Authors: Erin McCarthy
The Taking (13 page)
He shouldn’t have come tonight. He was in a foul mood, feeling a familiar swell of jealousy at the casual wealth of those in the ballroom as he watched through the windows. So entitled, every last one of them, and yet most had never done a damn thing to earn their money. Their easy lifestyle was an accident of birth, as was his reverse fortune.
Yet they took great delight in looking down on him and his mother.
His mother. The glow of the gas lamps and taper candles turned the room into a tallow cloud of faces and figures through the glass, and it was impossible to pick her out of the crush. It made him sick to think what her purpose was there tonight.
It wasn’t fair. His father’s death. His father’s wife using the courts to have his mother stripped of the house his father had given her, free and clear. Not fair none of it.
And it was agonizing to think that no employment available to Felix could ever earn enough money to prevent his mother from being forced to take this present course of action. She was nearly forty-five years old, her beauty still intact in his eyes, but a softer, more mature beauty, and she was being forced to compete with ripe twenty year olds for the prize of a wealthy benefactor.
His mother had been the mistress of his father for twenty-seven years. Felix had always known the arrangement. It had been neither a dirty little secret nor something his mother had been particularly proud of, but they had always been an affectionate pair, and Felix had felt secure in their amiability with one another. It had never seemed cheap or harsh or mercenary, and he had grown to manhood in the knowledge that if laws and money and society were not as they were, his parents would have married and been faithful to one another.
Had he longed for acceptance and a different sort of security for himself and his mother? Of course. But he had known enough to understand he was fortunate for his station in life.
But that was before his father’s death. Now his sweet and intelligent mother was reduced to flirting and casting about for a man to sexually service in order to feed herself, and it was devastating. A reality he wasn’t prepared for.
The long-simmering and mostly ignored resentments he had felt growing up were boiling up and over to the forefront. Yet he had no idea what to do to stop this madness, to find his way in a world that would no longer accept him without his wealthy white father’s wheel greasing, or how to retreat to a laborer’s life, where he was equally unwanted, both for the lightness of his skin and the quality of his education.
Felix’s stomach churned, from fear and disgust as well as deep and painful hunger. He hadn’t eaten in three days, and while his mother was imposing on a friend for shelter, Felix had assured her he could manage, so as to not be a burden to her. In reality, he had slept in the alley for the past seven nights. Six months ago various friends had opened their doors, but now he had surpassed their generosity.
“You might be able to see better if you entered the ballroom,” an amused voice said from behind him.
Turning quickly, Felix’s head spun. The lack of food and sleep combined with the sharp movement blurred his vision for a split second in the sudden darkness after the lights of the ballroom. Slapping his hand against the bricks of the house behind him to reestablish equilibrium, he blinked and swallowed the bile that had risen from his empty stomach. There was a man in front of him, dressed all in black, the cut of his coat and trousers elegant, his hat at a jaunty angle. He looked to be in his late twenties, and when he pulled back his coat to reach for his tobacco, Felix saw a gold pocket watch that gave off a gleam even from five feet away. The walking stick he carried swung back and forth casually, its owner seemingly unconcerned with the way it scraped the cobblestones.
A rich man, no doubt.
Felix fought the urge to tug at his own coat sleeve again and started to move past him, intending to leave without speaking. He had no desire to either be heckled or arrested for vagrancy.
“Do you know the story of Aladdin’s lamp?” the man said as Felix skirted him.
“Excuse me?” Felix paused, the voice quiet yet commanding in the courtyard, compelling him to respond.
“I’m sure you do. Aladdin is granted three wishes from the genie of the lamp. If you were to request three wishes, what would they be?”
He scoffed, head swimming again. God, he needed to sit down. Just sink to the ground and rest for a few hours, then he could think what to do. There were no answers to be found staring into the play palace of the rich, or talking to a stranger dressed in black. “I have no wishes.”
“Oh, no? Perhaps a house of her own again for your mother ... a new wardrobe for yourself... never having to wonder where your next meal will come from?”
Anger, humiliation surged in Felix. “How the hell do you know about my mother?”
He shrugged. “I’ve followed you. You seem like the kind of man I’m looking for in my line of work.”
Feeling weaker by the second, Felix shook his head, straining to hold his shoulders up, to hang on to the last vestiges of pride he felt. “I understand how that bargain works. I do your thieving or dealing for you, take a small cut, than you toss me to the authorities to placate them for your illegal doings. Leaving me in prison, my mother on the streets, and you rich and happy. No thank you.”
Felix turned to leave, irritated that he had allowed himself even one second of hope. Organized crime was not a temptation.
“You misunderstand.” The man stepped forward, his hand outstretched as he stepped into the square of light cast from the window. “Allow me to introduce myself. I have different names, but all you need to know is that I am the man who can give you your three wishes and then some.”
Before Felix could reject the handshake, the man’s flesh gripped his and a pulsing warmth rippled through his fingertips and palm, racing up his arm. “What ...”
Felix tried to pull back, break the contact, but the grip was ironclad, and when he tugged harder, panicking, he looked into the man’s amber eyes, their glow bright and vibrant like a cat’s, and his own vision blurred again.
When it cleared, he was standing in a tidy house, filled with tasteful and expensive furnishings, his mother smiling up at him from her position on a velvet sofa. Her fingers played with a diamond pendant dangling from her neck, her gown a rich gold that complemented her coloring.
Only his mother wasn’t smiling at him, but a different him. Felix watched himself stroll into the parlor, dressed in dapper evening clothes, affixing his hat to his head.
“Enjoy your evening,
cher,
” she told him, the other him, her smile pleasant and content.
cher,
” she told him, the other him, her smile pleasant and content.
“I will, thank you, and you should do the same.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, his well-shined shoes squeaking on the hardwood floors. “I’m off to dinner at my club. I have a taste for étouffée this evening.” He rubbed his stomach in anticipation. “And a glass of wine or two.”
Felix could feel his own anticipation for the meal, feel the pleasure of the innocuous domestic scene, smell his mother’s floral perfume, and see the crisp newness of his gloves. He even turned and saw the exterior street through the floor-to- ceiling windows. The houses across the street were well maintained and attractive, and a couple strolled by, an idyllic neighborhood scene.
“Are you taking the carriage?” his mother asked his other self.
“I’m of a mind to walk. Have a wonderful evening.”
His mother nodded, and then she and he were gone, the parlor receding, the room disappearing like a carpet being rolled up and hauled off. There was a brief moment ofdarkness, where Felix hovered in nothing, then the sound came first, of ladies laughing, their sweet high-pitched voices unnatural in the emptiness. The visuals returned, rushing back at him in a blur of color, like butterflies’ wings, and he was in a different house, surrounded by proper ladies.
They were attentive and twittering, their chairs arranged in a circle in front of him, their expressions rapt as they batted eyelashes and flicked fans in the summer heat.
“That is fascinating, Mr. Leblanc,” one brunette said. The girl next to her whacked her arm with her fan, and the original speaker made a moue of distaste at her friend. “What? It is.”
The friend who had smacked the brunette said, “Mr. Leblanc, I fear that your intelligence so greatly exceeds my own that I am having trouble following your lesson. Perhaps you might be so kind as to repeat your thoughts again for me at the end of the session?”
Outrage played over the brunette’s face and she sat up straighter. “I think I could benefit from additional instruction as well, Mr. Leblanc. Would you be so kind?”
They were flirting with him, that was clear, and he felt his own smug satisfaction in the scene. Then Felix saw the cashbox behind him on the piano bench, the lid slightly askew. It was stuffed with bills, hundreds of dollars, and he knew that it was his money.
He was rich and he had everything he had ever wanted. Everything he had ever wanted...
The scene crackled in front of him, the sound that of fabric tearing, and then it was gone and he was back in the grip of the man with many names, the glow of his amber eyes dimming. He dropped Felix’s hand, and the loss of that vise-like grip had him stumbling backward in the courtyard, his skin throbbing where they had touched, not from pressure, but as if it had been warmed from the inside out. Felix glanced down, afraid his hand had been seared, but it looked perfectly normal. It just felt as if it had been shoved into the fire.
“Who are you?” he whispered to the man.
“The genie of your lamp,” he said with a smile. “I have shown you what I can give you.”
Felix shook his head. “I don’t understand... how...”
“Your mother raised you with voodoo secretly, didn’t she?”
He didn’t answer, the warnings of his mother too engrained in his mind. They were never to tell his father.
Of course, that no longer mattered.
“Yes.”
“Then you understand the gods and goddesses and that if you please them, they will help you achieve your desires. That is me.” The man turned his hand over so his palm was up, and on it rested a wedge of bread. “For you.”
Fear and fascination mingled together, and Felix’s heart raced. He should walk away, turn his back on whoever and whatever this man was. Because he knew that you never got everything you wanted without paying a price, and this man, this creature, would exact a high price, he was sure.
But his mouth watered at the thought of eating the warm, crusty bread, and he could smell its yeasty freshness. His stomach growled, an aching pit of desperation, and his hands trembled from exhaustion and hunger. The warnings his brain were whispering were drowned out by the urgent cries of his stomach, and getting lost in the vapid fog malnourishment had created in his thoughts.
He reached out, stretching his arm, hand trembling, saliva filling his mouth, and he accepted what was being offered him, with no real understanding of what that even was.
“Do you regret any temptations you’ve resisted?” Regan asked him, crossing her legs, her fingers flitting over the top of her coffee cup.
He’d made her nervous.
Felix smiled at the irony. “No, for me it’s the opposite. I wish I had learned fortitude earlier in life. There are a number of things I should have resisted.”
His greed had driven him to accept the demon’s bargain, his greed had led him to his dalliance with Camille. And he had paid for both. Harshly.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever really been tempted to do anything,” she said in a thoughtful tone. “I’ve never been a risk taker. I guess marriage was a temptation, but like you, I wish I had resisted that urge.” She shrugged like it no longer mattered. “Have you ever been married?”
“No. Never even tempted.”
Regan laughed.
Felix smiled at the sound. She had an innocent, joyous laugh. Regan was an interesting woman to be around. Despite what she was doing, starting a new life and fighting Alcroft tooth and nail to get out of her marriage, there was nothing cynical or bitter about her. Anxious, yes, but not hardened. He found that intriguing, refreshing.
Every minute that he sat there in clear view in a public place increased his risk of being caught with her, of facing retribution, but he didn’t want to leave. There was a quiet peacefulness about just sitting there with her, and he enjoyed her company. But he didn’t want this to turn into yet another temptation he wished he had resisted. Punishment would be swift and harsh and painful.
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