Chapter Thirty-Five – Ryder

 

I trailed after Esther, floating through the wake she left in the crowd, which seemed to part at her very presence.

Half-naked, sweaty men and women in their twenties turned to stare at us as we passed by them, stepping back to make room for us. None of them cats, all just flesh and blood people. The air continued to thrum with energy like an electrical line, humming along as we made our way to the stage. Marguerite sang on the bandstand, her voice rising and falling as she sang of ancient, long-gone times. Of ghosts being put to rest, of promises being kept, of dark family curses, and of unrequited love never forgotten.

It was beautiful. Haunting. Otherworldly in ways I could never have imagined, her words spoke to me, like they were whispered directly into my heart.

But she was the evil witch, wasn’t she? The wicked one?

Up ahead, Esther turned back and gave me a look with those penetrating hazel orbs of hers. “Lagging behind?” she seemed to asked with one raised eyebrow.

Nodding, I lengthened my strides and caught up with her like a dog brought to heel. She was right; I was lagging. Needed to step up, if I was going to keep up.

“Try not to listen to her music, Ryder,” she said, her voice cutting through the noise of the crowd, and of Maneki Neko’s sonorous sounds. Her words seemed to have a physical texture to them, something I could touch and caress, that I could wrap myself up in. “It will only mix you up on who you need to really listen to.”

I realized then that I hadn’t heard her words with my ears. Instead, it was like they’d been beamed directly into my brain. Or my soul. As if I were nothing but a giant radio antenna, and she was broadcasting the only station I could receive.

“My sister caught me nearly three decades ago, just after I’d come across the spell to bring back Mother,” Esther said as we continued to cross the festival grounds, the giant stage with all its scaffolding rising from the field in front of us like the steel skeleton of some derelict skyscraper. Her soft soul-speak seemed to exclude the strange music of her sister, pushing the notes and melodies out to the peripherals of my existence. “She and her coven tried to strike me down, and I was forced on the run. For nearly a decade, I ran, Ryder, hunted by my own sister. All of my power gone, my laboratory in Philadelphia destroyed, my connections throughout the world severed. I was a pariah. On more than one occasion, I wished she would have just killed me outright that day, or that I’d had the courage to take my own life.”

I nodded along with her as her words danced in my mind, with the cooling, but also somehow warming, feeling they seemed to give me.

“But two decades in the home of the people who murdered your mother? Two long decades to contemplate how to destroy them, and when. Two decades to collect hair samples from them, to collect fingernail clippings, beard stubble. Two decades to formulate the curse I’d have to lay down on them.”

I smiled a little at her patience. At how hard she clearly must have worked to try and pull this all off without a hitch. It was impressive, really, when you got down to it.

“And that ticket of yours?” Esther asked. “That ticket was all my doing. Look at it now.”

Still striding along behind her, each bootfall bringing me closer and closer to my destination on that stage, I reached into my back pocket and withdrew the ticket I’d bought off Chad earlier that morning. I brought it up in front of my eyes, still walking, and squinted hard at it.

It looked perfect.

“Look again.” I could practically feel the joy at her little ruse.

It seemed to vibrate for a moment, as if it was out of sync with time and the space around it, and all the creases and cracks on the surface began to show through. The spots where the ink had worn off, and the cardstock was coming through. The dog-eared edges.

“Sometimes,” Esther said, imitating a man with an Austrian or German accent, “a ticket is just a ticket.”

I sniffed. It was nothing special.

She stopped for a moment, stretching a beckoning hand to me. “If you will? I’ll need that for later. Do you know how hard it was to get tickets for this event? Even my own sister didn’t put me on the guest list.”

I looked down at the ticket for a second, before passing it over to her.

She took it with a little smile, stuffing it away in her back pocket, before we both continued off into the crowd. “You know, my sister always loved cats,” Esther mused. “Adored them, really. I thought it was fitting to force a transition for the people I’d originally planned on using against her. But, oh, did things change when I first laid eyes on you. What better way to kill my own sister than with a panther shifter? How fitting would that be? Even giving up that nitwit Chad, or whatever his name is, was worthwhile when I compared it to you.”

My hand came up, settling on my sidearm. Distantly, in that same spot of my mind that had been wondering why I was going along with this, a thought appeared.

I could just draw this pistol. I could put a silver bullet in the back of Esther’s head and be done with all this. I could disappear, go back to St. Louis and the rest of Full Moon Security, and everything would be over and done with.

Draw. Click off safety. Pull trigger.

And no one else would need to get hurt.

Just me and my broken heart, slinking off to lick my wounds. Maybe climb a tree somewhere, and just pray that the other shifters would leave me alone till the pain faded away.

But that was ludicrous! How could I hurt a woman as beautiful as Esther? A woman who’d taken the time to let me get to know her? A good woman, who cared about me?

On cue, she looked back over her shoulder at me, brushing a stray raven-haired lock from her eyes. “Exactly,” she whispered into my head. “Now, come along, Ryder. Come along. It’s time to put that little pistol of yours to good use.”

A grin grew on my face, and I nodded eagerly. That’s what I was here for, after all.

To kill witches. And to save the day.

And if it was good for Esther, it was good for me.