Boyfriend from Hell (Saturn's Daughters) (28 page)

“Okay, next time I’ll sit around and twiddle my thumbs in hopes someone better at beating up people will come along and save me. That totally works.” I kicked a box toward him. “Here, that one is labeled Acme. Take a look.”

“If you shake a nut tree, nuts will fall out,” he said enigmatically, flipping through the files without much interest. “You should have let me take care of the Escalade.”

“Andre, you so know that isn’t happening,” I retorted in a pitying tone. “I’ve never had anyone take care of me, even when I was a kid, and it ain’t happening now. I’m grateful for your help, don’t get me wrong. But if I can do it myself, I will. And just how can you be so damned certain I was responsible for your weak sprinkler system?” I asked, just to irritate him.

“Because that’s what I do,” he replied. “I put two and two together and figure out where the threes are
coming from. I’ve had years to perfect that talent, and I haven’t wasted it flooding bars. I’ve been watching you, waiting to see what you’ll become. Don’t underestimate me or any other Zone inhabitant. We have our uses.”

“Should I ever pass the bar exam, I’ll remember that,” I said, not wanting to learn more for fear it would set my hair on fire. I was just happy to know he didn’t know what I was any more than I did. Digging through another box, I triumphantly removed a fat file labeled Vanderventer. “Got it. Let’s go home. I have a friend I’d like to look through the rest of these.”

I didn’t know if Jane could afford the time, but at some point, someone had to follow Max’s lead.

I was flipping through the file and didn’t hear Andre walk up behind me. He hauled me off the floor, swung me around, and hugged me so tight, I could feel the press of his shirt buttons against my boobs, although the damned file kind of got in the way. His hand crushed my head into his shoulder so I couldn’t read his expression.

“Until we know what you are and what you can do,” his voice rumbled against my ear, “you have to start thinking of yourself as a rare treasure needing constant protection. Got that?”

His breath was warm in my hair, and I really enjoyed the masculine hardness pressed against my soft bits. I wanted to wriggle and test his arousal, but triumph only went so far. I didn’t want to be rare or protected.

“You make me sound like a loggerhead turtle. I am not a protected species, or if I am, I want it to be a wolf or a tiger.” I shoved at his shoulders. He didn’t completely release me, but wary of my dangerous knees and feet, he let me keep a distance.

“Talk to me after next week.” I relented when his breath against my ear gave me warm shivers. “I’ll be your golden lamb. Right now, I just want to study and finish school and keep out of sight. How am I supposed to do that?”

He growled in a way that made my insides all weak and watery. He might not have been bulky-big like Max, but Andre had testosterone out the ears. And I responded to his embrace. I didn’t have to like it—especially if he was as warped as me. I wriggled some more, until he let me go.

“If it takes bodyguards and Humvees, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “You won’t like what you find in that Vanderventer file, so I want people with you twenty-four-seven. You have a hair trigger.”

“Do not,” I argued, jerking away from him and marching for the door. “I just think faster than most people.”

“You don’t think at all or you wouldn’t have stolen the Escalade! You really didn’t think those bums would take that lying down, did you?”

“I got rid of them, didn’t I? And their nasty equipment as well. If they mean to follow me around, they might as well learn it will be a damned expensive operation.” I was
proud
of my accomplishment. The spies were the douche nozzles, not me.

“Your damned expensive operation has practically put
me
out of business.” Andre pried open the warehouse door, checked outside, then pulled it back enough for me to slip out. “You’re a walking loaded weapon and someone needs to put a safety lock on you.”

“That someone being you?” I asked scornfully. “Why don’t you waste your time trying to ‘figure out what I am’ while I go somewhere quiet and study?”

In the ugly security lighting, I could see him debating his reply. His eyes burned like coals when he suppressed his fury. “You endanger anyone you’re around,” he concluded. “You’ve not only threatened the macho of dangerous men, but humiliated them badly in front of people they consider scum, and in the eyes of their bosses. They won’t be polite next time.”

He opened the van door and practically heaved me in. I hunkered down, scowling, knowing he was right. Over the years, I’d learned the psyches of bullies. That didn’t mean I paid attention to their messed-up heads or used what I knew to avoid them—hence the martial arts lessons—but I understood them. Their minds were fairly simple, after all; they wanted control and domination because, without it, they were terrified.

Which meant the goons had to take me out to feel superior again. Would I ever get a break? Have a normal life sitting quietly behind a desk?

I’d tried that these last few years. Hadn’t liked it much. I scowled some more.

Andre slid into the driver’s seat and started the
ignition. I thought about asking where we were going, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I was still chewing on the very little information he’d fed me earlier. He put two and two together and figured out where the threes came from? So he observed and figured out the oddities in the Zone. And then he used them. Oddities like me. I could easily become another tool in his arsenal. That notion bothered me.

• • •

The van pulled up at the flower shop Andre owned on Edgewater. Silently, we locked up the van and got into the convertible parked there. He put the hood up. Tinted glass concealed us. I didn’t see any Lincolns or Escalades around, but the feeling of being watched never left me these days.

“I’m trusting you, Clancy,” Andre said, almost angrily. “I don’t trust anyone, but you,” he muttered, and drove down a back street I didn’t recognize. “Something is happening with you that we haven’t seen in the Zone. Around here, good comes with bad, but mostly it’s shades of gray. I want to believe that you’re the good break we need. Which probably means I’ve finally gone over the edge like everyone else.”

“Yeah, thanks for the vote of confidence,” I responded without enthusiasm. “If it helps, I don’t trust you any further than I can see you, either.”

He shot me a look I assumed was one of scorn, since I couldn’t really see him in the dark. Because I’d gone this far in baring my innards, I asked casually, “Have you ever heard of the Daughters of Saturn?”

“Sounds like a female band. Should I have heard of
them?” The Mercedes purred like Milo, sliding up to a gate with a key card lock. Andre pushed in a card and the gate slid open.

No information there. I didn’t really want to explain. “Probably not. Just something I heard.”

I watched with interest as we drove behind what appeared to be an abandoned brick edifice with a loading dock. The blue neon lighting didn’t mar the buildings, so we weren’t in the Zone as I knew it, but the early-1900s industrial architecture was similar. Attached buildings without signs or lights or any indication of habitation occupied at least a city block. In the beam of his headlights I could see not grassy backyards, but lots paved with crumbling blacktop and gravel sprouting weeds.

Only this one building had a gate around the parking lot. Three stories tall, with boarded windows on the first floor and gaping emptiness above, the place didn’t scream security.

Andre drove the Mercedes up the loading ramp, opened a rusty, automatic overhead door, and pulled inside. After he turned off his headlights, a dim bulb illuminated the interior of what appeared to be a typical garage decorated with trash cans, snow shovels, and the kind of things garages stored. If this had once been a store, it had been out of business for a while. There was no inventory on the wooden shelves lining the walls. He’d found the perfect location to protect his pricey car.

“Why couldn’t we leave the boxes here?” I asked, wondering where “here” was.

“If Acme’s goons really are after them, I don’t want them anywhere around this place,” he said curtly, without explaining why.

He climbed out and I followed suit, gathering up Milo, my backpack, and the Vanderventer file while the garage door closed behind us. Andre took the heavy backpack and slung it over one shoulder as if it were a jacket. He opened a door at the far end, and we strolled into another storeroom. Boxes and barrels were scattered in disorganization around the walls and on metal shelving.

He continued to a door on an interior wall, guided by a pale night-light. Or at least, I assumed it was a night-light. It was hard to imagine electricity in a building that smelled as old and musty as this one. Maybe the light ran on battery power.

I almost turned around and refused to follow, when he disappeared down cellar stairs so dark I couldn’t see my fingers in front of my nose. Milo was peering out of my messenger bag with interest and not growling, so I sucked it up and set my heels on the first step. No spiderwebs tangled in my hair. No rodents squealed and ran. I found a rail and dared to touch it as I edged my way down in the dark.

“Are you a vampire who sees without light?” I asked, just to make certain Andre was still ahead somewhere.

“Sorry.” He flicked on another dim light that glowed softly along the stair treads. “I’m so used to the path, I don’t even notice.”

I still couldn’t find the source of the light, but at least I could see the stairs had an end ahead, and I could follow Andre’s graceful male stride downward. I was feeling way more dependent than I liked, but I desperately wanted to stay alive and graduate, and I didn’t want my beautiful new home contaminated by Cadillac gangsters.

We followed what appeared to be a dimly lit tunnel long enough to traverse a city block before we took more stairs going up.

“Does the Zone breed paranoia?” I asked, realizing that this tunnel was meant to conceal Andre’s movements, just as I’d used back alleys.

“We have security issues. You’ve thrown us into turmoil. We’ll need to develop a better plan once we settle your problem.”

There it was again, the ubiquitous
we
. “You’re running an underground organization? To do what?”

“Not underground. Right out in the open. And survival is our main agenda.”

At the top of the stairs, he used several keys to unlock a metal door. It swung open noiselessly, and he held it, waiting for me to precede him inside.

“Said the spider to the fly,” I muttered, clomping into what appeared to be a perfectly normal kitchen, one with granite countertops and shiny stainless steel appliances. The kind of kitchen I’d never had and never thought to have. “This your place?”

“I own it, if that’s what you’re asking.” Without more explanation, he led the way to more stairs.

Ah, so he was protecting his lair by not bringing the boxes here. I had to wonder if I wasn’t more dangerous than the boxes.

I don’t know a whole lot about architecture, but I was pretty sure the narrow back stairs we were taking were meant for servants and that only old buildings had them. And the layout reminded me of the Victorian boardinghouse I was supposed to be living in. I’d never seen Mrs. Bodine’s kitchen, but the placement seemed right.

My glimpse of the second floor didn’t look exactly like the floor I lived on. The wood was clean and polished, for instance. But the similarity was strong enough that I realized we were probably in a row house neighboring the one where I lived.

“Is this where you had the vacancy?” I asked. “In your house?”

“One of the second-story apartments is available,” he acknowledged. “I hadn’t realized Pearl’s tenant had permanently disappeared. Good detective work on your part,” he said grudgingly.

“Why are we continuing up if you have a vacant apartment?” I asked, starting to balk.

“There are beds upstairs. Desk, computer, kitchen stocked with food. How many more days of finals?”

This was almost Tuesday. My last final was Thursday. “Three.” I glanced longingly at the lovely wood glimpsed from the second-story landing, and wrinkled my nose in dismay at climbing to the third floor—where Andre lived? Or was that his place on the first
floor? “I still have to leave the building to go to school. You can’t really hide me here.”

“We can play mind games with the bastards for three days. C’mon. I haven’t got all night.”

His impatience spurred me on. He wasn’t acting like a would-be lover, despite our earlier embrace. He opened a door at the top of the stairs and startled a gray-haired man who looked remarkably like Andre.

“Tina, my father, Julius. Dad, this is the Tina Clancy I’ve been telling you about.”

I shuffled files and bags until I could hold out a hand to shake. If this was what Andre would look like in thirty years, I approved. His father was slighter in stature, but he had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and just enough wrinkles around his eyes to look experienced and amused.

He bowed over my hand in a courtly manner while studying me as if I might be the secret to
locked doors. Milo didn’t growl, so I trusted his instincts.