Page 6 of Hopelessly Teavoted
He looked at her, determination glinting in his eyes.
“Listen, Veronika.”
“It’s Victoria.”
“Right. Do two things for me.”
She sighed, rubbing the cuff links, now scalding as the flame in her fist licked higher. They didn’t have much time.
“Sure,” she agreed. Who was she to deny a dead man his last request?
“Have your father tell Candie I would have left. She was worth it.”
Vickie bit down on the impulse to tell him that if he was going to leave, he would have.
“And second. They really should know, all things considered. It’s on them. There’s shady stuff going on at Brethren of One Love.”
“The megachurch?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure what, but I kept seeing one of the college kids from my neighborhood headed in there. He’s a fine upstanding fellow. Straight As, captain of his lacrosse team. His mom is—well, she’s a close friend.” The ghost winked, and Vickie shuddered. “She was worried about him. I told her it was probably over a girl, but the night I died, I saw him go in there again. After hours. I almost told his mom about it, but he’s just about a grown person. Still, no reason for him to be around that insufferable group at Brethren.”
Her eyebrows furrowed, Vickie puzzled at that. There could be a thousand reasons for a student to check out a different church. A girl. A boy. Hell, maybe a religious conversion. Kyle was trying to buy time in his last moments. She shook off the nagging feeling at the back of her mind that this was consequential.
“It felt important,” said Kyle. He looked desperate enough to lie. “The school might be involved. I mean, just because I told some kid’s smoking-hot mom I love her in the heat of a moment doesn’t mean he wasmykid. But still I saw—”
But Kyle George’s time had run out, and Vickie was tired of listening to his tales of philandering. She stepped back, dropping the crumbling cuff links. The ash of them flamed orange, red, and finally gold, and within seconds was gone, along with the last remains of Kyle George’s immortal soul, on this plane, anyway.
“What was that about a church?” Her father adjusted his tie, not looking as surprised as one might expect for a man who had just heard a one-sided conversation that made Vickie look like a person in need of medical assistance.
Which made sense, since her parents, upon learning there was magic in the world, had arranged a deal with a devil for their only daughter to see dead people. Obviously, they wouldn’t stoop so low as to bargain for death powers for themselves.
She picked at her bright yellow nail polish.
“He said there’s something shady going on at the megachurch.”
“Well, that’s certainly always the case with religious organizations wringing money from the poor and handing out platitudes about how they’ll go to Heaven if they simply vote to remove rights from women and give those rights to demagogues.”
“Don’t you and Dad also wring money from people?”
“My darling, we are stockbrokers; we at least don’t try to hide what we are doing by masquerading it as the work of the Lord. Ours is an honest sort of robbery.” Amelie tilted her head, and bleached blond hair shifted like a silken waterfall. Even with the blowout, Vickie’s didn’t look that flawless, and she was sure her mother had noticed.
“We never should have brought that megachurch to town,” Maximillian muttered.
“You did what?” Vickie blanched.
Her father shrugged. “We thought it would be good for business. It’s one of those clever multilevel marketing–modeled organizations. It’s good business. Your mother had this idea that we could join and use it for weekly Sunday networking.”
Amelie shrugged. “It turns out they were too despicable for us to tolerate, and stingy to boot.” She examined her perfect French manicure.
Unbelievable. Her parents were unbelievable.
“So you brought an actively recruiting church to town to try to turn a profit, and then abandoned it to wreak havoc on Hallowcross?”
“Victoria, we aren’t responsible for other people’s decisions.” Her mother sighed, and shook her head, as though Vickie were the unreasonable one.
“What else did Kyle say?” Her father’s eyes bored into her, commanding.
“Ah, Dad, Kyle also wanted you to tell Candie he was going to leave his wife.”
