Fire Works in the Hamptons : A Willow Tate Novel (9781101547649) (15 page)

“Are you sure you don't want to go to the emergency room? The EMTs said you didn't have a concussion, and the split lip doesn't need stitches. But if you are in agony . . .”

“I have my own pain pills.”

“They thought you'd be fine except for a headache.”

“Yeah, and her name is Willow Tate. What the hell had you going after Roy Ruskin in the first place? I was winning!”

“That's not what it looked like from my angle.”

“I could have put him down anytime. I was stalling to let the cops get here, so he couldn't claim I attacked him.”

“Good thing I am no lie detector. He was bigger and meaner. Anyway, they set up roadblocks and have Roy's room staked out. They'll get him. If not tonight, Big Eddie and Ranger will track him through the woods tomorrow. There's a lot of open space, but he'll have to surface sometime.”

“Unless he steals a boat and crosses to Connecticut or Rhode Island.”

“Good riddance to him. He didn't get Elladaire, and that's all that matters. The chief says the town's got contingency funds to help Mary out with whatever Social Services won't pay. No one will hire Roy whether he goes to jail or not, so she won't be getting money from him. She won't be living in fear, either.”

He held the glass of iced tea up to his sore lip. “At least something good came from tonight.”

“And we made some kind of contact with the fireflies. I know they can recognize my pictures, and I know they are concerned about a creature with six limbs.” I started to sketch the figure I'd seen while it was fresh in my mind.

“But we don't know if it's a fish or an insect, if it's a friend or a foe, if it came with them or keeps them here. So we have more questions than we had before. And not a lot of answers.”

“I have a question for you. You instantly extinguished the fires in the entire swarm, but then they all started to glow. I can understand when they were high up, out of your range, but they kept that warm half-light when they landed right on us, too. I thought your knack was all or nothing.”

“So did I. I'd love to sit near embers in a fireplace, or have one tiny birthday candle, but it's never worked that way.”

“So when I told you to tone it down, you weren't controlling the dampening effect?”

“I tried. I've never had to put out half a fire. Never saw a reason for it, never thought I could. For that matter, I've never had to consciously think about snuffing flames. It was always get there, get it done, get out. As if all that was required was my presence, not my brain. Tonight was different. I didn't want to hurt your bugs. They made me feel, I don't know, peaceful? Content? Protective, too. I wanted to help them, and you. I tried my damnedest to find a way to let them keep the light. Maybe I did have something to do with it, or else it's the alien magic thing again.”

“This is important, so we know for next time. If you
were
in control, not the pyrates, how did you do it? How did you negate or minimize the fire dousing?”

He took the cold glass away from his lip and smiled, which made the hurt worse. “Ouch.” But he kept smiling. “I thought about something else.”

“You what?”

“I directed my thoughts elsewhere, to not be thinking of fire. It worked.”

“Great. What did you think about, so you can use it next time we try to converse with winged matches?”

He grinned, and a drop of blood formed on his cut lip. “I thought about making love to you by candlelight.”

 

There were seven of us in the living room: Elladaire all snug in her canvas mesh crib, three sleeping dogs, Piet at his computer, me with the library books and my sketch pad, and the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of sexual tension.

I was attracted to Piet of course. Who wouldn't be, despite the scars? And I liked him, which naturally made the attraction stronger. My heart almost stopped when I thought I'd killed him with the petunias. And I was flattered that he reciprocated. I was not, under any circumstances, going to act on that mutual attraction and admiration. He'd be leaving. He'd be in constant danger. He was a confirmed bachelor. If I wanted a man, I'd choose someone like the nice, reliable vet. But I'd sworn off men. All men. So there.

I had to get back to my career, not go gaga every time a handsome, hero-type dude smiled and said he wanted me. But, oh, tell that to the parts of me that hummed and vibrated and glowed.

I opened the book to close my mind to opening that can of worms. Scary, slimy, stomach-turning worms.

The insect book was extensive, indexed, and not much help. It was better than the Internet, because I could flip pages and skim and look at hundreds of color plates without having to open new windows or hit the go-back button every time a new link petered out. What wasn't helpful was the fact that my bugs weren't in it, of course.

I kept reading, anyway. A lot of stuff I already knew from quick Google searches, like how the entire order of beetles was called Coleoptera, which had over half a million separate species. The fireflies belonged to the family of Lampyridae, and there were hundreds of different ones, commonly called Luminaries, spread around the globe. They'd been called Lucifers, not for the devil, but for early matches and the chemical Luciferin that caused them to glow. Mythology had them minions of Vulcan, a god of fire. The English called them Lantern Beetles, which I found charming and more accurate, since they were neither flies nor bugs.

After that, the book got technical about what was common knowledge, that the iridescent flashes came from a chemical reaction, not any kind of flame. Right. Tell that to the German shepherd, or Barry, or Roy. My beetles had real sparks. I didn't care about the chemicals' names or how they got extracted for use in warfare and medicine, which may benefit mankind but didn't do much for the beetles. Now that I had friends in the field, or in the sky, my attitude toward the bugs took a turn toward compassion.

I read about how those chemicals made fireflies poisonous to a lot of species, which was why the beetles had few predators. Which didn't tell me if anything tried to prey on Lucifers.

Nor did the book provide any guidance about my bunch's lives or behavior.

Some fireflies lived underground, I read, some in trees. Some ate other insects; some ate plants, carrion, or wood. Others ate everything and a few ate nothing after the larval stage. Some were short-lived, dying in days after laying eggs for the next generation, others lived long, for insects. Mine could be eternal for all I knew, in their own environment.

According to the experts who wrote the book, all fireflies used the illumination to signal, attract, and identify a mate of their own species, depending on how long they flashed, with what frequency. In some varieties, only the males flew or glowed, in others both sexes hit the sky, like an open-air pickup bar with strobes.

I skipped the parts about larvae and pupal stage and metamorphosis and went to the pictures. Some of the insects were brightly colored, some dull. Some big, some small, some striped, spotted, or solid colored. None had blue eyes. None looked like mine. How could they, when my bugs didn't exist in this world?

Magic. I needed a book of magic right out of Hogwarts to tell me what I was seeing and how to get them home. DUE's arcane library at the Royce Institute was my only hope.

“Are you having any luck?” I asked Piet, who was hunched over his laptop.

“It's taken me an hour simply to get clearance to view the site.”

Security had to be tight for a secret section of a public university. This one had more firewalls and passcodes and encryptions than the government had. Heck, the FBI, the Army, and the White House had been hacked; DUE couldn't be. Not when they recruited computer geeks with extrasensory capabilities. An attempted unauthorized entry to one of their sites, the hidden library included, got the web thief tracked, arrested, his memory erased. His computer's memory chip didn't matter, because the whole computer blew up the instant it tried to trespass. Big psychic Brother wasn't watching, but he sure as hell was defending his territory. One could only hope that the DUE crew had more honor and less evil intent than the usual hacker. Imagine what a cyber-wizard could destroy. Or steal.

Piet sent my sketch of the fishy creature to the researcher he finally reached, plus my drawings of the lightning bugs themselves, blue eyes and all.

U kidding me? he got back in IM. U I these?

A friend did, Piet typed back. Just search the archives. Maybe some bard centuries ago told a tale about a flying fish, or beetles that caused fires.

Paumanok Harbor, USA, right? :)

Where else?

Piet typed in his cell number, then asked for mine.

Hurry.

He signed off, shut down his computer, and leaned his head against the sofa back. “One hell of a day. I'm ready for bed. You?”

Not his bed. “I have to get the dogs out and tidy up around here. You go on upstairs.”

“What about Edie?”

“She'll be fine. You said so. When you put out a fire, it stays out, right?”

He got up and tucked a blanket around her, then came over and kissed me good night: A light kiss, because of his sore lip, but sweet and stirring, and it left both of us wanting more.

I thought he was supposed to put out fires, not start them.

CHAPTER 15

P
IET AND ELLADAIRE took a nap the next morning. I called my father.

“Did you get my message, baby girl?”

“Yes, Dad, and my rear end is fine. What worries me is some kind of strange creature. It might be a fish, but it has too many fins. It might be an insect, but it has no wings. Do you have any feelings about something like that?”

“A creature! That must be it! I've had a niggling fret about something, not strong enough to be truly worrisome, but troubling all the same. You know how it is, something in the back of your mind that won't go away, like a sore tooth. I thought I was glimpsing a preacher, but this makes more sense.”

When I heard “preacher,” I thought of tents and televangelists, not the minister of our tiny local church where I attended weddings and funerals, nothing else. Quiet, gray-haired Reverend Shankman offered no threat to anyone, except possibly boring his congregation to death.

“So you don't think the creature is a big danger?”

“Oh, no. I'd have called right away. As I told you, it feels more troublesome than perilous.”

“Okay. Nothing about bugs either?”

“They've got termites in the next condo unit. Everyone has to get out while they fumigate the place. A nice widowed woman from Jericho is going to stay at my place temporarily, but don't tell your mother.”

“Then Mom isn't in Florida now?”

“I don't know. She's not talking to me. At least she's not nagging anymore.”

I hadn't actually counted on my parents getting back together, not after all these years and all the arguments. Still, I loved them both and wanted to see them happy. “What happened this time?”

“Gotta go, baby. Golf game in fifteen minutes. You take care of yourself, okay?”

In other words, none of my business, and business as usual. “You, too, Dad. Love you.”

 

I left a message for my mother on her cell phone. “Hi, Mom. How are you? Where are you and are you coming home soon? Do you know any entomologists? The dogs are all fine, now. Call me. Oh, and do you think Dad is strong enough to be playing golf so soon after the heart surgery?”

When I got back from walking the dogs, she'd left me a message: “Do you know the number of puppy mills they have in Arkansas? And organized dog fights, too. Do you think I have time to worry about that womanizer? If he's well enough to entertain his bimbos, he is well enough to play golf. I took care of him after the surgery, that's more than generous, isn't it? And all you care about is some bugs? No, you also care about when I am coming home so you can use my room with its king-size bed. Did you think I didn't hear about the new man you have staying at the house? What does that make? Three different men in three months?”

She didn't remember Arlen, the stockbroker in Manhattan I'd been seeing before Grant and Ty Farraday and now Piet. Thank goodness. Four for four. Yikes.

I heard her unmistakable sniff of disapproval, then the message continued: “What are you turning into, a slut like your cousin Susan? I didn't raise you to be a floozy. Maybe your father did, when you spent weekends with him. Now you can't be happy with one—”

I pressed erase.

 

Susan herself came home after four days in the city, at my apartment.