Liz sucked in a slow, painful breath. Layla gasped, her face paling. The comment was blunt enough to be worthy of Jane Yellowrock herself, and the rogue-vampire hunter was honest to the point of being brusque. Cia meant that Layla’s mom could be dead. She was the gentler twin. Usually. Suddenly Liz remembered what it had felt like to bear the brunt of Layla’s cruelty—the goading, the taunting. And that one time . . . In that single indrawn breath, the memory descended, full, complete, and awful.
“Boadecia,” Layla had hissed. “Stupid name for a stupid girl. Some people think the twins have some kind of power. I just think they’re ugly.” A shove, hidden from the teachers by the group of girls surrounding them. “Stupid and ugly. Ugly red hair and ugly freckles. When Mother Nature messes up, she messes up bad. She made two of them.” Another shove. A yank of hair.
The moon had been full that day, making Cia less stable, more reckless, like stormy waves on an icy ocean, pushed by a full-moon tide. Fear had grown up inside Liz, like frozen rocks hanging on a cliff face, ready to fall.
Not fear of the taunting girls, but fear of themselves, fear of losing control. Fear that one of them would erupt and pull the other into her magical reaction through the twin bond. Fear that they would misuse their gifts and pay the price. Then the bell had sounded. They had gotten away, barely, before one of them lost control and they hurt the girls.
Liz blew out her breath. Yeah. Okay. Cia was right. That girl who hurt them back in high school was the woman facing them. To an enemy, their services shouldn’t be offered as a gift freely given, the way they were supposed to be for one in need. “What she said. That’s our price.”
“No matter what,” Layla said. Her hands trembling, she counted out thirty hundred-dollar bills. “I pay up front. You do your best.” She stood, tucking the goat into the crook of her arm and soothing it with an absentminded caress.
“We need to see the house,” Cia said, her tone still hard. “We’ll need to take something your mother was wearing the day she disappeared. To do a working to find her.”
Layla opened her pocketbook and removed an expensive-looking pen and planner. She wrote down her mother’s address and tore off the sheet. Then she tossed down a business card, glossy and dark, with her contact info on it. “Call me.”
She turned on the heel of the Manolo and left the café, the icy spring wind whipping inside.
“She wanted us to sacrifice a goat kid.”
“She’s an idiot. She called us by our full names, as if we’re fae and can be commanded.”
“Not our full names,” Liz said.
“Nope. I’m not sure we ever told anyone our full names. But I’d kill for those boots,” Cia said.
“I’d fight you for them.”
Her twin gave her a hard slash of smile and said, “Good idea on Jane’s prices, huh?”
Liz nodded and opened her mouth to tell Cia that Jane Yellowrock was in town for the hearing about the day their sister died. About the day Jane had killed her to save human lives. But she closed it on the words. Some things needed to die peacefully, things like the memory of their sister being put out of her insane, raving, psychotic, demon-drunk misery on live TV. So far she had been able to keep the news from her twin. Why spoil it?
Cia handed Liz the address and card and said, “Let’s get set up for lunch. I have the kitchen, and while the soups aren’t demanding, the salads and breads are.” Cia sashayed toward the back. “As soon as we’re done here for the afternoon,” she added, “let’s go by the mom’s house and get this over with.”
“Evangelina never had trouble handling the kitchen,” Liz grumbled. “Why can’t we get the knack? We need to hire a chef.”
“On it,” Cia said from behind the kitchen bar. “Résumés in a stack.” She waved a sheaf of papers in the air. “Maybe we should have a cook-off.”
Liz snorted and headed to the back to wash the breakfast dishes. A café didn’t run by itself.
? ? ?
The Subaru idled at the curb as the twins studied the house. It was a small home in the Montford Historic District, two-story, traditional, steeply gabled, slate roofed, painted in shades of charcoal, pale gray, and white. The windows were new, triple-paned replacements, glinting in the cold sunlight. The winter plantings were tasteful, and a batch of early spring jonquils pushed up through the soil on the south side of the house. The white picket fence was newly painted. The bare branches of a small oak tree stretched over the Lexus parked in the short gravel drive.
“Looks okay,” Liz said.
“Looks expensive.”
“Is expensive. Probably goes for nearly seven fifty in today’s market.” Liz could see her sister adding the necessary zeros to her housing cost figure.
“We could buy a place,” Cia said. “Not this nice, but we could buy a place somewhere else. We have the money from Evie’s estate. If we combined it—”
“No way. When you marry that guitar-playing, long-haired hippie you’re dating and start having all the six kids he wants, what happens to me?”
“You get to babysit, sis.”