Kicking It

Kicking It Page 22

“All on the floor with her clothes.” Fresh tears gathered in Layla’s eyes and she bent over the goat. It nudged her jaw and licked her chin. “I don’t know what to do. Can you help me? Can you find her?”

Cia and Liz shared looks that said, No. Yes. No. Maybe. No.

Layla eased the goat back into the crook of her arm, placed the expensive pocketbook on the table, and opened the flap. “I can pay.” She pulled out a stack of hundred-dollar bills and pushed it across the table toward them. Neither twin looked at the money, but they both saw it. More money than they made in tips in a month. Maybe two.

Cia’s magic rose again, like a wave at high tide, hard and powerful and angry. She leaned forward and said, “We can try. Trying is a flat fee of a thousand. Success is another two thousand. Nonnegotiable.” When Liz started to debate the amount, Cia said, “That’s Jane Yellowrock’s fee for a PI job. And she doesn’t have magic. And”—she looked hard at Layla—“if we get your mom back, the fee is required, no matter what shape your mom is in.”

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 be 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 her mother’s address down 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 bread 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.”

“Babysitting I can handle. It’s life as a live-in nanny I’m not interested in.”

“That long-haired hippie is rich as Midas. If Ray and I get married someday, we’ll get our own place and you can have our house.” Cia sounded part smug, part smitten, part unsure, the way she always did when she talked about Ray, the country singer who had fallen head over heels the first time he saw her and who had made a habit of sending flowers and candy and presents to get her attention.

A red car passed them slowly. “She’s here.” Liz couldn’t hide the bitterness in her words.

The vintage T-bird rolled into the drive and nestled into the small space behind the Lexus. When their archenemy stepped from the car, she was once again holding the baby goat. And it was wearing a diaper. Cia breathed out a giggle, but oddly, Layla didn’t look ridiculous. More like a socialite with a chic, pampered lapdog. Lap goat. Liz resisted a smile.

“Does it look to you like she’s making a pet of the kid?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Cia said. Unspoken but understood was the phrase that’s weird. “Can you house-train them?”

“No. And they’ll eat literally anything and everything. Shoes. Fancy pocketbooks.”

Cia laughed softly and shared a glance, both of them imagining the scene of the goat eating the pricey bag. Layla screaming and stomping her feet.

“And their poop stinks. Like, really bad,” Liz added.

“I see a rude awakening on the horizon,” Cia said with barely restrained glee. “Hope it’s today so I can watch.”

They got out of their car and moved across the street to the house, Cia in front, as if to protect her weaker sister. Cia’s dress blew back in the slow wind, the shifting shades of color mimicking the silver-pinkish hues of moonlight on orchids. She wore a long vintage wool coat from the sixties, gray with tan lapel and cuffs, unbuttoned so the dress would show. Her red hair, dyed to a deep wine, was pulled into a chignon that looked smooth and chic. Her boots, never worn until today—never worn despite her boot fetish—struck the pavement with steady force. She looked classy and quirky and expensive, like the rich man’s toy that Ray might want to make her.

Cia hadn’t been wearing the Old Gringo boots, the coat, or the moonlight dress when they left the house this morning. The pricey buff-colored boots, hand-stitched with scarlet dragons climbing each side, had been Ray’s gift, one she hadn’t felt like she could wear, and she had kept them in the box, under her bed. Until today. She had put aside her uncertainty about accepting Ray’s present to show off to Layla.

Liz looked down at her own well-worn hiking boots, old jeans, and warm sweater crocheted by Evangelina last winter, before she started consorting with demons. It wasn’t often that the twins’ clothing choices were so dissimilar.

She frowned, not liking the change in her sister but powerless to affect it. The fear reaction to the loss of Evangelina had been stimulating Cia’s aggressive tendencies for months, and this close to the full moon, Liz was going to be able only to mitigate her twin’s reaction, not stop it. Getting through the loss of their sister would take time, and though it might be helped along by Liz getting well and strong again, that wasn’t going to happen overnight.

Liz followed in Cia’s wake, walking more slowly, taking in the house the way she had seen their friend—if their sister’s killer could be called that—Jane Yellowrock do. None of the perfectly placed rocks beside the drive had been moved out of position. No leaves had been allowed to catch in the nooks and crannies of roots and winter plants. The gravel beside the Lexus looked undisturbed, no signs of struggle anywhere.

The small front porch where Layla waited was freshly painted and the door was locked. Liz made sure to search for signs of problems, like, say, a size twelve boot print and a busted door, or overturned flowerpots. There was nothing. “Wait,” Liz said. She walked around the porch, tilting back the clay pots until she found the extra key. Brass, shiny, looking new, it sat on the painted boards, an invitation of sorts. It had taken her less than fifteen seconds to find it. If anyone had wanted inside, they could have unlocked the door and walked in with no trouble. Layla looked horrified, her eyes wide.