Simply Irresistible (2 page)

“You’re psychic,” he whispered.

“Yeah, but I’m not able to see the future. Just the present.” And sometimes that was more than enough.

“I thought psychics see the future,” he whispered.

“I wish I did,” Vivian said. “Sometimes I think it would make life a whole lot easier.”

“I don’t think it does,” Kyle said, and for the first time in Vivian’s recollection, he sounded a lot older than eleven.

She looked at him, feeling an odd sensation, as if she were missing something. But he was already running down the sidewalk to greet his father, as if they’d been separated for years instead of hours.

Vivian followed, sighing. For the first time, she realized just how difficult life was going to be here. She wouldn’t have Travers’s common sense to rely on, or Kyle’s jokes to give her joy.

But she didn’t want them facing the same thing Aunt Eugenia had faced. Vivian could take care of herself, but she couldn’t handle it if something happened to her family.

Her sixth sense had been working overtime— and she knew Kyle and Travers were leaving none too soon.

Chapter Two

Dexter Grant looked inside the filthy box sitting on top of his pristine countertop. Five mewling kittens nosed the crumpled newspaper as if it held the secrets of the universe. They were tiny, five weeks old at best. They hadn’t lost their downy fur yet and their eyes were barely open.

“I don’t take animals,” he said to the woman who stood across the counter from him. She was meticulously dressed, wearing a silk suit that shone in the light from the hundred working aquariums that lined the walls.

“You’re a pet store, aren’t you?” she snapped.

He nearly corrected her—
he
wasn’t the pet store; he
owned
the pet store—but he knew that it would gain him nothing. And he already had a heck of a battle on his hands, one that was becoming all too familiar these days.

So he thought he’d try a different tack. “These kittens are too young to be away from their mother.”

“She’s dead,” the woman said flatly.

Her son, who had been eyeing the exotic fish in the saltwater tanks, started. The boy had been Dex’s clue that something was wrong here from the start. Even though the woman was painstakingly put together, the boy was a mess—his hair uncombed, his skin dirty, and his shirt ripped. He was old enough to take care of himself—maybe thirteen at most—and old enough to rebel against an obsessed parent.

“How’d she die?” Dex asked. Nursing mother cats rarely left their broods. It was unusual for one to die when she had kittens this young.

“Squashed,” the woman said, moving her hand in dismissal. Bracelets jangled as she did.

“Squashed?” Dex asked.

The boy was watching closely now, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“And the kittens were unharmed?” Dex asked.

“Miracles do happen,” the woman said without a trace of irony. “So how much are you going to pay me for them?”

“Pay you?” Dex choked. That part was new.

“They’re stock, and you’re a store. You should pay your suppliers,” the woman said.

“They’re mammals, and I specialize in fish,” Dex said. “Besides, they haven’t been weaned yet.”

“So wean them,” the woman said.

As if he could snap his fingers and wean the kittens. Then he shook his head. He
could
do that— he had all sorts of magic powers—but he wouldn’t. The less he tampered with the natural order of things, the better.

Still, this had already gone farther than he liked. He couldn’t very well give the kittens back to this woman. She would take them to every pet store in Portland and, when she discovered that stores didn’t pay for strays, she’d probably dump them beside the road.

He truly despised people like her, but he couldn’t do much about her—at least through regular legal means. And the things he wanted to do would get him in trouble with the Fates. He’d spent the last few decades watching his back so that the Fates had nothing to hold against him.

There were a few other things he could do, things on the borderline between legal and not, things that would at least prevent her from coming into contact with vulnerable creatures again.

“Ma’am,” Dex said, “kittens this young need more than I can give them. You need to—”

“I don’t need to do anything,” she said. “They’re your responsibility now. Come along, Harold.”

Harold. Poor kid. Dex had known quite a few Harolds in his hundred years, but most had been born at the turn of the twentieth century. Kids who would make it in the twenty-first would see the name Harold as something to overcome.

The woman headed to the door. The kid followed, as if he were a prisoner being led by an invisible chain.

“I’m sorry,” the kid whispered as he passed Dex. And that was what decided him.

Dex did snap his fingers—that was one of the many ways he could do magic—freezing time around him: the woman, the boy, the fish, and the poor, mewling kittens. The woman’s manicured fingers just brushed the door handle and the kid was in front of the counter, the embarrassed and worried look still on his acne-covered face.

The kittens appeared even younger than they had a moment before. Dex revised their ages downward another week. Their eyes had probably just opened.

It was up to him. Look at what he’d become. Dexter Grant: Kitten Superhero. It wasn’t a title he minded, although it did lack the glamour of his past.

Still, he stepped into the role. With a delicate movement of his fingers, he opened a rip in reality, searching for the kittens’ mother. He found her in the woods outside an expensive house on Portland’s west side, plaintively meowing for her missing children.

How did he know that was what he was going to find? This cruel woman had taken the kittens away from their mother, seeing dollar signs. The cat didn’t even have a collar, and her coat was rough. She was probably a stray who’d ventured into the wrong yard.

Then Dex glanced at the boy. Or maybe she had become a companion to a lonely child.

He sighed. Maybe he wasn’t just a kitten superhero. Maybe he still had some weaknesses for human beings. Now he had to do more spells, just because this horrible woman had walked into his store.

He did the spells in rapid succession. First, he clapped his hands together, bringing the mother cat to her babies. She landed inside the box— and he had to do an emergency spell before she thought her frozen offspring were dead.

The kittens started mewling, and the mother cat heaved a sigh of relief. She didn’t even look confused about her sudden change of venue. She just seemed happy that she had found her brood.

She lay down and the kittens nuzzled at her teats. Dex smiled, relieved that this one would turn out all right. Then he spelled the boy, adding a memory. The boy would think he had managed to defy his mother and had brought the mother cat in on his own.

Then Dex did one last spell. He put a hex on the woman herself, making her seem poisonous to any domesticated animal that came to her for help. That, at least, would prevent this from happening again.

The kid wouldn’t be able to have pets while he was growing up, but given the mother’s insensitivity, that would probably be a good thing. No sense in teaching Harold how to mistreat animals. With his subtle rebellious nature and his tender heart, he might grow up to be one of those people who adopted animals instead of harming them, so long as he didn’t have his mother’s example.

The mother cat was purring. She looked up at him with warm, adoring eyes. “We’ll take care of you,” Dex said, wishing it would be as easy as those last few spells had been. He’d have to dig into his meager coffers to fix the cat and vaccinate her, and he’d have to do the same with the kittens.

Then he’d have to figure out how to give them away. He already had way too many animals at his house. He didn’t want to sell the kittens at the store, but he might have no choice. He’d have to use more magic in that case. He wasn’t about to let a kitten go home with someone he didn’t know.

Dex snapped his fingers and the “freeze” spell ended. The woman continued her way out the door. But Dex touched the kid’s arm as he passed.

“You did the right thing, bringing the mother and her kittens here,” Dex said.

The kid turned toward him, stopped, and touched the box. He peered in like a hungry man being denied food. “I wanted to take them to the shelter, but she wouldn’t. She said that was too far and they were just cats.”

And you couldn’t make a profit at the shelter.

“You know her attitude about animals is wrong,”

Dex said, treading lightly. No matter how awful a parent, a child often refused to see it.

“How come you don’t have pets in a pet store?” Harold blurted out, as if he’d been bottling in the question.

Dex smiled at him. “I can’t bear to part with the animals.”

Harold nodded. His fingers dipped into the box and lightly touched the mother cat’s back. She closed her eyes and continued purring. Dex shouldn’t have worried about Harold; the cat was letting him know the boy was all right.

“I always wanted a cat,” Harold said.

“You’ll be able to have one,” Dex said, “just as soon as you move out.”

Harold’s smile left. “You noticed that too, huh?”

“It wasn’t hard to miss. You know, you could always volunteer at the shelter. They need extra help, particularly in the winter.”

The shop door opened. A bell tinkled above. The woman stuck her face back inside. “Harold!”

Her tone made Dex jump.

“Coming, Mom,” Harold said. Then he whispered, “Thanks,” as he hurried out the door.

Dex watched the boy and his mother through the shop window. They crossed the parking lot, the mother berating the boy. Dex had the magic to spell that relationship too, maybe even fix it, but such intervention in mortal lives wasn’t allowed. The Fates had already given him a warning, telling him that he was violating the rules made centuries before he was born.

He wouldn’t get another warning. They would zap him away from whatever he was doing—even if he was saving a life—and then they’d try him, and probably send him away for a millennium.

If he’d been a slightly different man, he would have continued intervening—after all, what was the point of magic powers if you couldn’t use them for all that was good and right?—but he couldn’t stand the thought of the Fates’ punishment.

He’d heard about some of the sentences the Fates had dealt out, like forcing master musician Apollo to listen to Wagner’s
Ring Cycle
for three hundred years, which would have been bad enough even if the singers hadn’t been nearly a half step flat. The last thing Dex wanted to do was be sent to some Fate-imagined hell, probably (for him) a place without any animals at all, just because he had done something he believed to be right.

So he’d had to rely on his own instincts, pushing where he could push and being subtle everywhere else. He’d done both here. If he had to defend his spells to the Fates, he’d tell them the truth—he’d hexed the mother so that no other animals would cross her path. And he’d tell the Fates that the only reason he’d spelled the boy was to make certain the kid wouldn’t notice anything wrong when Dex had to bring the mother cat to her kittens.

All the things he had to do to pretend he wasn’t using his magic. He resented it. And he missed the days when he saw trouble and responded, using the gift he’d been given.

Dex leaned over the box of kittens just like Harold had. The kittens were still nursing, and the mother cat was still purring. Everything looked fine, but Dex had a lot of work to do if he was going to care for these cats—and he would be the one to care for them. The local shelter was overstocked with strays and kittens, and he didn’t want to throw more into the mix.

Someday he wished he could find someone else who cared as much about animals as he did. Someone who wasn’t a vet or a pet store owner, someone who had a warm heart and a good soul.

Someone female.

He smiled at himself. In a hundred years, he hadn’t met a woman who interested him. Even though his personal prophecy from the Fates said he would have a great love, he didn’t believe it.

No woman had ever interested him beyond a passing fancy. He was beginning to think he’d never meet the right one.

He picked up the phone and dialed his vet’s number from memory. As the ringing sounded in his ear, he swiveled toward the cash register. He started punching in the prices for a cat bed, a litter box, and some Science Diet cat food. He was becoming his own best customer.

“Heart’s too soft, Grant,” he muttered to himself as the vet’s tech put him on hold. But he’d always known that was his problem.

He also knew that he really wasn’t interested in a solution.

Her name was not Erika O’Connell, but that was the name she had been using for the past twenty years. Her time with that name was almost up: When you were in the public eye as long as she had been, people tended to notice when you didn’t age. She figured she had another ten years before she had to fake a spectacular death or disappear on a trip to a remote outpost.

Unfortunately, there weren’t that many remote outposts left, not like it had been when she was a child—four thousand years ago—when everything, it seemed, was remote.

Erika O’Connell—whose real name, Eris, was not something she had shared with anyone—sat behind the desk in her Los Angeles office. She had her shoes off. They lay on the tasteful white carpet, the heel of one inside the other.

Hard-copy files rested on all the leather furniture—only a custom-built wooden desk chair had escaped the clutter. Even her plants were messy because she preferred them that way—overgrown, trailing down the sides of tables and onto the floor.

She was talking on her cell phone, listening to a meeting on speaker phone, watching CNN, KAHS, FOX News, and CNBC on the double split-screen television that sat on one corner of her desk. In the center of her desk, her state-of-the-art IBM with more bells, whistles, and other unnecessary items, remained on AOL, pinging whenever she received e-mail. In one corner of that screen, stock quotes ran in real time, and in the other corner, ESPN shared the tiny television monitor with C-SPAN.