre. She looked a featherweight. It should affect her quickly.
I put the charmed drink in front of her.
“At ten, I was sent to Eton, across the Channel. At fourteen, I was admitted to Cambridge. When I turned fifteen, I ran away from university.”
I watched her openly now. Her skin was unbelievably white. She looked like a cartoon girl, with a child’s face and the full breasts and rounded bottom of a cartoon woman. My gaze lingered on the dimpled knee she was hugging, those blue eyes fixed on me, her lips open in a perfect red O. The very rich can afford to select such genes for their bloodlines.
Her breasts rose and fell. Yes, she was still attracted. I could tell her anything I liked.
“Then what happened?”
I opened my mouth to lie, and truth came out.
“I ran away to my mother’s family, to New Orleans.”
The leash again. I had forgotten.
“When I was seventeen I wrote to my father, telling him I was living in the United States.” She hadn’t touched her drink yet. I tasted mine and smacked my lips. “He sent money. I was welcome to stay here, far away from my lily-white aristocratic family. I moved often. The money didn’t always reach me. I didn’t need it.”
No, don’t tell her that. Don’t tell her anything she doesn’t ask for.
My throat was barely wide enough to let out words. What had she asked for? Letters and postcards. “When my father died, I had recently sent a postcard with my address, so the news reached me promptly.”
“Wait, what was the postcard? What picture was on it?”
“Yosemite,” I said after some thought. Jake and I had worked in the lodge kitchen all summer, got paid in meals, and slept in the woods. “A redwood tree.”
“And what year was this?”
I thought. “I was nineteen. July, nineteen-thirty-six.”
She nodded. “Go on.” Her bright, fleshy lips parted and the tip of her tongue showed.
I felt hot and swollen, as if that Yosemite summer heated me.
“Within a month the patrimony papers came for me to sign.” I snorted. “No doubt the fact that there were no new photographs of me misled the lawyers into supposing I could not be as black as I had been painted.”
I stretched out my hand to show her, the hand holding my cocktail, and clinked it against her glass. Drink, damn you! So near her pale hand, mine looked like outer space.
“Their letters in return were much friendlier for a while.”
“You are very good,” she said with approval. “How do you come to know all this?”
My throat tightened further. “It’s a really long story.”
“Jake told you so much!” Her sunny smile warmed me. “You will baffle my father!”
I realized now why she was taking my claim to be ninety-six so calmly.
She thought I was reciting Jake’s history. She believed I was an impostor.
Looking at her, a teenaged, black-haired Jessica Rabbit bouncing on the booth cushion, I didn’t feel like a century-old sex demon. I felt like a teenager myself, emotionally and sexually on edge, vulnerable, hungry, full of longing.
My eye fell on the vodka tonic glass in my hand.
Merde. I must have switched the glasses somehow.
That explained why I was so light-headed.
I’d drunk my own love philtre.
o0o
Suddenly Sophie squeaked. She was staring behind me.
I looked around. Amid the murk and noise of some two hundred barhopping conventioneers and concert-goers, a man in a gray suit stood thirty feet away. With his lean face and perfect grooming, he looked like a greyhound in a room full of crossbreds.
I glanced at his feet.
He wore black custom-made brogues pierced in a distinctive pattern.
Sophie’s papa! The man who would cheat me of my title in two weeks.
I dematerialized. My vodka tonic tipped over. I was thankful to be vapor, so that it couldn’t drip onto my linen trousers.
Sophie looked back to me—and looked right through me. Her eyes widened.
I was almost sure she couldn’t see me.
“Well, daughter?” The bon papa stood by our table now. He calmly took her purse off the table, picked up my napkin, wiped the spilled vodka tonic off the booth bench, and slid in across from her.
Invisible, I flew upward, out of his way.
He wore the family cologne, designed by a Parisian parfumeur exclusively for one of my ancestors in the mid-eighteenth century.
That scent gave me the horrors.
Sophie seemed to be speechless. Her gaze darted left and right, as if she were looking for me. Her lips shaped the words, Sex demon.
“Where is your companion?” her papa demanded.
She bristled. “What do you care? I’m allowed to be here.”
“Drinking under age?” Her papa clicked his tongue. I could see that he didn’t care if she was drinking. “Your hair is disgraceful.”
“Your detectives mauled me,” she chirped, “and they bruised me, and they struck me on the head.”
Her papa went very still.
“Have you come to drag me to the airport yourself, then?”
Her papa looked at her. There was something unsettling between them. He frightened her, but she also frightened him. I wanted to continue eavesdropping, but the noise and smells of the crowd were battering my demon senses.
It was a mistake to look at her face again.
Her expression was brave and calm, but in my etheric form I could see her distress like a red cloud around her.
I made another mistake.
Don’t panic, Sophie, I thought. I laid one invisible hand on her shoulder and sent her comfort. Be brave. He can’t hurt you.
Her face quieted. Her pulse slowed.
Her father must have seen her expression change. Swiftly he looked behind him.
Unsettled, I fled, immaterial and confused, my head full of the scent of my own father’s cologne, and in my chest a gaping hole where Sophie had fluttered in and snatched up my heart.
In some distant, rational part of my mind I thought, That’s going to be inconvenient.