Dancing With Werewolves (5 page)

Chapter Nine

“You’re a skeptic,” he said.

“Um, yes. It’s a fun game for the kids, but water dowsing is small stuff nowadays.”

“Giving children attention and a sense of accomplishment isn’t small stuff.” His look was corrective and cool.

What an arrogant twit! Although I’d just been touched by his ease with the kids, it obviously didn’t translate to adults.

“No,” I answered, “but making them think they can find underground water with Witch-Hazel’s twig is deceiving them to make yourself look good.” I’d been deceived a lot in my childhood, and still resented it.

He lifted the twig, which I hadn’t seen him holding at his side. It was slender and rough-barked.

“Mesquite?” I scoffed. “Doesn’t it have to be willow?”

“Willow is traditional but not essential. I can dowse with anything that has three legs. A wood twig. A re-formed wire hanger. A midget with a hard-on.”

My shock couldn’t help coming out as a laugh. His mouth was unsmiling but his dark eyes glinted with humor and challenge. “Why don’t you try it? You might have the gift.”

“I doubt it. I don’t have a gift for anything but my work.”

He shrugged and held out the stupid stick.

I stood and took it. It’d been . . . oh, fifteen years since I’d touched a dead stick, probably to prod an icky bug out of my path.

“All right. What do I do? Walk around with the two branches in my hands and the third one pointed dead-ahead like—” Well, I wasn’t going to say what it was pointed straight out like.

“Right.”

Only then did I realize that he had no accent to go with the sleek Latin looks.

“Watch my purse,” I ordered, and began circling aimlessly over the grass, “driving” a featherweight twig ahead of me. I went to where each child had jumped for joy, and then paused. “This is the place, isn’t it? The sure-thing spot?”

He had perched on the picnic table to watch me. “That’s the spot. You’re an ace detective.”

“I’m an investigator, but not that kind.”

“Don’t tell me: you investigate fraudulent phenomena.”

“Sometimes. See? Nothing’s here. Nothing’s happened.”

“That’s because I’m not there.”

I was thinking that might be a shame but it didn’t prove anything.

He got up, draping his jacket over my purse so it wasn’t thief-bait, and came up behind me. Then he put his arms around me, but not close, and touched both thumbs and forefingers to the twig in front of my curled fists. The touch brushed my knuckles, no heavier than a butterfly lighting on my skin.

The slim branches in my palms swiveled fast enough to give me an Indian burn. The third branch jerked down as if drawn by an invisible hand, one that could pull as hard as a Great Dane on a leash. It pointed straight down at the ground.

“Ohmigod!”

“You did feel that?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah.” I had. Along with a peculiar sharpening of

all my senses, particularly smell, like the sun-lit ironed

odor of his shirt enveloping me, the damp mossy perfume

of grass under my feet, a musky citrus odor of men’s

cologne at my back. My own slightly acrid sweat from

the warm day.

I stepped away from him and his soft touch and scents. The powerful pull against the twig wilted in my hands.

“You found this spot before,” I pointed out. “It does this sort of thing. Maybe the minerals in the ground are a certain blend here. Maybe there’s iron in the fertilizer for the trees. Something chemical.”

“So you do believe in chemistry?”

I didn’t miss the double entrendre. My hard-nosed skepticism only amused him.

He was watching me with a faint smile, as benign as the one he’d shown the kids but more prickly, more prodding. I glimpsed the sliver of white teeth between his well-arched lips. Maybe he was a daylight vamp; some could “pass” as human if you didn’t look too close, like Undead Ted. Vamps were always drawn to my Black Irish pallor and I hated that, like the girl in the old ballad who wanted to be loved for more than her yellow hair alone.

He glanced down at the grass. “You think this spot is a ‘plant.’ Tell you what. Take the twig somewhere else, wherever you want to go.”

“What’ll that prove?”

“I’ll bring up the rear and try my talented touch every now and then.”

“You seem pretty confident there’ll be more ‘water’ around here. What’s the source? The lake?”

“It began as a pond that overflowed a spring, but the water table dried up decades ago. It’s all desert now, so the city manufactured this model.”

“Including the Easter Island head on the islet in the center?”

“Yup. Grotesque, isn’t it? Just one seems lonesome.”

“So there are still remnants of the original spring under the land, you’re telling me?”

He smiled mysteriously and shrugged again, his shoulders broad under the crisp-collared silken shirt, his hips narrow under that discreet snake of a gold belt that whispered “sexy” to my observer’s eagle eye.

Maybe he wasn’t a vamp. They couldn’t keep their eyes off my neck and wrists, and he was totally focused on my eyes, on my mind. Which in a way was even scarier.

I grabbed the silly twig again, my palms still smarting from the first strike, and began weaving over the grass in an opposite direction. The late-day crowd was melting away. Distant reeds cast stilettos of shadow as the sun weltered red and swollen behind them.

I actually tried to clear my mind and believe that I could find water, that the stick would perform for me, for my touch alone. Say you believe in fairies and Tinker Bell, or Peter Pan, will live.

He followed me, but I felt nothing and the twig was unimpressed by my custody too. After a couple minutes he came up behind me, his fingers pausing on mine.

Not a bad feeling. Attractive guy, late twenties, no rings, successful professional and kind to kids, which was a huge plus in my rating system. Smelled good. Felt good. No evident fangs. Was this just a come-on scheme? my inner cynical reporter wondered. Was I falling for another load of—? Then his fingers moved past me to the wooden Y.

I gasped.
Bingo!
The branches in my hands pulled down harder than a twenty-mule team. My palms breathed fire as his fingertip touch became hands fully tightened over mine. We were being sucked into the ground by a hurricane-level force, my braced feet and his barely keeping us upright.

The day had gone dark, at first at the edges of my vision and now all the way to the center. Nothing to see but lightning flashing right around us.

“Hold on!” he shouted in my ear. Maybe he whispered and it only sounded like a shout to my instantly raw nerves. The words evaporated into a whirlwind. On either side of me his arms felt like muscle-roped iron, the only things holding me to this ground, this reality. This earth.

I grew clammy all over remembering my alien abduction dreams. This felt like the same endless, unanchored moment. I could feel my knuckles threatening to pop through my skin and my fingernails cutting into my palms, but I couldn’t release the rods of acid fire between my hands.

And then a deep interior rush of indescribable pleasure swooped between my legs and up my center to some sweet spot that melded the physical and mental. The sensation swept mind and senses away into a secret sensual place that wasn’t anywhere I recognized, not in my wildest dreams. Yet I was there. Light teased the darkness, flashing like a strobe on bare limbs. Male. Female. Albino snakes entwining in a black pit. It took me a moment to see four legs, four arms making the beast with two backs. Two sexes.

If these were ghosts, they were carnal ones. Sighs, guttural cries, fevered panting, moans, expressing either pleasure or pain, or both, entwined in some deadly dance of desire.

For I also heard grunts, screams, felt the thud of club on bone, the impact of hot metal on muscle and tissue. The albino snakes in my mind, at my fingertips, were now running red with blood. I was watching a savagely cut film, splicing love with death, desire with destruction. If this was death I witnessed, it was the death of a thousand blows and caresses and cuts and kisses.

Too much. More than I could withstand, a theme park ride into a horror movie. I wanted off. Out. Away. Out of the dream, the nightmare. I screamed into the violent darkness . . . and woke up silent, my head thrust back to howl but no sound coming out.

Ahead of me the setting sun was gilding the trees and the lake water. Ducks and geese and one toy sailboat skimmed the glassy surface, creating sandlike ripples. The Easter Island head shone like solid gold in front of its guardian palm fronds. Sunny afternoon had become twilight.

Was I alarmed, like I should have been? No. I lingered in a languid dreamy state, as if drugged. The afterglow of the light saber of sensation that had pierced my core reminded me of a divining rod finding and reaching its central element, the spot where earth met underworld, search met find, my spot, the mythical G-spot maybe.

The violence I’d glimpsed faded under that sense of fruition, of having finally made it to something untouched within myself.

Then I remembered that self, the one who wanted into Hector Nightwine’s establishment so badly. The one who was now wrapped in a stranger’s arms, my head leaning into his shoulder and chin, my body leaning back against something else. . . .

I spun around, away, so that we were facing each other.

The dowser was looking as dazed and embarrassed as I felt, thank God. His rich cocoa-colored skin had an ashy undertone. Tiny beads of sweat swept across his forehead, catching the twilight like a diadem.

He looked . . . dazzling. Like a fairyland lord come to take me away. From the electricity I’d felt between us, I was ready to go anywhere.

Girl, get over it!
urged my inner best friend, Irma. She often came to me after nightmares. Sometimes she was an eighties housewife humorist like Erma Bombeck, but today she was a pert Shirley MacLaine French tart from a sixties film,
Irma la Douce.
Cable TV kept all the oldies but goodies alive.

He’s a park pick-up. Cute, but what’s with the magic water wand bit?Some sort of scam. Some pick-up shtick. Get your shit together.

Irma was trying to shake me out of this bizarre state I was in. I felt like I’d been struck dumb by a lightning bolt of sex and death. And I felt another new overwhelming feeling. Satisfaction. Wow, this was weird.

Someone had to speak. Usually the girl was good at making awkward conversational transitions. Usually she felt that responsibility, anyway.

“Um,” I heard myself say, “do you always go
up
when the dowsing rod goes
down
?”

What had I said? Irma? Was that you, you brassy flirt?
Or was it the bolt of sheer sexual energy that had surged up from the ground to his dowsing rod and through my hands into his fingertips?

He stepped away and back. His dusky face reddened in the fading sunlight.

Even while I wanted to clap a hand over my suddenly sexy mouth, I realized that I liked that. His reticence. I wasn’t normally this up-front. I didn’t know what had gotten into me.

“It’s getting late.” He sounded as flustered as I did.

He reached into a pants pocket, but not for the car keys I expected. He reached in a thumb and pulled out a . . . golf ball marker.

Then he looked at the sunset, then east to a line of small trees, all neatly labeled with dead people’s names, and finally past me to the Easter Island head.

He bent to impale the small object in the thick grass between us.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s for my work.”

“Then there really is water under this spot? I found it? Are you a landscape architect or something?”

He smiled, distracted. “You could call it that.” Then he looked at me, hard, a question in his eyes. “Here’s my business card, by the way.”

In the descending dusk, I could barely read the embossed gold lettering on the heavy linen paper: Ric Montoya, Consultant. An office address was followed by several phone numbers and an email address.

I walked away on shaky legs, planning to put the card in my purse on the deserted bench.
My purse!
Someone could have taken it while I was dallying with a dowser!

“Let me get that.” He lifted his jacket from the picnic bench before I could. While I was checking my purse for signs of rifling, he pulled a small black object from his jacket side pocket. “Portable alarm. If anyone had moved my jacket it would have gone off. You haven’t been robbed.”

“Oh. What a relief! I’m new in town and all my ID, my credit card info, Social Security number—”

“It’s okay.” He rested a calming hand on my wrist, but I jerked away as if burned.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m getting a terrible headache. I guess I panicked.”

“May I have your phone number, Miss—?” The sunset-gilded pen he produced like a magic wand shone, liquid lava in his dark hand, against his luminous white shirt cuff.

I seemed to be seeing everything in intensified colors, the sunset bathing us in an amber-orange glow, the grass darkening to emerald.

“Miss—?” he repeated.

Dummy. Speak!

“Street.” I decided to skip the Delilah part. He looked like the kind of Latin lover who’d call you “Miss” while he was unzipping your skirt. A gigolo maybe. Was I thinking this because he was so attractive? “I never remember my own number,” I said, stuttering a little. “Let me look at my phone . . .”

Girlfriend, get a hold of yourself, urged Irma. He’s probably straight both ways, gender and species, and you two have obviously got some heavy-metal chemistry going.

I found the cell, punched “My phone #,” and read it off, watching Ric Montoya, consultant (
on what?),
punch it into his own phone. Twilight had edged into dark by the time he escorted me to the curb and opened the door of my queen-size black Caddy with the red leather interior and white convertible top.

“A lot of car,” he noted, surprised and intrigued by Dolly. What guy wouldn’t be? “Should I follow you home?”

“No, I’m fine. It’s just this sudden headache.”

All I could see of him now was luminous splashes of white: that supernaturally white shirtfront, his flashing teeth and eyes. The lights inside my head were lurid red and green and blue.