Gabrielle Read online

  GABRIELLE

  Book 1 in the Ancient Legacy series

  Smashwords Edition

  © 2011 Lucy Kevin

  [email protected]

  She’s caught between a good boy, a bad boy…and an ancient legacy that comes with its very own curse

  Bonus material: This ebook contains 5 songs written by Gabrielle. Listen to the songs at:

  http://lucykevin.blogspot.com

  http://www.youtube.com/user/GabrielleLucyKevin

  http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/gabrielle-ep/id427761572

  PROLOGUE

  You probably don’t think they exist anymore. At least, not in America. But they do.

  My grandmother was one. So was her mother.

  And when I turn 18, evidently it’s my destiny to become one, too.

  But last fall I hadn’t heard about the curse, I hadn’t met Dylan or Bradley…and I had no idea that I was about to make the most difficult choice of my life.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was the last one at my high school to see him.

  All afternoon I’d been sitting at a piano in a tiny practice room in my school’s basement, working on a song. Earlier, as I’d walked down the hall, I’d heard a plethora of sounds coming from the other practice rooms: the vibrant alto of a cello, a soprano trilling carefully up a scale, hard-driving percussion.

  Ninety-nine other students were enrolled at the City School for the Arts. We had to do math and history like everyone else, but the school’s core focus was on creating. As a child, I’d learned to knit and cook and sing long before I knew how to multiply. Over the years, I’d been taught everything from painting to ballet to clothing construction to music, but songwriting was where my heart had always been.

  Senior year had begun six weeks earlier and I needed to get working on the five songs that were going to be my application for the Berklee School of Music. With my current song as it stood, a few random—and by random, I mean bad—piano riffs and no lyrics whatsoever, I figured I had a great future going for me in data entry.

  Usually, I loved those hours in the tiny composition rooms, hunkered down over a dusty piano, sweating out the notes, chasing that beautifully breathless feeling that would grip my lungs, squeeze them tight, and send my heart racing when my fingers found a great melody or I stumbled upon a great lyric. When I first started writing songs, and it was all so fresh—before I really had a clue about good or bad—there had been times when I could practically see the perfect combination of notes and beats and words line up in front of me, squeaking into my subconscious through the path of least resistance.

  Realizing how hunched and tight my neck and shoulders were, I closed my eyes and worked to calm my breathing using the meditation techniques the school taught all of us. When I felt centered again, I put my fingers on the keyboard and tried to let the song ring through me.

  But the perfect notes and words seemed as elusive as they’d ever been.

  I’d tried to start a hundred different songs over the past few weeks, but each one was more insipid than the next and the phrase trying to drink from an empty well was starting to make way too much sense to me.

  The truth was, I’d made it to seventeen without ever crying into my pillow all night about a broken heart or sneaking off to throw up or cut myself like some girls in my class. In fact, the only real emotional pain that I had to mine—never knowing my father and losing my mother when I was a little girl—wasn’t anything anyone would want to hear a song about.

  Which was good, because I didn’t ever plan on going near it.

  The practice room walls felt like they were closing in on me. But I hated to give up.

  Maybe if I took a short break, something brilliant would come to me before I went home for dinner. Scooting off the piano bench, I locked the door, grabbed my iPod out of my bag, and stuck my earphones in.

  I had one secret release: a small cache of classic heavy metal songs. Choosing a Metallica song, I put it on repeat and started picking out the chords on the keyboard. I’d never played a song like this before—my previous range being classical to stage to pop—and I was surprised by how good it felt to play into this kind of musical darkness. I might not have experienced monsters under my bed or any of the harsh untruths the singer was screaming about, but it was a huge rush to get to feel it vicariously.

  The song took hold of me, playing me instead of me playing it, and I let loose on the piano, letting the chords crash through my fingers, up my arms. I screeched out the words in a way that would make my vocal coach weep, but I didn’t care. It felt so good to give in to anger and pain, even if they were someone else’s words and music, to let the raw fury in the song obliterate the empty spaces inside me. My eyes shut tight as the song played on repeat—again and again I rode the harsh wave.

  And then, suddenly, I realized I wasn’t alone anymore. A stranger was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, staring at me.

  My hands shaking, I yanked out my earphones just in time to hear him say, “Jesus. Who the hell are you?”

  No one had ever heard me completely let go like that before and I felt as if he’d seen me naked. Judging by his expression, I’d clearly shocked him. Horrified him with my caterwauling.

  I’d been trained in a myriad of professional techniques. But what he’d heard me do to the Metallica song was as far from trained as you could get.

  And then I remembered the door. I had locked it.

  “How did you get in?”

  His mouth—it was a beautiful mouth, I was surprised to notice, full yet masculine—moved slightly, as if he would smile. But he didn’t.

  “Locks are easy.”

  I swallowed, realizing how small the room was. Just big enough for the baby grand and the person playing it. Sitting on the piano bench, my back was against the wall and I was glad for the cool, hard surface to prop against as I worked to compose myself.

  Before I could, he asked, “How the hell did you do that?”

  Again, my gut went for embarrassment. For wishing I’d never downloaded the song to my iPod, that I hadn’t given in to the weakness of playing something different. Forbidden.

  A stammered reply was on the tip of my tongue when he continued, “Those chords with that song. You were playing minor, diminished.” He shook his head, looked down at my hands, still resting on the keys—gripping them, actually—and said, “It shouldn’t have worked. Nothing about it should have worked. But it did.”

  And then, through the crack of least resistance, it finally came. That breathless squeezing in my chest, the racing of my heart. But not from a song.

  From him.

  From what he’d said about me, about my playing.

  He shifted on the floor, and before I realized it, he was standing up and coming over to the piano. Without asking my permission, he slid onto the piano bench. I was too stunned to think to move over and make room for him. His thigh in his worn black jeans ended up pressing hard against my right leg.

  He was warm and it was the strangest thing, but I swore I could almost feel his heart beating through our legs.

  What was he doing, coming into my practice room and sitting so close to me like this? I didn’t know who he was, had never seen him before, hadn’t heard that there was a new student.

  I’d never given a second thought to my safety at school. Not when I’d known everyone here practically my whole life.

  But now, my heart fluttered with unease.

  At least, that’s why I told myself it was fluttering. That’s what I told myself the knot in my stomach was.

  Unease.

  Not interest.

  Or even something as foreign to me as desire.

  No one would ever describe me as bold or aggressive. But I wasn’t shy either. I
knew how to express myself, how to ask for what I wanted. Still, instead of asking this stranger to leave me alone, or at least to introduce himself like a normal person, I found myself waiting.

  To see what else he would do.

  To hear what else he would say.

  To see if he would look at me again like he had when I first saw him sitting on the floor…as if watching me had stolen the breath from his lungs.

  Waiting.

  Still waiting.

  I didn’t know if it was five seconds or five minutes until he raised his hands and arms to the keyboard, his long fingers moving to the exact spot where I’d left off in stunned surprise when I realized he was in the room.

  And then, there was no more waiting, because before I could take my next breath, he was playing. Playing hard and fast like I had been before, as if there had been no break between me and him, no exchange of words, no shifting of positions on the piano bench.

  He was playing as if the music had never stopped.

  My breath got caught in my throat and my heart pounded harder now, and faster too, until there was nothing left of me but the song he was playing.

  Silently, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear him, could only smell the rush of mint on his breath as the words left his lips, he said, “Play.”

  It wasn’t a request. Not an order, either. Simply the obvious progression of two strangers in a small room with a baby grand. Perfectly natural that four hands should end up on the ivory to wring out as much sound and sensation as possible. As if we had scripted it, my smaller hands found the bass notes, his larger fingers shifting up the keyboard into the mid-to-high regions.

  And when his voice came, it was like nothing I had ever heard before. Rich, but with an edge. Crackling not only with passion, but with knowledge, too, like a virtuoso who really knew how to use his instrument. I got lost in his tenor, let myself drown in the resonance of listening to a born singer. I played into his voice with my fingers on the keys, letting the piano be an accompaniment but nothing more to the real instrument in the room.

  So, I suddenly thought, as the temperature in the room rose up to meet the volume, this is what love at first sight feels like.

  Only that wasn’t quite right. Yes, he was good-looking. Very. But I’d met plenty of good-looking guys before now and none of them had affected me like this.

  He was drawing me in with sound. Weaving a spell around me with vibration.

  Using his hands and his voice, he had me. Whoever he was.

  When the song finally ended, I found that I was panting. The muscles of my arms were sore, my fingers were still jumping from our playing. I wanted to ask him his name, and tell him mine. I wanted to ask where he’d learned to sing and play like that. I wanted to ask where he’d come from, why I’d never seen him before.

  But I’d never felt like this about a guy before. Never had butterflies move up from my stomach and explode across my tongue until they had it completely tied up.

  It was all I could do to sit there beside him and keep breathing in. Out. In. Out.

  “Next time,” he said into the silence, mint lingering again, “sing with me.”

  Before I could reply, he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I sat alone in the practice room for a while. Partly because I was stunned by what had just happened. But also because I didn’t want to move and lose hold of what I was feeling, didn’t want to start forgetting the way it had felt to play with him—his leg, his arms, his fingers brushing up against mine.

  Finally, my stomach started growling and I slid off the piano bench and grabbed my bag to head home for dinner. The leaves on the trees were just starting to turn from green to red as I walked beneath them. I’d walked these three blocks home from school and back a thousand times since kindergarten, first with my hand in my grandmother’s and then, when I got old enough to go alone, I often walked with my best friend, Missy.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket, on the verge of texting her to tell her about what had happened. My thumbs were poised over the keyboard when I decided, instead, to put it away.

  Everything about what had happened at the piano had felt so honest, so pure. I’d felt the song we were playing in my bones, my muscles, my skin. If I giggled about it with my best friend, it might go away. Be as if it never happened.

  My grandmother was in the kitchen chopping vegetables for the pistou we would be having for dinner. A Frenchwoman through and through, despite the thirty years she’d lived in the United States, I took great comfort in knowing that nothing would ever change her. Not time.

  Not the boundaries of a different country. She’d always have her hair tucked behind her ears in an elegant bob, always wear pearls at her ears, always wear a subtle hint of Chanel No. 5.

  Looking at her, no one would ever guess who she had been, what she had done.

  “Ma petite,” she said, looking up with a smile, “how was school today?”

  A vision of a boy with dark hair falling over one eye, of green eyes that looked at me with wonder as I banged and wailed at the piano, almost had me saying, Amazing.

  “Good.”

  She smiled as I walked over to kiss her on the cheek and I was about to move away to put my bag down when she put one hand on my forearm. Stilling, I noticed how carefully she was looking at me.

  What did she see, I wondered? Five minutes at the piano felt like they’d changed me on the inside. Did I look different on the outside, too?

  “Every day I expect a little girl to walk through that door, and always, I’m surprised by a beautiful woman. Seventeen going on eighteen.” Her expression was strangely serious. “When I was your age … no, it’s too soon,” she said, almost as if she’d forgotten I was in the room.

  My grandmother and I didn’t often talk about her past. I only knew the barest details about her life as a courtesan in France—that it had begun on her eighteenth birthday and ended when she became pregnant with my mother. But with my eighteenth birthday coming in less than a year, I’d found myself thinking more and more about the fact that when she was barely older than me, she’d been forced into prostitution.

  She had never called it that, had always used the word courtesan, but I wasn’t a kid anymore and I could read between the lines.

  Men had paid her for sex. She had been a mistress many times over, never a wife.

  What had she been forced to give up, apart from the obvious control of her own body?

  Had there been someone she would have dated or married if she could have?

  “Grandmaman,” I suddenly said, thinking of the way I’d felt in the practice room playing piano with a gorgeous stranger, “did you ever want to marry someone?”

  Her only outward reaction to my question was a slight halt in her wrist as she sliced through a courgette.

  I knew that circumstances had dictated my grandmother’s choices and her mother’s before her. But although she’d never hidden the truth from me, I’d never asked many questions.

  Mostly because I didn’t want to think too hard about what being a courtesan meant. And I didn’t want any reason to judge her for what she’d done or who she’d been.

  “Gabrielle,” she said in her precise yet heavily accented English, as beautiful to my ears as a perfectly composed sonata, “you know I will never lie to you.”

  Just then, the kitchen lights overhead seemed to flicker, the marble countertop beneath my fingertips suddenly turning cold. I shivered. Was she telling me not to ask questions if I couldn’t handle the answers?

  “I know that, Grandmaman,” I said softly. But I didn’t retract my question. Instead, I came at it from a slightly different direction. “Was there ever a man you could have married?

  Instead of simply—”

  I was unable to finish the sentence.

  “Ah, ma petite, I have wondered when we would have this discussion.”

  I swallowed. I’d meant it only as a simple question. Not as the lead-in to a discussion.
>
  Fortunately, her tinkling laughter seemed to set the lights back to normal. She leaned over and kissed my forehead. “So many worries. Always so hard to be a young girl. Don’t worry, I promise not to say anything that will shock you tonight.”

  “When have I ever been shocked, Grandmaman?” I challenged her.

  From the first time I’d learned that she’d been a courtesan—I couldn’t have been more than thirteen—I hadn’t been shocked. Well, perhaps a little, but I thought I’d hidden it well.

  She put down her knife, the lines that criss-crossed the tops of her hands the only true betrayal of her age. “You know I was near to your age when I took up the life.”

  The life, I knew, meant becoming a courtesan. A prostitute.

  “Were you scared?” I asked, but I already felt I knew the answer. How could she not have been frightened? How could anyone—especially my incredible grandmother—trade her beauty, her wit and talent, her sexuality for money without fear?

  She shrugged and waved her hand in the air as if to dismiss my question. “Much was different then.”

  “The nineteen-thirties weren’t that long ago,” I argued.

  “For someone who has lived less than two decades, you claim to know a remarkable amount about what the six before you were born were like,” she chided.

  “So, were you?” I pressed. “Scared, I mean?”

  This time she licked her lips, seemed to consider the question more carefully. “If I was afraid, I could not admit my fear. And my mother prepared me well.”

  It sounded so calculated, I thought silently, one woman preparing another for that life.

  How could her mother have done that to her? Basically sold off her daughter to the highest bidder?

  I slid the pile of chopped celery into my palm and dropped it into the pot on the stove.

  “Because you had to do it.”

  She laughed again and I turned to her in surprise as she said, “You make it all sound so horrible,” before looking off into the distance as if she were fading back into her memories.

  “Becoming a courtesan was my best option, yes, but I embraced the life.” She opened her eyes again, pinned me with them. “I soon came to see that there was more good than bad in it. And I reveled in my freedom.”