Charming Blue (10 page)

Blue knew. It wasn’t Hollywood magic. It was real magic, and the projection came from a man’s mind.

If he wasn’t caught, this guy would do the same thing Blue did—he would kill dozens of women all in the name of love.

Blue stood, walking to the window and clasping his hands behind his back. He hadn’t been able to stop himself. How could he help anyone stop some other guy? He didn’t even know what caused all of this. It certainly wasn’t intent. He had never meant to hurt anyone. His mother used to say in bewilderment that he was the most kindhearted child she had ever known.

And that hadn’t turned out well.

He ran a hand over his face. He was tired, deep down bone-tired. He wished the rehab center allowed energy drinks, but the folks here thought of them as a drug. Even though they did allow coffee. He could go to the kitchen and get some. It would make him jittery and tired instead of just tired, but that might be good enough.

The last thing he wanted to do was fall asleep, particularly with the Fairy Tale Stalker on his brain. And Jodi.

Jodi. She was beautiful and determined, and properly disgusted by him. He appreciated that. She seemed sensible.

He wasn’t quite sure why Tank had roped her into all of this. He had known Tank long enough to know she often had motives that no one understood.

He always wished Tank would stop helping him, because he thought it would get her in trouble. And now she was helping this other guy—or the women this other guy was victimizing.

He clenched a fist. Maybe it was someone he’d been drinking with, someone who had heard of Bluebeard. Maybe the media was right and there was some kind of way to do a Hollywood magic projection. Maybe there was a simple explanation for all of this.

But he doubted it.

And he didn’t know what he could do about any of this. He wasn’t the heroic type.

The only thing he could do—besides stay awake—was share his insight into what was happening. And he had insight, although probably not the type Tank wanted.

He knew what this guy was doing. He knew how it would escalate. And he knew if someone couldn’t figure out a way to stop it, a lot of women would die.

Chapter 11

Jodi woke out of a sound sleep, her heart pounding. Someone was in the room.

She didn’t move except to open her eyes. An odd amber light came through the sliding glass doors. The light over the pool went out at midnight, although she did have lamps scattered through her garden—little one-foot-high things that some dumb marketing executive called “fairy lights.” If he’d ever seen a true fairy light, he would have called them something else.

If the pool light was off, all she should have seen was the edges of the patio around the pool. If the light was on, she would have seen the pool itself.

Then she woke up enough to realize that she shouldn’t have seen any of it. She had pulled the blackout curtains. She ordered new blackout curtains every few years from the same organization that made them for Vegas casinos. When she was in her bedroom, she wanted to sleep, not worry about light creeping in at dawn.

Carefully she looked around the room, trying not to move so that she wouldn’t make any noise.

Her bedroom was square and large, dwarfing her California king-size bed. A door opened in from the hallway, and she had converted a smaller second bedroom into a completely luxurious bathroom. That door was open, as it always was, just like the door to the hallway. She lived alone, so she didn’t have to close doors. She didn’t need the privacy.

A large wood-burning fireplace dominated the remaining wall. She only used the fireplace on the cool rainy nights of deep winter—nights that people elsewhere in the country would believe temperate or even mild. She had lived here long enough that such nights seemed frigid to her.

And even when a fire burned in that fireplace, the light in this room was never amber.

She eased herself up and finally looked toward that light. It took all of her strength not to gasp at what she saw.

Bluebeard stood in the center of the light. His gaze met hers, his spectacular blue eyes unmistakable. They twinkled. Then he smiled at her, slow and easy.

The smile was sensual, and it transformed him from an incredibly good-looking man into a seductive one. She almost—almost—smiled back.

Then she realized what she had done. She shuddered, threaded her hands through her sheets, and whispered a small phrase that activated a protective spell embedded in it, shielding herself.

He looked powerful, the king’s son, the man he had been born to be, not the broken, half-frightened man he had become. She understood even more the lure of his charm—he could crook a finger and a more susceptible woman would be heading straight for his arms or inviting him into her bed.

He warned her about this: he had said that he would get her into his brain, and then he would come after her.

And here he was in her room. Just smiling at her.

“Get out,” she said, wondering why her wards had failed. They should have protected her against him and anything he sent directly. “Get the hell out.”

His smile grew, and now it was less charming and more sinister. She didn’t get frightened very often, but she was frightened now. This man had killed fifteen women that she knew of. Fifteen women in the Kingdoms. He could have killed dozens in the Greater World and never gotten caught. Once serial killers crossed state lines, Americans had no real way to track them.

He could have killed women in every single decade he was here, so long as he did so in different towns, different places.

“Get out,” she said again, wondering what she could use against him. Comfort magic was not offensive magic. It didn’t kill by definition. It didn’t harm. It didn’t maim. It eased. It soothed.

She wondered if that would work—some kind of soothe spell. But she didn’t want to raise her hands, didn’t want to let go of the sheets just in case he launched himself at her.

He wasn’t holding a weapon, so she didn’t know how he could hurt her.

Except, at the rehab center, he had looked down at those hands of his as if they had done very bad things. Had he killed those women without the aid of a knife? Had he done it with brute strength alone?

He wasn’t moving toward her. He was just watching her.

She had one other power: she could get rid of something that disrupted. And he was clearly disrupting.

She sent a bolt of energy toward him, banning him from the house.

His smile faded, and he looked oddly disappointed. Then he turned around and headed through the door. The amber light faded as if it had never been.

But she didn’t hear the front door open. Nor had her alarm gone off.

Her heart was still pounding, and she wasn’t sure if he was still in the house.

So she grabbed the backup cell phone that she kept in a recharging cradle beside the bed, grabbed her robe, and slipped it on. Then she put her feet over the side of the bed, careful not to step into her slippers, which had heels and would make a sound on the hardwood floor.

She was heading out to the pool. If the warded house couldn’t protect her, then she saw no point in staying here, particularly if he was still inside.

She wished she knew how to reach Tank, but she didn’t. And she didn’t want to call the police. They couldn’t do anything.

Instead, she dialed 411 as she quietly let herself out the sliding glass doors. She needed to call the rehab center.

She needed to know what Bluebeard was doing right now.

Chapter 12

“Ma’am,” said the annoyed voice on the other end of the phone. “We do a bed check. All our residents are accounted for.”

Jodi paced around the pool. The tile was cool under her feet. The fairy lights illuminated her plants, making everything beautiful, and not creating shadows. So far, she saw no amber light, and no Bluebeard. But she spoke softly just in case.

“Is he asleep?” she asked.

“Ma’am, he’s not required to be asleep. He’s just required to be inside when we lock the facility at night.”

“Please,” she said. “Check for me.”

The person on the other end of the phone sighed. “Ma’am, look. He can’t come to the phone. Our rules say no outside contact for weeks, and he’s not on the contact list.”

“I know that,” she snapped. “I just got a call from someone claiming to be him, and I’m hoping to hell it was a prank.”

Working in Hollywood all these years made it easy for her to tell a plausible lie.

“Oh,” the voice on the other end of the phone said, as if he (she? Jodi couldn’t quite tell) finally understood why Jodi was calling. “Let me check.”

She paced, swallowing hard, keeping an eye on the house and all the entrances to the pool area. She had gated this off when Hancock Park got more popular. Her land abutted the Wilshire Country Club, but she had at least two lots between her and the nearest fairway. Two overgrown lots where someone could hide.

She had put a gate in the trees years ago, but she had disabled the alarm system she placed on it when she realized that the stupid duffer golfers would shank the ball into the gate and set off the alarm. Then she deemed it more trouble than it was worth.

Now she wished it was on.

She felt surrounded by danger on all sides—and she was scared to go back into her house, which pissed her off.

Then she heard the phone on the other end rattle.

“He’s here, ma’am,” the voice said. “He’s been awake the entire time, in our reading room, studying some computer printouts.”

“You’re sure he’s been awake?” she asked.

“I looked at our security footage, ma’am. Making a phone call during your no-contact period here is a major violation of our policies.”

“Did you talk to him?” Jodi asked a bit breathlessly. He was a Charming. He could convince anyone of anything.

“No, ma’am. But I did check with our other staffers. He’s been awake the entire time, ma’am.”

So the voice—whoever this was—had also thought that he had tampered with the security feed and had checked with the other employees to make sure he hadn’t.

“And no phones nearby?” Jodi asked.

“We keep our phones under lock and key,” the voice said without irony. “It would take a miracle for him to find an unattended phone. And it would be even more of a miracle if he made a call to you and the call didn’t get caught on our security feed.”

Jodi let out a small breath. She wasn’t quite sure how to process this information, but she did know one thing: It made her brain hurt. How could he send a projection of himself without being unconscious or unaware of it?

And if he was on the security feed, then he hadn’t left the facility, which meant he hadn’t been in her house. Besides, he couldn’t have messed with the security feed. The Kingdom magical couldn’t manipulate electronics. They could use the electronics—thank God, she wouldn’t survive in this modern age without her computer—but they couldn’t tamper with them. The electronics got frizzed out. If a magical being could be filmed (and not all of them could), then their image on film was actually their image—and what they were doing at the time.

Someone else had done this. Somehow. But she didn’t know who could have.

She thanked the nameless voice on the other end of the line, hung up, and then speed-dialed the Archetype Place. She knew no one would be monitoring the phone at this hour, but she also knew she could leave a message.

When she heard the voice of Griselda, the woman who had run the Archetype Place successfully for more than sixty years, Jodi let out a small sigh of relief, even though she knew Selda wasn’t there. Jodi was relieved by the sound of Selda’s voice mail message.

“Hey, Selda,” Jodi said, “I need to talk to Tank ASAP. Can you find her for me? And I also need to talk with you when you get in. Thanks.”

She hung up and stared at her house. She hated all those countless Hollywood movies where the heroine (or the dumb half-naked chick in the nightgown) went into the place where the Big Evil was, completely undefended. At least Jodi wasn’t wearing high heels and a miniskirt.

But she couldn’t quite convince herself to go back inside. She didn’t see herself as a dumb half-naked chick. Or the heroine, for that matter.

“You rang?”

Jodi eeped, tossed her phone into the air in surprise, and nearly fell backward into the pool. She didn’t see where the voice came from, until the phone stopped its descent about two feet above her head.

She looked up, saw motion, and realized that she was looking at gossamer wings in the pale light, wings fluttering really, really, really hard to deal with the weight of the phone.

“Tank,” Jodi said. “Thank God.”

“I don’t believe in God,” Tank said. “I believe in gods, and mostly I avoid them. They have a different kind of magic, it annoys me, and they listen to those god-awful Fates all the time, which really pisses me off.”

Jodi wasn’t going to talk politics with Tank. Jodi especially was not going to talk politics mixed with religion with Tank. Jodi didn’t know what Tank believed in, and she didn’t want to know.