Dangerous Creatures Page 7

  By the time Link returned from the Beater with her three bags, a big gray box, and his old Stonewall Jackson basketball team duffel, Rid was lying on the mattress, fully dressed.

  “There is no way I can sleep on this thing,” she said.

  Link laughed. “A mattress in the kitchen. Sure you don’t wanna sleep in the Beater?”

  “How about in a cab on the way to a hotel in Manhattan?” Ridley wasn’t kidding. Necro’s warning had shaken her up.

  Who is Casting a Vindicabo on me? Maybe the same person who was watching me outside the apartment? If I wasn’t imagining the whole thing?

  Ridley flung her arm over her eyes, blacking out the world around her, as if she could make it all go away.

  Is any of this real, or is the Necromancer just messing with me?

  Link slid his arm around her. “Come on. Where’s your spirit of adventure, Babe?”

  “Don’t call me Babe.” Ridley shrugged him off. “And that’s easy for you to say. You don’t even sleep.”

  “I wish I could. This day has been too freakin’ long.” Link dropped the bags and box from the car in front of her. The kitchen was so small there wasn’t much room for anything but the mattress.

  He sighed, falling next to her onto the mattress. Then he shoved the gray box in her direction.

  “What is it, a present?” Ridley hated surprises. She always imagined the worst.

  A head in a box. A bomb. Link’s mother, miniaturized.

  “I guess I shoulda told you,” Link said sheepishly. “But I didn’t know you were comin’, remember?”

  Rid reached for the lid and knocked it to one side, tentatively, as if she were afraid whatever was in the box would bite her.

  Turned out, she wasn’t that far off.

  Lucille Ball stared back at her, curled up inside an old pink bath rug, looking as if she’d just woken up from a twenty-four-hour catnap.

  “Are you kidding me? You brought the cat?”

  Lucille howled, equally offended.

  “Aunt Mercy said she’d never been up North. Aunt Grace said Lucille Ball would be better off crossin’ the Mason-Dixon Line in the sky. Then Ethan promised he’d ask, and I promised I’d think about it, and before I knew it—”

  “Your big plan was to run off to New York City to become a rock star with your best friend’s great-aunts’ cat as your sidekick?” Ridley looked from Lucille Ball to Link.

  “I thought it might be nice, you know, to have a familiar face from back home.”

  “A cat’s face?”

  Lucille Ball howled again. Link tried to muzzle her, and Lucille bit his hand.

  “Bite her, not me! I’m not the one who hates you.” Link tried to slam the lid back on the box, but Lucille leaped out and onto the mattress.

  He grabbed for her, but she slipped out of his hands and disappeared through the crack in the door.

  “Hope the windows are closed. Otherwise I gotta tell the Sisters that I lost Lucille before she even got to see the Statue a Liberty.”

  “Don’t worry.” Ridley sighed. “Nobody is lucky enough to get rid of that cat.”

  “Yeah?” He sounded hopeful.

  “Believe me, I’ve tried.” Rid wanted to look angry, but she started giggling, and then Link cracked up, and soon they were both laughing so hard they could barely breathe.

  Ridley flopped back on the mattress, and Link lowered himself down next to her. They lay there, staring at the ceiling.

  “You want to snuggle up and keep warm? You know, body heat?” Link rubbed her arm.

  “I’m hot.” Ridley pulled her arm away. Seeing Lucille had made her feel better. But the cat had disappeared, and so had Ridley’s good mood.

  “Third Degree Burns. Can’t argue with that,” Link said, grinning down at her.

  “It’s late. I want to get some sleep.” She wiggled out of his arms.

  “What did Necro say when we were comin’ to check out our room that got you so rattled?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You can tell me.”

  Yeah, right.

  A few minutes later, Link gave up. He disappeared to the practice room and Ridley was left staring up at the ceiling, wondering if this was her real punishment for that night at Suffer.

  She heard Link’s voice, and then a girl’s laugh.

  Supertramp. At it again.

  Moments later, the bass guitar began to thump, followed by the drums. Soon the crowd was chanting.

  Ridley pulled the pillow over her head.

  “Li-ink Floyd. Li-ink Floyd. Li-ink Floyd.” You couldn’t ignore it. Rid turned on her side.

  Could this night get any better?

  She didn’t bother to take off her shoes. She wanted to be ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. (It was already difficult enough to bolt in four-inch heels.) Plus, the mattress smelled like an old swimming pool. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place where you wanted to strip.

  Ridley fell into a fitful sleep, alone on a hard mattress, in a city full of threats and lies, while her boyfriend hung out with another girl.

  Only the dim green glow of her Binding Ring lit the way.

  The salty wind on her face felt good, tickling her like kisses. “The breeze is blowing the sunshine away, Reece.” When she looked up, she saw sunspots—and two small dark spots on the horizon. She rubbed her eyes.

  They were still there, past the palms, all the way down on the sand.

  “Look. What’s that?” Ridley sat up, still sucking on two sugar cubes that she had stolen from Gramma’s tea tray. In the fourteen summers she and her siblings and Lena had spent visiting their grandmother, she had never once been caught.

  “You mean who?” Her big sister, Reece, asked as she tied the back of her bathing suit even more tightly than usual. Because now they could see that the dark spots were moving, or more precisely, walking.

  They were two people—two dark figures following along the aquamarine shoreline of Bathsheba Beach.

  “Fine. Who’s that?” Rid’s eyes narrowed. She kept sucking, but now the cubes were so small that she could barely taste the sweetness anymore.

  “Lost Shorelings, probably. Why don’t you ask them yourself?” Shoreling was Gramma’s made-up word for all the curious folk who wandered up and down the sandy stretch in front of their house.

  One of the black dots was headed right into the startling blue bay.

  “We’re too far east for swimming. They’ll drown in the current. Someone should tell them.”

  “Mortals?” Reece shrugged. “Don’t look at me.” Though the Mortal and Caster populations of the island had mixed peaceably for centuries, the fundamental code seemed to be leave well enough alone.

  If you drowned, you drowned.

  Que sera, sera.

  “Fine.” Ridley hopped off the ancient wicker settee and started on the sandy path that snaked between beds of cliff grass down to Bathsheba Beach.

  “Hat,” yelled Reece from the veranda above, but Ridley just waved her off.

  The balcony that wrapped around Ravenwood Abbey, Gramma’s Barbados house, was carved of broad stone, a graceful contrast to the otherwise severe coastal cliffs beneath it. Their house had guarded the edge of the island—the bay, and Bathsheba Beach—ever since the sixteen hundreds. Ravenwood Abbey was even older than Ravenwood Plantation; like so many others, Ridley’s ancestors had stopped in Barbados on the way to the Carolinas, long ago.

  Hundreds of years of nothing ever happening, thought Ridley.

  That was a long, long time.

  Unless you loved spending hours memorizing family ancestral charts, maps of constellations, herb and garden journals, Caster histories. And the history of the Abbey, of course, which was why Ridley knew an encyclopedia’s worth of information about Gramma’s summerhouse. Reece and Ridley and Lena had studied everything but the actual Casts themselves, which they weren’t allowed to see. Even little Ryan wasn’t spared hours in the Abbey library. “It’s like she
wants us to learn about power just to make sure we’ll never have any,” Rid had complained when they first arrived this summer.

  “Don’t say those things. Gramma loves us.” Reece frowned, looking worried.

  But she looks that way most of the time, Ridley thought.

  “How do I know that? She’s never nice to me. Sometimes I think she hates me.” It sounded strange to finally say the words out loud.

  “She doesn’t hate you,” Reece said, pulling Ridley into her arms for a sisterly hug. These moments didn’t happen very often, and Rid savored it while it lasted. “I think, sometimes, Gramma is a tiny bit afraid of you.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  Reece just put her hand on Ridley’s cheek and looked into her eyes, as if she could see the answers to all her sister’s questions there. “I wish I knew.”

  But Gramma wasn’t even here today. She had gone with Mamma to the easternmost tip of the islands to look at some ancient caves that Gramma was convinced had something to do with their family’s future.

  Why would anyone spend a whole day looking at a cave? Ridley had no idea. But as she ran down the path, she tried not to think about anything but the sun and the sky and the tadpoles she had found in the pond by her room last night.

  Summer was meant to be fun.

  Everything else could be ignored for now.

  She was going to save the Shorelings and then tell Gramma all about it at dinner. Uncle Macon, too. They’d think she was brave and kind. They’d tell Reece and Ryan to be more like her, and then give Ridley an extra piece of dessert. Ridley had it all worked out.

  “You! Shorelings! Get out of the water!”

  A towheaded boy pulled himself to his feet. He walked up out of the foaming surf, right toward her. A girl, younger looking, with darker hair, sat at the edge of the water, on the sand.

  “What did you call me?” The boy’s eyes flashed.

  Ridley sniffed. “The water’s dangerous. If you drown, my Gramma will have to call the police. And she hates the police.”

  “I’m not going to drown.” The light-haired, dark-eyed boy smiled. He couldn’t have been that much older than she was. He was tan and tall, but not too tall. Not old.

  Just a boy.

  “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s private property,” she said.

  “Nobody owns the beach or the ocean.” He crossed his arms.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here with my sister,” he said. “We’re bored.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “We’re stuck here while my grandfather is away for the day.”

  Ridley nodded. “Mine, too. I mean, Gramma.”

  “He’s at some stupid caves.”

  “Mine, too,” Ridley said, with an odd feeling in her stomach.

  She wanted to run away. She wanted to run as fast as she could, all the way back up to the path and up the stairs and down the hall and into her room. She wanted to hide under the bed—only she didn’t know why.

  Kiss me, she thought. That’s what I want.

  I want him to kiss me.

  My first kiss.

  And I want it to be here, on the beach, with this dark-eyed boy.

  Her eyes were wide. The boy smiled, his teeth as sharp and white as his eyes were round and dark. He leaned his face closer to hers.

  Her wish was about to be granted.

  Then he whispered, so quietly that she almost couldn’t hear him over the ocean wind.

  “You want me to kiss you, don’t you?”

  “No,” she said. But it was a lie.

  “You know why you want me to kiss you?” he asked.

  She said nothing.

  “Because I wanted you to.”

  Then he pulled his head back and started laughing. Ridley started crying.

  “Don’t mistake me for a Mortal again,” he said. “I’m not your Shoreling, or whatever you called it. I’m one of the most powerful Casters alive.”

  “You wish,” Ridley said, suddenly bold. “You’re just a dumb Caster boy. And my Gramma is a thousand times more powerful than you.”

  He took a sandy step closer to her. “Yeah? Prove it.”

  This fight was as exhilarating as the kiss.

  As the kiss might have been, she reminded herself.

  She closed her eyes.

  Kiss me.

  I want you to want to kiss me.

  And as if he was listening, he brought his face toward hers, his eyes wide open, as if he couldn’t believe it himself.

  She felt her powers relaxing over him, enveloping them. She’d never used them before, not like this. Not so knowingly on another person, especially not another Caster.

  She liked how they made her feel—strong, independent, invincible.

  He brought his lips to hers… closer and closer.

  Now his eyes were shut.

  “This is for you,” she whispered, her voice as low and husky as his had been moments before. “So you never forget. My name is Ridley Duchannes, and nobody tells me what to do. If I want you to kiss me, believe me, you’ll want to kiss me.”

  The boy was speechless.

  “Is that what you want?”

  He nodded.

  “More than anything?”

  He nodded again.

  “Good.”

  Then she slapped his face as hard as she could and turned and ran all the way back up the path.

  Ridley sat up on the mattress, feeling like she’d just remembered something important. It was only when she heard Link playing “Burger Boy” from the practice room that she realized where she was—and why.

  The crowd was gone, and so was Floyd. All Rid could hear was Link.

  “Patty, oh, Patty, you’re not real Fatty / and you’re only kinda Bratty / my ham-burger Patty.”

  Ridley lay back down on the mattress, staring at the cracks in the ceiling until the set ended and the sun was high. By either measure, it was one of the longest nights of her life.

  She would get Link in this Caster band and then get him right out again. Devil’s Hangnail. Whatever. She wasn’t going to let him ruin his life for her or for anyone else. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to let her life be ruined by some stupid gambling debt.

  Or by the crazy feeling she was being watched. Or by the even crazier thought that she was being threatened by a Necromancer with a Vindicabo Cast from the unseen world.

  Or, craziest of all, by the idea that some rocker girl named Floyd thought she could steal her boyfriend.

  Link Floyd? Never going to happen.

  Because her name was Ridley Duchannes, and nobody told her what to do.

  Nobody.

  CHAPTER 11

  Read Between the Lies

  In the morning, Ridley left apartment 2D and came downstairs to see Link sitting alone in a booth in Marilyn’s Diner, talking into his cell phone.

  Interesting.

  A cold cup of untouched coffee sat in front of him. He was wearing Mario and Luigi on his T-shirt, which meant only one thing: Link was feeling nostalgic and sentimental. That usually meant trouble for Ridley, who never admitted to feeling much of either.

  She moved toward Link, wary. She was wearing her favorite fishnets, her peep-toe suede booties, her buckled mini-kilt, and her oldest black T-shirt. All of her most trusted comfort clothes—yet somehow, this morning they weren’t doing the trick.

  Ridley didn’t know why she felt so off her game. Nothing around her looked that out of the ordinary. Spinning fans turned above a long counter in the center of the room. A faded New York City Department of Health certificate hung on the wall next to an out-of-date calendar featuring Marilyn Monroe, the namesake of the diner. Not a Siren, as far as Ridley knew, but she should’ve been. Rising behind the counter, dusty glass shelves offered sticky doughnuts with frosting stained by old colored sprinkles. Stale slices of cake in plastic wrap leaned against oversize chocolate muffins or mini boxes of sugar cereal or small pitchers dripping wit
h maple syrup—in other words, Siren bait. She could smell it in the air.

  But Rid was the only Siren in the diner, of that she was pretty certain. The counter and vinyl-covered stools were crowded with nose-ringed students, tattooed arty types, even stressed-looking office folks in jackets and running shoes—mostly Mortals, it seemed. When she walked past them, they avoided her eyes, as if they knew something she didn’t. As if there was something about her they didn’t want to know.

  Or were afraid to know.

  Strange.

  She felt the same familiar coldness—the one from the curb, the one from the Vindicabo Cast. From her dreams. She tried to shake it off. New York City was complicated enough—second-guessing herself wasn’t a luxury she could afford.

  Nothing here I can’t handle, is there?

  She tried not to consider the answer to her own question.

  Besides, there were a few familiar faces. Upon closer inspection, Ridley picked out a Blood Incubus chopping up raw meat in the kitchen, a Dark Caster hunched over the Marilyn’s Sweetheart Specials menu, and what appeared to be an aging Siren bartender nursing a coffee at the counter. A mixed crowd was relatively rare in the Caster world, and Ridley didn’t know what to make of it.

  She didn’t know what to make of a lot of things since they’d arrived.

  “What do you know? The joint is jumping,” Ridley said, sliding into the booth across the table from Link.

  He kept talking into his phone, holding up one hand. “Hang on. My roommate just walked into the dining hall.”

  Rid raised an eyebrow.

  Link’s mom.

  He looked at her, pleading. She got the message.

  Don’t blow this for me.

  “Gotta go, or I’ll be late for the Righteous Freshman breakfast.” He nodded. “I know.” He nodded again. “Sure thing.” And again. “Yes, ma’am.” Again. “Yep. Yep. Yep. Flossed, too.”

  Ridley held up a canister of cutlery and shook it by Link’s face, making a loud clattering noise. He started to laugh in spite of himself.

  “Whoops—I’m losin’ you. I think the band’s practicin’ or somethin’. Call you next week—I can’t hear—” He clicked off with a sigh.

  She smiled. “How’s my favorite Mamma?”