The Accidental Kiss (The Kiss Book 1) (4 page)

I was sick of this twisted game of riddles. Whoever Daemon was, thought I was, or wanted me to be had to wait another day. I was bone tired, emotionally and physically. A hot bath, a cup of tea, and a proper meal were desperately needed before any more strange events happened.

“Well I don’t,” I snapped. “Now can you please step aside so I can get home? My mom was expecting me hours ago.”

Concern lined his mouth. “It’s not safe for you to walk alone at night.”

“Why should you care about my safety when you have so little disregard for your own?” I answered as I brushed past him.

Long after Daemon was out of sight, his smoldering gaze could still be felt on the back of my head.

The pink shotgun house I called home was abnormally bright. Dead people didn’t keep normal business hours, which meant my mom was never home before nine at night. I used to relish not having a parent around because what teenager wouldn’t? Once Melissa died though, I avoided silence like the plague. The coffee shop down the street from my old house became my refuge. However when we moved, there was nowhere to go but home. My mother’s guilt about a long list of things drove her to buy me a dog-named Frank, a French bulldog whose heavy breathing and lovable snorts made the house not so empty.

When I opened the door, the smell of marinara sauce greeted me, followed by Frank’s short wiggly body.

“Hey, Franky boy.” I dropped my backpack and picked him up into my arms. His tongue darted out, covering my cheek in saliva.

My mom’s head peeked around the corner. “You’re home late.”

Frank wiggled out of my grasp toward the kitchen to find wayward scraps of food.

I kicked off my shoes and grinned. “How would you know? I could be working the streets. These jeans don’t pay for themselves, after all.”

While my mom knew I was joking, there was a heavy amount of underlying anxiety about not knowing my whereabouts when she wasn’t home. If it were up to her, I would wear a tracking device attached to my clothes.

She shook a spoon covered in sauce at me. “That’s not funny. Hooking is a dangerous business. Just today I had to try and cover up the bruises on a woman’s face given to her by her john.”

“Jesus Mom, way to dampen the mood.”

She shrugged. “Sorry sweetie but life isn’t all sunshine and roses.”

I rolled my eyes at the cliché. Working as a beauty mortician gave my mom an inside peek at the dark and twisted. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t kill her (no pun intended) to lighten up sometimes. She hadn’t been on a date in almost five years and I had a pretty good idea why.

“Take a seat at the table. Dinner will be ready in two,” she said.

Plopping down in one of our barely used dining chairs, I fiddled with a napkin in my lap. “So why are you home early?”

“It was your first day of school and I wanted to hear all about it,” she responded from the kitchen.

“Oh.”

A second later, she came out holding a huge pot of pasta and set it out on the table. The smell of garlic and tomatoes made my stomach growl. I was impressed. Usually, my mom burned everything she cooked but this actually looked edible. She dished out a huge portion on my plate and then served herself.

I dug in greedily. “Thanks.”

“So what happened at school today?”

Mid-bite, I chewed slowly as I considered what to tell her and what to leave out. Obviously Daemon was out of the question since I myself couldn’t explain what happened. Nobody gets hit by a car and survives. Then there was the whole business of him thinking I knew something I didn’t. A slow ache formed behind my eyes. Daemon was definitely out.

“Well…” I hedged. “I met a girl named Emily and all her friends.”

My mom smiled. “That’s great, sweetie. What are they like?”

“They are nice…really nice. You know, just down to earth people. Normal.”

Frank rested his paws against my legs, begging for a piece of veggie meatball. I happily obliged. When I looked back up, my mom’s eyes shined with worry.

“What?” I asked.

“I feel like you’re not telling me everything.”

Like my mom, I was horrible at concealing my emotions. Rising from my chair, I picked my plate off the table and brought it to the sink. Daemon was an off limits topic, there was no way around it. My mom would think I was going crazy. As I stood staring out into the darkness, she came up behind me.

“Whatever is on your mind, Sky, you can tell me.”

A flashback of the car’s headlights reflected in Daemon’s eyes caused my stomach to tie in knots. He was a huge pain in my ass but in that brief moment when I thought he was dead, the world had stopped, as if I cared about him. I bit my lip from laughing at the absurd idea.
Lust? Yes. Cared? No way in hell.
Daemon was an egotistic superhuman.

“Sky?” My mom’s voice cut through my rumination.

“Sorry,” I said.

She gripped my shoulder and gently forced me to face her. In the moonlight, I noticed for the first time the wrinkles around her mouth. My mom had given birth to me when she was barely out of college so I had always perceived her as young. It pained me to think about her growing older.

“Spill the beans,” she ordered.

I sighed and shook my head. “It’s not explainable.”

“I work in a morgue. Nothing shocks me anymore.”

That was true. The other day, my mom told me a story about a guy who had died from an atomic wedgie gone horribly wrong. My body slacked against the counter. She was stubborn in the worst way possible and wouldn’t give up until I told her.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Fine, but no judgments.” She opened her mouth to talk when I threw her a pointed look. “And no interrupting.”

Gesturing her lips were sealed, the story about Daemon and the near fatal accident rushed out of me like a busted dam. When I was finished, my mom shockingly appeared to take it better than I had.

“You’re sure the car almost hit him?” She asked.

“Yes but like I said he walked away unscathed. It was freaky with a capital F.” Anxiety seized my chest. “Am I crazy?”

“Not at all. What you saw was real, Sky. Just hold on.”

My eyebrows bunched in confusion. “Hold on?” She walked out of the room and I called out after her. “Hold on for what?”

A pounding headache took resident above my eye. This day wasn’t supposed to end with additional uncertainty. If I were of legal drinking age, there would be a tall glass of scotch in my hand right now. My mom returned with a large leather bound book. Dust rose off of it in a cloud when it hit the table. I’d had enough reading for the day. I wanted sleep.

“Mom, can this wait till tomorrow? I’m exhausted.”

She beckoned me over. “Trust me, you’ll want to see this.”

My feet dragged across the hardwood floors. Confronted by the book, my eyes widened. Gold letters were embossed on the front cover. “
In Caligine
,” it read. I traced the script with my fingers, entranced.

“What does it mean?” I asked softly.

“
The Darkness
.”

The huge lifelike skeleton in the living room was the perfect example of my mom’s decorating taste. So, the fact that she had a book titled
The Darkness
wasn’t a shocker. What was odd though, was how old the book looked. Based on the amount of dust, I had to say it was at least three hundred years old.

“Where did you find this thing?” I asked her.

She patted the book, admiringly. “It wasn’t found. It was given to me by your grandmother.”

My mom avoided three things like the plague. Baseball, full moons, and my grandmother—in that order. When I was four years old, my grandmother visited our home in California. It was a studio apartment on a sweet little street lined with palm trees off Sunset Boulevard. My mom cozied up the place as best she could on a limited budget. To my grandmother though, our house was a dump. I remember her walking into our living room and saying exactly that. To be fair, my grandmother was used to her lavish lifestyle back in the South where everything was casted in gold. She stayed two days, faked an illness and caught the earliest flight home. It was the last my mom and I heard or saw of my grandmother since.

“Grandma doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who believes in the hokey pokey,” I said.

Her eyes scrunched at the corners. “How do you know this book is about that?” My grades might have been awful in math but I wasn’t stupid. A book titled
The Darkness
obviously wasn’t about fairy tales and lollipops.

Biting back a smartass remark, I shrugged. “A lucky guess.”

She opened the book to the first page where a detailed photograph of a man, arms wide, dressed in an elaborate outfit, danced around a fire. The title read, “
Priest of Santeria.”

“Let me guess, this is my Dad,” I deadpanned.

My mom let out a laugh that caused the heaviness in the room to dissipate. I smiled and reached to flip to the next page when she slapped my hand away.

“You’re not running the show, missy.”

My patience to know what was so special about this book was wearing thin. Heaving a sigh, I collapsed into the dining room chair. “Then come out and tell me, already. Why did Grandma give it to you? And what the hell is it?”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch. This isn’t something you throw out there.”

My mom had a few annoying qualities; one of them was her storytelling abilities. She believed in building the suspense to the point where people wanted to slap her. Namely me.

I shut my eyes. “Please for the love of God, just spill.”

“Fine.” She took a deep breath. “Have you ever heard of Santeria?”

Searching my extensive knowledge of random intellect, I drew a blank and frowned. “No, should I have?”

“Guess not, but it’s the religion your ancestors practiced.” She turned the page. “It’s a combination of the Yoruba religion and Roman Catholicism.” When she saw my blank look, a grin turned up her lips. “Basically, it’s like voodoo.”

My grandmother practicing animal sacrifices in her backyard was somehow believable. The woman was meaner than a wombat.

“So Grandma gave this book to you because why….” I trailed off.

“Because this book holds a very unique part of you, Sky.”

I glanced at it then back at her to see if she was joking. She wasn’t. Peering closer, I inhaled a speck of dust and sneezed. The only thing this book was giving me was an itchy nose.