To Dance with the Devil (The Blood Singer Novels) Read Free Page A

several years now, and for a while I’d cleaned up once or twice a year by throwing anything I wasn’t immediately using into a carton. Add that to Vicki’s boxes, and Gran’s, and the ones from my office—before and after the bombing—and there were plenty of boxes to go through. I didn’t expect we’d crack more than a few today.
    The box I grabbed wasn’t a packing carton. It was smaller and flatter and clearly marked with the logo and image of the VCR it had once held. It was also labeled, in my gran’s neat block handwriting, FAMILY PHOTOS .
    “ Aha! ” I settled back into my seat and opened it. Lifting the lid revealed a messy stack of photographs, some having aged badly, the colors faded; others stuck to the thick backing paper used for shots taken by my gran’s old instant camera.
    “Ooh, I love pictures. Let me see.” Emma all but leapt out of her seat. Moving aside a stack of boxes, she plopped down on the couch beside me.
    Smiling, I started passing photos to her, explaining each one as I did. “This is my grandpa Peahi on his boat. He called it The Dreamcatcher. He always said he named it that because it’s how he caught my grandma’s attention, and it was where he proposed to her. He was out at sea on it, all alone, when he had the heart attack that killed him. Gran couldn’t bear to look at the boat after that, so she sold it.”
    “So, is he the ancestor with the siren blood?”
    “None other. I think it’s why he loved the water so much.” I set the picture aside. I’d see if my great-aunt Lopaka wanted a copy. She’d told me before that she and Grandpa were close before he left the siren islands.
    The next shot was of Ivy, blowing out the candles on her fourth birthday cake. It was one of those cakes that had a doll in the middle so that the cake looked like the doll’s poufy dress. It had been iced so that it looked quite a lot like Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind —a dark-haired woman in a big hoop-skirt. Ivy had been so delighted. She’d played with that doll all day, every day after that, swiping clothes from my Barbie to dress her. Looking deeper in the box, I saw that same battered doll, dressed in a faded orange swimsuit and buried in photos. I shuffled through more pictures and spotted several of me in my ballet clothes. There were even a couple of shots of me on stage at one of my performances.
    Every photo held a memory, most of them good. There were few images of my father. My mother had thrown most of them out in the great purge after he left. I had grabbed a few and hidden them under my mattress, unable to bear losing that last bit of the past. I still had them; they were in the drawer of my nightstand. I never looked at them anymore, but they were still there.
    Em and I flipped through the box of memories, chatting happily. My psychiatrist had tasked me with finding pictures of myself and my baby sister from shortly before Ivy died. I picked out a few, but discovering that box put an end to the cleaning for the day. Emma and I just sat, drinking and talking, until it was time for her to leave and meet Matty for dinner.
    I was sorry to see her go.
    I returned most of the photos to the box and closed it reluctantly, leaving only a pair of photos out on the coffee table to take to my appointment tomorrow.
    I wasn’t hungry, but I fixed myself some food anyway. I have more control over my vampire nature than I used to, in part because I’ve learned not to go too long between meals. Tonight’s menu was from the assortment of baby food I had stocked up on: squash, plus pureed chicken and noodles, warmed in the microwave, with a bit of organic applesauce for dessert. Not exactly haute cuisine, but so much better than the full liquid diet I’d started out on after the bite that I wasn’t about to complain.
    I ate at the kitchen counter, then rinsed the dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher. It was nearly full, so I went ahead and started the cycle. On