Indulgence. For the mind, the body, the spirit. She intended to give her customers a bit of all three.
On this evening, she drove from the Valley where she made her home, and would make her business, into the mountains. Where she would face her fate. Simon brooded a little, staring out the window. He wasn't happy, she knew, that she'd made him wear his suit.
But when you were invited to dinner at a place like Warrior's Peak, you dressed for the occasion.
Absently, she tugged at the skirt of her dress. She'd gotten it at the outlet for a good price, and hoped the deep purple jersey was appropriate.
Probably should've gotten something black, she mused, to be more dignified and sober. But she so enjoyed color, and for this event she needed the punch of it for confidence. Tonight was one of the most momentous nights of her life, so she might as well go outfitted in something that made her feel good.
She pressed her lips together. Now that her thoughts had circled around to what she'd tried to avoid thinking about, she had to deal with it.
Just how, she wondered, was she going to explain to a nine-year-old boy what she'd been doing—and more, what she was about to do?
"I guess we'd better talk about why we're going up here to dinner tonight," she began.
"I bet nobody else is wearing a suit," he muttered.
"I bet you're wrong."
He turned his head, slanted her a look. "Dollar."
"Dollar," she agreed.
He looked so much like her, she thought. Sometimes it just struck her with a kind of fierce and possessive joy. Wasn't it funny that there was nothing of James stamped on that face? Those were her eyes, that was her mouth, her nose, her chin, her hair, all tipped just the slightest bit to make them Simon.
"Anyway." She cleared her throat. "You know how I got that invitation to go up there, a couple months ago? And that's where I met Malory and Dana."
"Sure, I remember, because the next day you bought me PlayStation 2, and it wasn't even my birthday."
"Unbirthday presents are the best." She'd been able to buy Simon his heart's desire with part of the twenty-five thousand dollars paid to her for agreeing to… the fantastic.
"You know Malory and Dana, and you know Flynn and Jordan and Bradley."
"Yeah, we hang with them a lot now. They're cool. For old people," he added, with a smirk he knew would make her laugh.
But she didn't laugh.
"Something wrong with them?" he asked quickly.
"No. No. Absolutely nothing's wrong." She chewed her bottom lip as she tried to find the right words. "Um, sometimes people are sort of connected, without even knowing it. I mean, Dana and Flynn are brother and sister—well, stepbrother and stepsister, then Dana gets to be friends with Malory, and Malory meets Flynn, and before you know it, Malory and Flynn fall in love."
"Is this going to be a sloppy love story? Because I might get sick."
"Be sure to lean out the window if you do. So, Flynn's oldest friends are Jordan and Bradley, and when they were younger, Jordan and Dana used to… date." It was the safest word a mother could think of. "Then Jordan and Bradley moved out of the Valley. Then they came back, partly because of this connection I'm getting to. And Jordan and Dana got back together and—"
"Now they're going to get married, and so's Flynn and Malory. It's like an epidemic." He was turned to her now, and his face mirrored preadolescent pain. "If we go to those weddings like we did Aunt Joleen's, you're probably going to make me wear a suit, aren't you?"
"Yes, it's one of my quiet pleasures, this torment of you. What I'm trying to show you is that each of us turned out to be connected, one way or another—to the others. And to something else. I haven't told you much about the people who live at Warrior's Peak."
"They're the magic people."
Zoe's hand jerked on the wheel. Slowing, she pulled off to the shoulder of the winding road. "What do you mean by 'magic people'?"
"Jeez, Mom, I hear you guys talk when you have those meetings and junk. So are they like witches or what? I don't get it."
"No. Yes. I don't know exactly." How did she explain ancient gods to a child? "Do you believe in magic, Simon? I don't mean the card trick kind, but the kind of thing you read about in stories, like Harry Potter or The Hobbit" "If it wasn't real sometimes, how come there are so many books and movies and junk about it?"
"Good point," she said after a moment. "Rowena and Pitte, the people who live at the Peak, the people we're going to see tonight, they're magic. They come from a different place, and they're here because they need our help."
"For what?"
She had his attention and interest now, she knew. The interest that took him into the stories she'd mentioned, X-Men comics, and the role-playing video games he loved.
"I'm going to tell you. It's going to sound like a story, but it's not. But I have to start driving again while I tell you, or we'll be late."
"Okay."
She took a long, quiet breath as she pulled back onto the road. "A long time ago—a really, really long time ago, in a place behind what they call the Curtain of Dreams, or the Curtain of Power, there was this young god—"
"Like Apollo?"
"Sort of. But not Greek. He was Celtic. He was the son of the king, and when he was of age, he visited our world and he met a girl and fell in love."
Simon's mouth twisted. "How come that always happens?"
"Can we get into that area of things later? We're a little pressed for time. So, they fell in love, and even though it wasn't really allowed then, his parents let him bring the girl home with him so they could be married. This was okay with some of the gods, but it wasn't okay with some of the others. There were battles and—"
"Cool."
"The world split into two kingdoms, I guess you could say. One with the young god becoming ruler with his human wife, and the other ruled by, well, a wicked sorcerer."
"Way cool."
"The young king had three daughters. They call them demigoddesses because they're part human. Each of the daughters had a special gift. One was music, or art, another was writing, or knowledge, and the third was courage, I guess. Valor."
It made her mouth a little dry to think of it, but she swallowed and went on. "She was a kind of warrior. They were very close to each other, the way sisters should be, and their parents loved them. To keep them safe while there was this trouble going on, they had them guarded and taught by a warrior and a teacher. Then—try not to groan—the warrior and the teacher fell in love."
He let his head fall back and stared upward. "I just knew it."
"Not being sarcastic nine-year-old boys, the daughters were happy for them, and covered for them when they slipped off a little way to be alone. So these girls weren't guarded as well as maybe they should have been. The wicked sorcerer took advantage of that, and he snuck close and cast a spell. The spell stole the souls of the daughters and locked them in a glass box with three locks and three keys."
"Man, that sucks for them."
"It sure does. The souls are trapped there, in the box, and can't get out until the keys are turned in the lock—one by one—and only by the hand of a mortal. A human."
Because her fingers tingled, she rubbed them on the skirt of her dress. "See, because they were half human, this sorcerer made it so only someone from our world could save them. Because he didn't think it could be done. The teacher was given the keys—but she can't work them—and she and the warrior were cast out, and into this world. In every generation they have to ask three humans, the three humans who are the only ones who can unlock the box, to find the keys. They have to be hidden and found as part of the quest, part of the spell. And each one of the chosen has to go in turn, and has just four weeks to find the key and put it in the lock."