Pawn (Nightmares Trilogy #1) (42 page)

I nodded and opened the
passenger side door. Standing on the doorstep of Betsy
Klinefelter’s modest home, I heard the sounds of a television
coming from inside.
Live with Kelly and
Michael
if I had to guess. Kannon rang the
doorbell, and a sound like wind chimes reverberated throughout the
inside of the house. The television went quiet, muted by the
watcher. Footsteps echoed, getting closer and closer until the
front door flew open and I was staring down the barrel of a
shotgun.

“Ms. Klinefelter?” Kannon asked
calmly, too calmly in my opinion since the gun was pointing at me,
not him.

The woman I assumed was Betsy
Klinefelter swung the barrel to face Kannon. “Leave now,” she said
in the raspy voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker.

“We just want to talk to you, ma’am,”
Kannon said, holding up his hands, palms out.

“Talk? Do you think I am stupid, son?
I know another Egrgoroi when I come across one.”

“No, ma’am, I don’t think you’re
stupid,” Kannon said.

Rhetorical question! I wanted to shout
at him.

“We need your help,
please.”

Betsy shoved the barrel of the gun
into Kannon’s chest hard enough to bruise. Kannon remained calm,
only the tiny beads of sweat on his upper lip betraying his
unease.

“I think you may have met my father,”
I said quickly. “Mark Andrews? He had your name and now he is
missing and we can’t find him and we drove all the way from
Maryland to see you and I’m being hunted by underworld assassins
and Kannon broke his contract with Kronos,” I said in one
breath.

Betsy Klinefelter turned her attention
back to me, really looking at me for the first time. Her hazel eyes
widened when they landed on my dream catcher. She lowered her gun,
turning it into a cane and leaning on it for support.

“Endora?” she asked dryly.

I nodded, relieved she’d seen fit to
lower the gun, but not so thrilled that she knew my name. On the
one hand, Dad must have made contact with her. On the other hand,
she made the fifth Egrgoroi now who knew more about me then I knew
about myself prior to our first in-person meeting.

“Come in.” Betsy held the door
open.

Kannon and I exchanged nervous
glances.

“One-time offer, kids,” Betsy
snapped.

“Thank you,” I told her and breezed
past, dragging Kannon behind me by the shirt.

Betsy led us through a tidy
living space with mismatched furnishings that suggested she’d
purchased them secondhand. The recliner in the TV room was worn,
the afghan draped over the back shabby, and the TV itself had
rabbit ears. The kitchen was barely large enough for one person,
and a faint odor of burnt coffee and
Febreeze
drifted out when I passed.
Two doors at the end of a short hallway, just past the TV room, led
to a bedroom and bathroom. At least, I assumed that they did. Betsy
didn’t exactly give us the grand tour.

Sliding glass doors off the back of
the house led to a sunroom. Betsy slid the doors open and a whoosh
of stale smoke smacked me in the face. Instantly, my eyes began to
itch; I blinked rapidly instead of rubbing them, lest I offend the
angry lady with a shotgun.

Betsy stepped into the sunroom,
clearly expecting Kannon and me to follow, which we did a second
later. I tried not to inhale but knew I couldn’t prevent the smoke
from crawling up my nose and into my lungs forever.

There was a comfortable-looking
loveseat, an armchair, and a coffee table. On top of the table sat
a cheap plastic ashtray, overflowing with cigarette butts. Betsy
motioned for us to sit on the loveseat. Then, she rested the
shotgun turned walking stick against the glass wall and disappeared
back inside the house.

“Do you think we made a mistake in
coming here?” I asked as soon as she was out of earshot.

“Not yet,” Kannon said. “She put the
gun down, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Did you think she was going to greet
us with open arms?” Kannon asked.

“No. I just didn’t think it would be
with a shotgun either.”

A clinking of glasses stopped our
hushed conversation in its tracks. Betsy appeared back in the
sunroom with a pitcher of lemonade, three glasses, a tray of
cookies, and a pack of Marlboros. She set the lemonade and cookies
on the table and sat in the recliner. Next, Betsy selected a
cigarette from her pack and clamped it between her lips while she
rummaged through the pockets of her jeans until she found a
lighter. It took her three tries before the lighter produced a
flame. Once the cigarette was lit, Betsy took a long, shaky
drag.

“Help yourselves,” she wheezed on an
exhale of smoke and gestured to the snacks she’d
provided.

Not wanting to be rude, I did. I
poured lemonade for all three of us while Betsy sucked on her
cancer stick and weighed Kannon. He stared right back at Betsy,
mirroring her distrust. When I was finished doling out the
lemonade, I picked up a cookie and started nibbling on it. It was
lemon flavored as well and delicious.

“So,” Betsy finally said. “What
exactly is it that you kids think I can help you with?”

I looked to Kannon, who cleared his
throat and took a sip of his lemonade before answering. “I am an
Egrgoroi, as you know, and I violated my contract with
Kronos.”

“And now you are being hunted so your
soul can be reclaimed,” Betsy finished for him and blew out another
plume of smoke.

Kannon nodded.

“And you want to know how I’ve stayed
off their radar for so long?”

Kannon nodded again.

“You didn’t need to drive halfway
across the country, kid. The answer has been right in front of you
the entire time.” She stabbed the burning tip of her cigarette at
my necklace. “You need to get yourself one of those.”

“A dream catcher?” I asked, surprised.
“I thought they just stopped the messages from coming through in
your dreams and stuff.”

“The dream catcher does that. It’s the
diamond that keeps them blind to your whereabouts.”

“Diamond?” I asked.

“It’s the hardest mineral in this
world. The word ‘diamond’ comes from the Greek for adamas, meaning
invincible. That, combined with a blessing from a Shaman, will make
it impossible for the gods to find you. Finding a real Shaman
strong enough to bless the stone, well, that’s another
story.”

“Dad got this in Hilo,” I told her,
fingering my necklace with a newfound reverence.

Betsy nodded knowingly. “Yeah, great
Shaman down there by the name of Alaneo. I told your father about
him when he came to see me.”

“Where is yours?” Kannon asked
suspiciously.

Valid
question
, I thought, seeing as Betsy
Klinefelter wasn’t wearing a necklace or any other noticeable
jewelry. Betsy eyed Kannon with open disdain, then stubbed out her
cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. She turned sideways in her
chair and began rolling up the bottom of her sweater.

The entire area from Betsy’s shoulder
blades to her waist was covered in a web of black tattooed lines.
Feathers, like the gold ones on my necklace, started above the
waistband of her jeans. And in the center of it all, embedded in
Betsy’s pale flesh, was a quarter-sized diamond. The gem was
enormous, much larger than the one in my dream catcher.

I recoiled against the back of the
loveseat. The tattoo was gruesome and beautiful at the same time. I
couldn’t tear my gaze away from Betsy and her macabre
artwork.

Kannon stared in awed silence, mouth
slightly agape. When he noticed me trying to blend in with the
furniture, he took my hand and squeezed.

Betsy fixed her shirt and turned back
around to face us. “Like with all enchantments, the blessing will
wear off, but I find that it lasts longer this way.” She patted her
own back. “I have several like yours, too. I wear them when I leave
the house, just in case.”

“Why did my dad come to see you?” I
asked when I was finally able to get the image of the stone
embedded in Betsy’s back out of my mind.

“Same reason you and your boyfriend
are here,” Betsy said. “That and the Gates. He wanted to know if I
knew where they are.”

“He found them,” I told her. “Do you
know why he was looking for them in the first place?” While I was
convinced that I’d figured it out, I wanted
confirmation.

Betsy took a long sip of her lemonade,
eyeing me over the glass. “I do,” she finally said, setting her
glass down on the coffee table.

“Are you going to tell us or should we
guess?” Kannon asked impatiently.

I elbowed him in the ribs.
The woman had a gun; pissing her off was not a good idea.
“
Why
, ma’am?” I
pleaded.

“He wants to go to Minos and appeal
your case.”

I swallowed thickly. That was exactly
what I’d been afraid of; Dad believed that my soul was bound for
Tartarus. My fate was sealed: I was condemned to an eternity of
hell from the moment I was born, without ever committing a true
crime. I might as well go back to the hotel and have sex with
Kannon while doing lines of cocaine off of a mirror; living a
chaste life wasn’t going to change my soul’s eternal resting
place.

“How often does that actually work?”
Kannon wanted to know.

“Never,” Betsy said matter-of-factly.
“But, in your case it might be worth a shot. Not a risk I would
take, but whatever.”

“So there
was
some sort of mix-up?
I wasn’t supposed to come back? Samantha was? It was Samantha the
Panel gave the choice to?”

Betsy nodded. “Yes, except it was no
mix-up. Samantha Cable was given the option to return as an
Egrgoroi, yes. Only, the contract she signed was for your second
life, not hers. The Panel agreed to let you return to this world as
an Egrgoroi on the condition that whatever Samantha’s Judgment was,
it would be yours as well.”

The new piece of information
left me momentarily speechless. Aunt Samantha, my birth mother, a
woman everyone in my family described as selfish, had traded her
chance at a second life in exchange for mine. If only my mother,
her sister, knew the truth. A horrible thought occurred to me - Mom
did know the truth. That was what she’d meant when she said,
“I don’t think you were given a second
chance.”

“Did Samantha know her
Judgment before she made the deal?” I asked in a barely audible
voice.
Please say no, please say
no,
I chanted to myself. Giving her second
chance to me was great and all if she hadn’t known her soul’s fate,
because somehow I doubted my free-love, wild, drug-experimenting
birth mother was bound for Elysian Fields.

Kannon took my hand in his and
squeezed. Betsy looked back and forth between the two of
us.

“Did Samantha know her soul was
condemned when she asked to switch places with me?” I rephrased the
question.

“Endora,” Kannon began, “we don’t know
what her Judgment was.”

I turned to face him, tears pooling in
my eyes. “Yes, Kannon, we do.” The hot liquid spilled over. “Dad
wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of finding a way into the
underworld otherwise.”

Kannon’s expression softened. Pain,
empathy, and finally anger flashed in his eyes. The pressure on my
hand increased. “I’m sure she didn’t know,” he said
quietly.

“It’s possible she didn’t,” Betsy
chimed in. “The Panel doesn’t actually tell you the final Judgment
until after they’ve given you the choice of becoming an
Egrgoroi.”

This knowledge didn’t change the fact
that the next time I died I wouldn’t pass go, I wouldn’t collect
two hundred dollars, and no matter how I lived my life up until
that point I was going to burn in Tartarus… or whatever it was they
did to inflict misery upon the souls there.

Epilogue

“Where to now?” Kannon asked. We were
back in the Jeep and pulling out of Betsy Klinefelter’s driveway,
with a loaner dream catcher for Kannon in exchange for our promise
to never show up on her doorstep again.

“Hotel first,” I said.

“And then?”

“And then we find a way through one of
the physical gates to the underworld, find Minos, and appeal our
cases.”

“Our cases? I don’t really have a leg
to stand on. I’m in clear violation of my contract, Endora. If I
physically go into the underworld, they won’t let me back out. For
that matter, they won’t let you back out.”

“You don’t have to come, but that’s a
chance I’m willing to take,” I said. Too many people had sacrificed
too much for me already. This was my life, my fate, and it was time
I started taking control of it. “Besides, contracts are like
promises, Kannon. They’re meant to be broken.”

I spoke with more confidence than I
felt. But Mr. Wentworth had been right when he’d said I was my
mother’s daughter. My mother, Evelyn Cable Andrews, was the best
trial attorney in Maryland and, in my opinion, the country.
Eighteen years of sharing a roof with her had taught me a lot of
tricks, and I was willing to bet my soul that good lawyering
transcended worlds.