Is she hovering, Jane wonders, or is she passed out drunk somewhere?
Caitlin Chaisson spent most of the night glaring at Jane like she was some party crasher, and all night long Jane fought the urge to get right up in the girl’s face and let her know that while he was singing “Happy Birthday” with the rest of them, Caitlin’s husband was winking at Jane across the room and dragging his top teeth across his bottom lip like he could taste her on it.
Happy Birthday, princess!
Still, she hadn’t planned to move quite this fast, because she hadn’t been prepared for how epically drunk her target was going to be. Just the thought of having to stop now sends a spike of panic through Jane. Her first choice would have been slow seduction, not a frenzied quickie in the upstairs bathroom. But in her experience nothing killed a long game faster than a false start, or a suddenly remorseful husband buttoning up his pants and racing for the confessional booth. And tonight had taken weeks of subtle but careful preparation, weeks of listening studiously as her best friend, Margot, gossiped about the loveless marriage between her two wealthiest clients, one a former hero cop her aunt Judy would have described as crap your pants handsome, the other a spoiled-rotten trust-fund baby who went through life looking like she’d just smelled something terrible and it was you.
It wasn’t an easy sell, getting Margot to take her on as a crew supervisor for bigger events, events like Skanky Chaisson’s birthday party. The two women met when Jane worked the bar for one of Margot’s first events after she started Simply Splendid eight years ago. Since then, Jane had pitched in at all levels of the business, except for supervisor. Still, Jane wasn’t interested in passing trays; she was pretty damn sure the unflattering black-and-white uniform would make it that much harder to catch Troy Mangier’s eye. Instead she’d pitched Margot hard on the position that would allow her to wear a sparkly, low-cut cocktail dress, enabling her to look as classy and elegant as most of the other invited guests.
But now Jane is missing in action during teardown, her target is on the edge of bailing, and there’s a possibly suspicious wife somewhere nearby.
Good Christ, if Margot gets wind of even half of this, Jane will be in a world of trouble far bigger than an angry wife pounding on the door with the side of one fist.
Troy Mangier pulls up his trousers by his belt buckle and takes a step back, forcing Jane to unwrap her legs from around his waist. The way she sees it, she’s only got two options: try for the remorseful, romance-novel routine of I’m so sorry I forced myself on you—even though she hadn’t, technically—but my feelings for you are just soooooo strong, or drop to her knees and take him in her mouth right there.
But before she can commit to either, Troy Mangier takes her by the hand and pulls her off the sink. Her feet land gracelessly on top of her high heels instead of sliding into them cleanly, and Troy grabs her by the waist to make sure she doesn’t lose her balance as the shoes crumple under her feet like foliage.
Their lips meet in a sloppy kiss that fills her mouth with scotch breath, and Troy Mangier says, “Come with me.”
4
The hallucination breaks, giving way to a reality inside the gazebo that is more dreamlike and impossible than any of the visions that just strobed across her mind’s eye.
At the moment when Caitlin is sure her knees are going to strike the gazebo’s floor, a slick tendril wraps around her throat and she cries out, sure she’s about to be choked. But it does nothing of the kind. Rather, with a gentleness that seems almost human, it rights her until she is standing on both feet once again, before it slips off her shoulder, slides briefly down her left breast, and hovers in the air in front of her, level with her chest. In the pulses of light that line the stalks of each vine, she sees a clover-like assembly of leaves unfurling at its tip, opening to her just as the blossoms have. Only nothing glows within these leaves. They contain darkness deeper than the vague, shadowy definitions inside the gazebo.
But there is no misinterpreting the gesture; it’s as delicate and unnervingly polite as the sudden catch that kept her from falling knees-first to the floor.
She can vividly recall each vision that came from the scent of the blossoms, the jostled, terrifying flashbacks and the absolute certainty she was inside the body of some long-dead slave, the sense of imminent attack—they are coming!—but then, at the very end, her own husband, followed by the miraculous sense of the rage draining from her.
Draining, the word occurs to her easily, instinctively, and she remembers the eagerness with which the first tendrils that poked up through the floor pursued her fresh drops of blood. And that’s when she realizes what the unfurled leaves and the helpful vine hovering in the air before her look like—an extended hand.
A soft pop comes from the direction of the main house, the sound of someone trying—too late—to keep a screen door from slamming behind them. Peering between the vines, Caitlin sees them: Troy and the little slut.
Two silhouettes moving down the back of the house, crouching down to avoid the kitchen windows before they hurry through the maze of fountains and flower planters, bound for the oak-shadowed corridor on the opposite side of the property that houses the gardening shed. They are oblivious to her, where she stands shrouded by magic and shadow.
The girl almost trips, which causes her to throw her hand to her mouth to stifle her startled cry, and Troy curves an arm around her shoulders, and together, they stumble toward the shed.
As she watches her husband and his little slut join the darkness, Caitlin craves that cleansing feeling that marked the very end of the violent vision quest the blossoms just gave her—that sense that the rage she feels toward Troy has been expelled from her like a breath she’s held in for half a minute too long. Even if it means being rocketed back inside the body of that terrified slave. Even if it means unleashing some greater power from the inexplicable monster before her.
Caitlin extends her bleeding wrist toward the hovering vine. A thirsty pulse moves through the blossoms as it wraps firmly around her open wound. No visions come to her, but the sensation that accompanies the vine’s patient suckling is like a dozen sets of hands gently dragging their fingernails across her skin from her scalp to her toes. Her cry has more abandon in it than any sound she heard Troy’s little whore make in the guest bathroom.
As the vine slides down her wrist, then slips gently free of her palm and fingers, she sees that she has been healed; all that remains of her determined gash is a pale, rosy scar. Before she has time to process the implication of this, the thick tendrils on all sides of her descend cleanly through the spaces between the floorboards.
Barely a minute later, the earth shifts violently underneath one of the fountains in the center of the garden. The impact from below jostles the fountain’s copper basin to such an angle that the water begins pouring out of it in a thin and steady stream. A few seconds later, a tiny stone cherub is knocked from its perch, and several bricks along the side of a flower planter have been knocked free. Caitlin realizes they are but pieces of a contrail from some healing force that is now moving through the soil in pursuit of her husband’s sin.
5
Jane is amazed by the power of desire.
She is terrified of dark places, especially this far out in the country, and on any other night this pitch-black gardening shed would be an un-enterable lair of coiled snakes and patient psychopaths. But tonight, with Troy Mangier palming her and suckling her and taking her in a lust-stuttered waltz across the dirt floor, the darkness liberates.