Dragon Call (6 page)

Nobody spoke but Greg and Salim; someone had
cut the music. The energy of the room changed. Otherwise
uninvolved, spectators and bystanders pushed forward to drink up
the tension. Several people studied Cora with speculation in their
eyes.

“I came because I have an invitation,” Salim
said. “Perhaps we should discuss this privately.”

“What do you want to hide? Everybody here
already knows about you.”

“But they don’t know about you.” A soft
threat padded Salim’s words.

He
was
blackmailing Greg. Cora’s pulse
kicked up in fear. What would Salim do with his knowledge about her
family if he held Greg’s secrets for a price? She couldn’t meet an
extortion fee.

Greg clenched his fists until his knuckles
whitened. Cora retreated into the dubious safety of the crowd,
glancing at Diane. “What is this?” she whispered.

“Men making jackasses of themselves,” Diane
responded beneath her breath. “Are you ready to leave now?”

Cora nodded. She stole a last glance at Greg
and Salim, Greg trembling with emotion and Salim as emotionless as
a stick of gum. Ironic that neither had reason to clash over
her—she wasn’t interested in Greg’s inability to control his anger
or Salim’s capacity for cruelty.

Outside in the corridor, Diane jabbed the Up
arrow beside the elevator. “What was that about?” she asked. “Never
mind, it doesn’t matter. Now you know firsthand why you shouldn’t
get involved with either of them.”

Down the hall, the door to the apartment
they’d just left opened. The sound of voices spilled forth. At the
same time, the elevator chimed, and the doors slid open. Cora
looked back in time to see a man’s silhouette before Diane yanked
her into the elevator car and mashed her hand against the 14
button.

“You’re on 17,” Cora said, bristling. She
didn’t appreciate Diane’s dig about her choices in companionship
even if she was right.

“We’ll walk the other three floors.”

Diane pounded on the Close Door button until
the doors whooshed, then she leaned back against the wall and
closed her eyes.

“He’s the Collector,” she said a second
later. “If I’d known he was coming, we wouldn’t have gone.”

“Who? Salim? Collector of what?” Cora asked,
eyeing Diane. “Something besides blackmail money? What do you know
about him?” Her confusion had most definitely become annoyance, no
doubt about it.

Diane opened her eyes and straightened when
they reached the 14
^th
floor. “He’s some kind of monster.
I wouldn’t leave my worst enemy alone with him.”

“Yum, big city melodrama,” Cora muttered
beneath her breath. She followed Diane from the lift and toward the
stairs.

“It’s not like that,” Diane whispered. “Just
trust me, alright?”

The pair climbed the three flights of stairs
up to Diane’s floor.

“Stay away from him. He knows you’re
protected now, anyway, so he’ll stay away from you whether or not
you’re smart enough to do the same.”

“Could you be anymore condescending?” Cora
asked as they emerged from the stairwell.

Diane didn’t answer until after they were
inside her apartment. “Look,” she said, “I know you don’t get it,
and you don’t want to get it. I respect that. You need to
understand, though, that there are people who aren’t passive, who
are very, very dangerous. The Collector’s one of those people.”

Cora sighed, kicking out of her shoes. “It’s
a moot point now, anyway. He knows about us, so we need to figure
out what to do about him instead of how to avoid him.”

“Just avoid him,” Diane said on her way to
her bedroom.

Cora frowned after her sister. “Are you
listening to me? He knows about us. About you and me and ma
and—”

“That we’re witches?” Diane called from the
other room. “Everybody knows that, Cora. You’re the only one of us
who doesn’t talk about it openly. Ma and I don’t hide ourselves
from the world.”

Diane’s words struck Cora with the force of a
slap. Cora’s tendency to keep her Lune heritage private was a
longtime source of contention between all three Phillips women,
with Diane and Miranda resentful of what they viewed as shame and
Cora resentful that they tried to force their beliefs upon her.
She’d never been able to present a solid stand against Diane and
Miranda when they got up in arms about her view of the matter, so
she instinctively shied away from getting into it with Diane over
the same tired topic.

“Never mind,” she mumbled to herself.

Diane sailed from her bedroom, whipping her
hair—long and dark, unlike Cora’s blonde bob—up into a high
ponytail. She’d changed into a pair of sequin-studded jeans and a
glittery blue tube top, which she covered with a blue wool half
cape. “I’m going to Alissa’s for the night,” Diane said. “She’s
waiting for me downstairs. Call if you need anything.”

As soon as Diane closed the door, Cora
retrieved a pint of cherry vanilla ice cream from the freezer. She
ate it directly out of the container and paced Diane’s apartment.
The only light came from the kitchen, itself a small bulb over the
sink that shed just enough illumination to keep Cora from running
into walls.

The apartment reflected Diane’s flair for the
dramatic perfectly, done up in all dark wood floors and naked
windows that allowed the sun in to heat the wood during the day and
the moon in to cool the wood at night. A rocking chair stood in
front of a huge window, in easy reach of Diane’s several
bookcases.

Even though she didn’t share Diane’s
religious affinity with the goddess, she understood the power of
faith. Diane’s apartment reflected her belief. It was a ritual
place, a woman place—the rocker was their great-grandmother’s,
cherry wood shaped and carved and waxed and worn until it shone
blood red by sun and moonlight alike. The antique bed had no known
age, and for all Cora knew it was an eternal thing that had taken
life as often as it had ushered life from womb to world: countless
lives, bloodstains marking each birth on the feather mattress.

Diane had inherited both pieces of furniture.
Their ancestor’s journal had been bequeathed jointly to Cora,
Diane, and Miranda. The private writings revealed the old woman’s
own reverence of the moon goddess. Cora, then up to her neck in
econ courses at NYU, had not been in the proper frame of mind to
receive such a legacy with anything but skepticism, especially
after weaning herself off her adolescent lifestyle.

Occasionally, she wished she were as secure
in faith as Diane. They were both daughters of an ancient
tradition, if journals could be believed, and had power in their
very bloodstreams. As a child, Cora had believed in it all. Her
favorite of her great-grandmother’s stories about the first witch,
alternately known as the Lune and the Dragonkeeper, was the story
that explained how the Lunes became Dragonkeepers.

According to the story, centuries and
centuries ago, a human lineage that could shapeshift into dragons
became the targets of the Catholic Church’s witch hunts. In order
to protect themselves until the witch craze died down, the dragons
commissioned their mates, women who worshipped the goddess and the
moon, to smuggle the dragons somewhere they could not be touched by
human society. The witches cooperated, according to the story, by
darkening the moon so no individual who could not see in the dark
would ever see a dragon. When she was a little girl, Cora had
delighted in the trickery of the story. She found it much more
satisfying than tales of kidnapped princesses rescued by shining
knights.

She wasn’t a little girl anymore, though, and
she didn’t dream about strong women rescuing persecuted, cursed
men. She barely slept at all. Nightmares woke her when she did nod
off, and the anxiety of impending nightmares kept her awake until
her body overrode her mind. She had admitted as much to Diane over
lunch early in the day.

“It’s the fire,” Diane said around a mouthful
of loaded New York hotdog while they walked. “You’re still
terrified, somewhere inside, that it’ll happen again.”

“And to think I’m spending a fortune on my
shrink when I could just come to you,” Cora said without rancor.
“What neither he nor you have told me, though, is what to do about
it.”

The psychiatrist suggested sleeping pills and
hypnosis, as Cora had mentioned to Greg, while Diane suggested
meditation as a solution. Meditation would allow Cora to connect
her hidden self with her goddess self, and the reunited pair would
banish the fears leftover from the fire that nearly killed her two
months ago. No, not nearly—the fire
had
killed her. Dead for
three minutes according to the medical files and resurrected by the
firefighter who carried her out.

She scraped the last spoonful of ice cream
from the pint and let it melt on her tongue. She had nothing left
to do with the night than go to bed and lay awake, going over and
over the night’s events.

Diane’s big, ancient feather bed was swathed
in crimson satin sheets. The sight of the rumpled bed made Cora
pause. It suggested sex and blood and fire; her cheeks heated. Cora
imagined her face as scarlet as that bed, but not before she
imagined herself tangled up in it with Salim. The image startled
her, appearing out of nowhere. She suddenly remembered the electric
reaction to touching him, the way her fingertips had tingled. The
tense confrontation between Salim and Greg had driven it from her
head.

She decided the bed was too much. Neither her
nerves nor her nerve endings could deal with the mental and
physical stimulation of satin and suggestion, so she went to the
air mattress she’d brought with her for the spare bedroom. She
stripped out of the corset and gauzy skirt she’d worn to the party
and drew a cotton t-shirt over her naked, spa-sensitized body. She
lay awake a long time, alternately counting sheep and practicing
breathing exercises that were designed to make her stop thinking
long enough to pass out.

She catnapped off and on until she woke from
a nightmare sometime before dawn, early enough that the sky still
gleamed purple through the bare windows. The dragon dream had left
her heart trembling with an erratic, frightening beat. Her entire
body shook with that terror-pulse, clear down to her toes. She
concentrated on breathing, not to get to sleep, this time, but to
make sure that she didn’t stop breathing altogether. In the first
few seconds of waking this way, she desperately wished she had
someone into whose arms she could roll, someone who would stroke
her hair and assure her that nothing was chasing her through
dreams.

When her pulse slowed, she rolled over. The
air mattress groaned its plastic groan and shifted with her weight.
Something about the plastic noise sounded a little off; she made a
mental note to add more air tomorrow and closed her eyes against
the light of the city, still bright even at sometime-before-dawn.
The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen, and a siren wailed on the
street below. Her cell phone chimed its low battery warning. Every
sound would register now that adrenaline had chased away even the
slimmest prospect of sleep. Cora got up, wrapped herself in a
blanket from Diane’s bed, and started a pot of coffee.

She paced while the coffee brewed, looking
for something to do. Attaching her phone to its charger only filled
about thirty seconds of time. Diane’s sparsely furnished apartment
offered little in the way of entertainment. It truly was a ritual
place. Cora eyed the altar that Diane had set up in the corner of
her bedroom, but she didn’t go close enough to examine details of
its makeup. She considered that too private a thing to snoop
through, akin to a diary.

In the living room, she saw more evidence of
Diane’s belief. Diane had painted a large circle on the floor,
close to the window, with familiar markings at five points around
the circle. Cora had never noticed it before; the morning light
must have hit it at just the right angle to draw her attention. She
walked around the circle pensively.

“Get in touch with your goddess,” she
muttered, imitating Diane’s voice. “Sure isn’t anything else to do
here.”

Cora sighed and let the blanket slide to the
floor. She snooped a bit and gathered what she would need to close
the circle. While she didn’t believe like the other women in her
family did, at least not anymore, Cora still remembered the motions
of faith.

She found a plant pot filled with soil and
scooped up two handfuls. As she moved around the large empty room,
spilling soil at the circle’s five points, memories of the craft
returned to her. She marked each point and murmured a short
incantation to bless it with its orientation: water, wind, fire,
earth, spirit. The circle was simple and predictable, a 5-point
star building its foundation. Unable to go any further without
sealing it, she stopped and stripped to her skin.

On one level, she felt ridiculous and
fervently hoped Diane would not come home to catch her. On an
entirely different level, however, she felt herself warming to the
possibility. She felt like she was coming home.

Chapter Six

Cora opened the windows wide and moved the
rocking chair out of the way. December wind whipped into the
apartment and tore through her hair, blowing the blonde tangle away
from her face and shoulders. The open window made her feel exposed,
as if she were being watched. She returned to the circle
regardless, deciding that the feeling of exposure was part of the
process of opening up.

With a deep breath, she stepped into the
circle and spread a final handful of soil to close it and lock
herself, as well as anything she might connect with, inside the
ring. She remembered the closed circle as a safety precaution, and
the warning her mother had given: even good things belonged in
their own realm and should not be loosed into ours.