Immortal Muse by Stephen Leigh Page A

camera’s motor drive. She found his hand with hers, brought it down so it just touched the swell of her breast . . .
    â€œWhat the hell!” The voice—a woman’s voice—swept away the vitality and strength and heat in the room and stopped the heartbeat of the camera. David pulled his hand away. Camille’s head craned around as her own hands, instinctively, started to move to cover her breasts. She forced them to stay down, to look as calm as if she were fully dressed. The woman was attired in a business pants suit, the bangs of her hair, cut in a conservative bob, dark with sweat as if she’d just walked several blocks.
    â€œHelen? What are you doing here this early?” David lowered the camera as he took a step away from Camille. He looked from Helen to Camille and back.
    â€œInterrupting your afternoon fun, it looks like,” she answered. Helen glared at Camille her gaze dropping once to her exposed breasts and the sardonyx cameo there. “You—whoever you are—put your clothes on and get the hell out of here.”
    â€œDavid was photographing me, that’s all,” Camille said. “I’m just . . . just a model.”
    â€œI’m sure that’s all you are,” Helen answered, her voice low and angry. “Now, get out of here.”
    Camille put on her bra, slipped the tee over her head again. Helen stood in the doorway to the studio, watching her. “He’s much more talented than you think he is,” she said as she passed the woman. “You should open your eyes and see it. You should love him for his gift.”
    Helen sucked in her breath as if she were about to retort, but said nothing. Her blue eyes were searing, her hands were curled into fists with polished red fingernails digging into flesh. Camille kept walking.
    â€œYou’re dragging street sluts in here behind my back?” she heard Helen shout at David as she descended the stairs and walked through the living area toward the door. Camille saw an expensive leather briefcase on the couch that hadn’t been there earlier. “Again? Christ, David, that one has to be ten years younger than you . . .”
    Camille opened the door. She shut away the rising argument and David’s answer as she closed it again behind her.
    Â * * * 
    David didn’t call that day, nor the next. By the third day, she was certain that her decision had been made for her. She wasn’t going to call him—any further contact with her had to be his decision; she’d already made her own choice when she’d gone to see him, when she’d let him photograph her, when she’d let him touch her.
    The rest, she told herself, was up to him. It was fate telling her that going after him had been a mistake.
    On Sunday, she laid out the Tarot, but it told her nothing about David; the array was definitely concerned with her other quest, with Nicolas. Every card howled at his presence nearby. Both the Four of Swords and the Four of Wands showed in the array, both cards linked to hospitals and medical issues. She went down to the corner store and bought the Sunday paper; in the obituaries, there were four deaths listed where the person had been a patient at Mount Sinai Hospital, and the local section was screaming about another body found in Manhattan that appeared to be the work of the Black Fire killer.
    Camille went to the copies of the old manuscripts she kept in the closet; she read—as she had a hundred times before—the Finding spell, placing it within the sardonyx pendant as she always did. She went to the site of the latest Black Fire casualty: in Roosevelt Park. The crime tape was still up though the investigators had already left the scene. Standing outside the tape, Camille could see the outline of a blackened section of grass where the body had been. As she stared at it, the pendant throbbed on her chest—not as deeply as it