He rose and pulled off his shirt, his skin supple in the watery light.
As night moved through its darkest hours, I learned several things. That I liked being touched extensively, and in a certain way. That James Hawley had a length of scarred skin on the side and back of one thigh. And that when he twined his fingers with mine and pinned my arms over my head, both of us gripping the headboard—and when his body came over mine, musky and heavy—I no longer cared about what I was supposed to do and who I was supposed to be, and everything else was washed away.
* * *
“I want to tell you something,” I said to him in the dark, hours later. I rolled over, tucked my chin into the crook of his neck. “The answer to a riddle.”
He moved sleepily, crooked a hand behind his head as he lay on his back. “Go ahead.”
I sighed a breath and closed my eyes, letting the secret lift from me like a burden. “My mother was a true psychic,” I said. “There is no doubt of it. If you’d tested her when I was a child, you would have been amazed.”
He was quiet, awake now and listening.
“When I was sixteen, my mother told me she no longer wanted to do spirit sittings. I had developed my own powers by then, and she had trained me to use them. My father was gone, and there was no reason for us to pretend anymore. She told me that she got no pleasure from the sittings and she wanted to stop. She didn’t tell me the truth, which was that she couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Ellie, are you saying—?”
“Yes. It took me a long time to figure it out, I suppose. I didn’t question it, and I just wanted to help. She didn’t want to do the sessions anymore, but she was The Fantastique and I was just a girl. She was the one the clients came to see. So she did the sessions, and I sat behind a curtain and summoned the messages from the dead.” I traced a finger idly on his chest as I spoke, touching the springy hair there and feeling his heartbeat. “But she didn’t stop because she chose to. Do you see? She stopped because she had to. Because her power disappeared.”
“Of course,” he said softly. “It explains why we heard so many accounts of her powers. It could have been a natural function of age.”
“That day you did the tests on us.” I rolled over on my back, looked at the dark ceiling. “I always asked myself why she agreed. Gloria asked her to do it, fed her a line about how important it was to her that the New Society complete their research.”
Far from offended, James made a derisive sound. “Gloria didn’t care about the New Society. She liked the attention our tests gave her, and she liked to show off. But mostly she did it because we paid her for every test we did. Rather handsomely, too, by the end.”
“I know. My mother knew it, too. Gloria suspected from the first that it was me doing the sessions, and she wanted proof of it. She wanted to win; it was just her way. So I couldn’t understand, at first, why my mother would agree at all to a session that was set up expressly to humiliate her.”
“That wasn’t the intent on my part,” James said.
“That’s because you didn’t know what the outcome would be. But we all knew it, my mother most of all.”
He seemed to think this over. He rolled to his side, propped himself on one elbow, and looked down at me. “So why did she do it?”
“She was tired,” I said. “She was sick by then, although she hadn’t seen a doctor yet. She didn’t want to lie anymore. I think that, instead of admitting that her powers were gone and she’d been lying, it was just easier to let herself be officially exposed.”
“And it kept you out of it.”
I shrugged against the pillows. I hadn’t thought of that. “Perhaps.”
He ran one finger along my collarbone. I tried not to shiver. “You’ve left out one part of the riddle. What about you, that day of the tests? We saw no trace of your powers, either. And yet yours are strong.”
I thought back on that day, sitting tied to the chair, helpless and angry. “I could have tried,” I admitted slowly, “if I had calmed myself down, made myself focus. It wouldn’t have been easy in that situation, but I could have done something. But—” He traced my collarbone again, and I lost my train of thought. “She asked me not to. She made me promise. She told me that if I helped her that day, she would never forgive me.”
“Jesus, Ellie. I had no idea.”
“I know,” I said. “I know you didn’t. You couldn’t have. I was angry at you for so long, even though I wished you’d noticed me at the same time.”
“I did notice you.”
I blushed in the dark. “It was embarrassing, yes. But you didn’t force my mother to agree to it—no one did. You didn’t know what else was going on. You didn’t know that my mother was using you, using the Society, to get what she’d wanted for a long time. But there’s something else.”
“What is it?”
I swallowed. “When I went to the New Society office to look for you, I spoke to Paul Golding. I wanted to prove something to him—childish, I know, but there it was. I told him where he’d left his favorite watch, which he’d thought he’d lost. And he pulled it out of his pocket and told me he’d already found it.” I turned and looked up at James’s face in the dark. “That has never happened to me before, James. Never. In all the sessions I’ve done, finding lost items for clients, I’ve never once found an item that had already been found.”
He took a soft breath. “You think—”
“Yes. I’ve been having headaches, getting tired. Sometimes my powers go out of control, like at Ramona’s séance. Other times they don’t work. I could fool myself, I suppose, since much of the time they work as they always have.” I thought of the messages I’d received when Inspector Merriken had brushed my hand, coming as easy as water. “But the truth is that things are changing. Perhaps my powers won’t be gone next year, or the next. But I think they’re leaving me.”