Captive Heart (12 page)

Andy sat in a dark leather chair in the dark wood and stone section of Motherhouse Kérkira, where the handiwork of earth Sibyls and fire Sibyls joined to create the largest—and maybe the worst—section of frankenhouse. The big stone room with its hardwood floors had a few redeeming features, like the giant window overlooking the ocean—and a few weird ones, like wooden etchings of wolves built into the walls and stone carvings of winged creatures fighting what looked like dragons sitting on lots of the shelves.

“Boxing gloves?” Elana didn’t exactly sound disapproving. More like confused.

“They’re twelve.” Andy chewed the last few bites of her roast beef and pineapple sandwich, wondering if sourdough had been the right choice for the bread, as she watched the two brown-headed adepts through the big window. “I didn’t want them to hurt themselves.”

The girls walked with a lithe grace, like the waves beyond them, and they seemed to be talking instead of fighting. Blue-purple bruises still marked both of their cheeks, but Andy knew they’d heal quickly.

They’re Sibyls
, she thought with a bittersweet wistfulness she didn’t fully understand.
They don’t have any choice
.

Elana shrugged. “Having them punch each other silly with leather-padded fists under the water—I suppose it could have been worse.”

“We used to do that all the time when I still walked a beat for the NYPD. Young kids would be going at it, have some beef, and we’d set them up in a ring with gloves and show them how to work it out with a little honor.” Andy battled a surge of sadness, remembering all of that, because it seemed so logical and simple. “Lots of them went on to take up boxing as a sport,” she added, her voice cracking on the last word.

Elana let out a sigh of sympathy. “You miss your old life.”

“I don’t know what I miss anymore, Elana. I just know I’m a Sibyl now, so that’s what I have to be.”

For a time the old woman didn’t say anything, her fierce, concerned expression reminding Andy of one of the shelf dragons.

We have so got to get another place to live. And soon. Someplace right. Someplace more peaceful than this
.

“You have a heart as vast as any sea,” Elana said. “You can’t deny one aspect of yourself in favor of another. The sea can’t reject its mountains or its coral reefs, or turn its back on storms or whales or how moonlight ripples on night waves. It is what it is.
All
of what it is.”

Andy scuffed her heel against the hardwood. “I don’t have time to be everything I am. Or everything I want to be.”

“That’s because you’re trying to make everything separate.” Elana waved her hands in the air, then brought them together. “You have to flow, to make it all work as one stream.”

That made Andy bang her head against the chair’s leather headrest. “But everything
is
separate. I’m a Mother. I fight in a group. The two things don’t seem compatible all the time.”

Elana went quiet again, and Andy tensed, getting ready for another onslaught of tough observations.

“You used to work in law enforcement and still feel very loyal to that old fighting group also.” Elana’s observations sounded distant, almost scientific. “You’re a friend to some, companion to others, trusted confidante to many more. And, if I’m not much mistaken, you’re a woman, too. A woman with flesh and bones and emotions and … interests.”

Waves crashed onto the beach below Motherhouse Kérkira, scattering the few young adepts who had gathered to play in the sand. Andy realized she’d brought the water flying toward her. Her jeans and yellow tunic dripped steadily on the stone floor, soaking her socks and sneakers and making her want to go home.

She just wasn’t sure where home was anymore. Certainly not here, in this chaotic place. And the brownstone—it was okay, but she and Dio often felt like the odd women out with their married sister Sibyls keeping house all around them. She hated the townhouse where OCU was headquartered, since that’s where she’d had to face Sal’s death and see him so torn apart and cold. She didn’t get to go to any other NYPD precincts too often. The park stressed her out because half the paranormal battles she’d been in happened in its fields and clearings. And New York City itself had turned alien to her as she developed the ability to sense supernatural energy around every other corner.

Tears melded with the water droplets on her cheeks, and she dug her fingers into the leather arms of the chair. Outside, adepts laughed and danced in and out of the crashing waves, and Andy wished she could be one of them—all girl, all kid, all Sibyl, with her future path clear in her mind again.

“Okay, we’re stopping now,” she told Elana before Elana tried any more therapy or teaching with her.

“You have much to reconcile.”

“You say that like time’s running out or something. I’m going to live hundreds of years. I’ll get it figured out.” Andy touched her tears with her fingertips and dried them. It felt like cheating.

“Andy, you must grow comfortable with reading and challenging the emotions of your group. Of all the pieces of your scattered life, of all the fragments of duty and purpose and self you’re trying to pull together, that is the most important. The most sacred.”

Oh, for God’s sake
. Andy didn’t even bother to say anything to that. Elana might be ancient and wise, but
she
didn’t have live with Dio—or Bela or Camille.

Elana leaned toward Andy and reached out, holding her fingers in the air until Andy touched them. “If I had taken my emotional duties to my group more seriously, I might have prevented the disaster that left us so damaged and alone in this world, and living here instead of where our hearts belong.”

Andy gripped Elana’s hand. “Come on. How could you have stopped the destruction of the water Sibyls?”

“I might have realized we were all being drained by tapping into such great but terrible power.” Elana pulled away from her and sat back. “I might have understood action and reaction, decision and consequence. It’s the flow, don’t you see? How everything moves, how everything connects to the next thing? Patterns. They’ll become familiar to you. You’ll be able to follow them, sense them, perhaps even predict them.”

Andy thought about Sal’s death and how her former life had ended in a split-second paranormal attack that woke her water abilities. She thought about dead officers and dead Sibyls and how she and her entire group had lost everything at various times in their lives. Was Elana trying to say that if she understood flow, if she allowed herself to plunge into the stream of feelings and connect more fully with her sister Sibyls and the water of the world, she might sense such tragedies coming? That she might be able to stop them?

Is that wonderful—or horrible?

“Do you understand what I’m trying to say to you, Andy?” Elana sounded strange, and Andy wondered if the old woman was scared about something. She didn’t even want to ask.

“No, I don’t fully understand it, but like I said, I’m going to live practically forever, so I’ll have time to learn.”

Elana turned her face away, like she could see everything happening on the beach outside the Motherhouse’s big window. “Forever,” she said, “can be shorter than it seems.”

   Andy got back to the brownstone in time to change clothes and get out the door to headquarters to work with the sketch artist. She more or less stumbled off the communications platform in the brownstone’s living room and gave a quick wave to the projective mirror attuned to Motherhouse Kérkira.

Ona, the zillion-year-old fire Sibyl who had opened the channels for her, nodded. The mirror winked into darkness, and silence and stillness settled like a silky blanket around Andy’s mind. She so wanted to collapse on the leather sofa, maybe after a gourmet sandwich and five or ten servings of corn chips—but that wasn’t going to happen. Not now. Maybe later, or lots later, after patrol tonight.

Andy sensed the elemental energy of her sister Sibyls, familiar to her and welcome. Camille’s fire rose from downstairs, while Bela’s earth energy drifted languidly from the main-floor bedroom near the staircase closet. Dio’s wind moved softly through the space, moving with a soft lack of pressure that only happened when Dio was sleeping. Andy assumed they were all napping, storing up energy for tonight’s patrol. She’d love to do the same, but oh well.

She headed up the polished wooden stairs to the floor she shared with Dio and turned left, keeping her footsteps as quiet as possible. Her little bedroom seemed to welcome her, and did that bed ever beckon … damn it. No time, no time.

“Stretch, shower, and dress,” she told herself as she gazed at the pictures on her walls. Neatly arranged. Fairly sedate—a big change from her previous life. In her old apartment, she’d had dozens of posters, covers from
Gourmet
magazine, concert prints and ticket stubs from bands she liked, and teetering stacks of romance novels. And crime novels. And a bunch of fantasy novels, too. Now, who had time to read? And concerts? Poster browsing? None of that was happening anymore.

“Maybe I should just get dressed. I’m not that filthy.” She scratched at a layer of salt residue she’d probably picked up refereeing the underwater boxing match. “Well, maybe a little filthy.”

The bathroom was centered in the hallway, between Andy’s room and Dio’s room-library combo, and it was pretty small, too. The tile, however, was top-notch and decorative, with little water-burst patterns Bela had grouted in just to make Andy feel welcome. Bela never mentioned it, but Andy sensed her care and attention each time she came into the bright little space, as if Bela had layered her soothing, accepting earth energy into each crack and seal.

Andy turned on the shower.

When she first met Bela, she had hated her. Bela had seemed arrogant and bossy and brash, but she had turned out to be the most solid, loving, and loyal person Andy knew.

She stepped into the shower thinking about Jack Blackmore.

Maybe there were similarities.

Bela had started off trying to kill Andy—or, more to the point, her then-partner Creed Lowell, who was half demon. Warm water struck Andy’s face, rivulets and steam flowing across her body as she closed her eyes and soaked in the absolute peace and restoration of standing in the midst of her element.

Yeah, Bela had acted like a total ball-busting ass, but the minute she’d learned the truth of Creed’s strong, good nature, she did a 180 and defended him to the death. And when Andy had needed somebody, really needed another human being for the first time in her adult life, Bela had been right there. It had been Bela standing resolutely and lovingly at Andy’s side when Andy had to see Sal’s mutilated body and tell her lover goodbye.

“Just goes to show, no asshole is totally beyond rehabilitation.”

Except maybe Jack.

Andy put both hands on the heated tile in the shower, breathing in water and the mingled scents of Dio’s coconut soap and her own rain-scented shampoo. She snitched Dio’s soap and lathered herself up, then worked the shampoo into her salty curls.

What the hell was happening between her and Jack, anyway?

Andy opened her eyes as she stepped back into the water for a rinse. He agitated her. He knocked her off balance. But he also had her interest. What did she want it to be? Because he’d made sure she understood the call was hers to make …

Six months ago, this whole line of thinking would have been ludicrous. She’d hated the man worse than she’d ever hated Bela. She might still hate him—but no, that wasn’t true. Not anymore.

So what did she feel?

Attracted?

In lust?

Terrified?

All of the above?

She rinsed more shampoo out of her hair and let it slide down her skin, relaxing her. A fantasy kindled in the multicolored hue of the bubbles. Jack, in the shower with her, working the soap into her skin with his big hands. She could imagine his dark brown eyes studying her naked skin, choosing where to touch her, exactly how to make her moan and whimper and beg him never to stop.

The screaming started a few seconds later.

Andy’s heart skipped and she jerked her palms away from the shower’s slick tile. It was all she could do to keep from pitching out of the tub.

Dio.

Dio was screaming.

She sounded terrified. Dio was never terrified.

Breathing hard, Andy threw back the shower curtain, jumped out of the tub, and pelted down the hallway, wishing like hell her dart pistol wasn’t downstairs in the weapons closet.

“Dio? Hey!” Her own voice sounded harsh and desperate, almost as jagged as the screams. “Dio!”

Andy burst into Dio’s bedroom looking left, looking right, natural and elemental senses running so hot she probably could have sighted a spider at twenty paces and blown it to smithereens.

Identify the threat
. Left and right again. Nothing. The light blue walls seemed normal and free of blood spatter or smudges. The bookshelves covering every inch of Dio’s walls looked neat as ever. Her half-dozen tan file cabinets stood undisturbed. Her desk was immaculate. All of that would have been a sign of psychosis in most air Sibyls, but Dio had been maniacally neat since Andy met her.