Charming Blue (23 page)

“Either he’s several guys,” Blue said.

“Or something is different,” she said.

He ate another slider as he thought about the differences. “It might be cultural. I met women, but I had to concentrate on one at a time. And many weren’t suitable, so I wasn’t even allowed to think of them.”

Jodi snorted. “C’mon. Surely there was a village girl or two in your past. Maybe a tavern wench?”

He shook his head. It was hard to believe now, but he had been a conservative young man. More than that, he hadn’t wanted to disappoint his parents. Of course, he had become the biggest disappointment of all.

“No,” he said softly. “My first victim was the first girl I was ever serious about. My wife.”

So long ago. He hadn’t permitted himself to think about her. He had actually been in love. So young, so eager. So lost.

Jodi put her hand on his arm. “Not your first victim. The curse’s first victim. You have to make that distinction now.”

“I suppose,” he said. But it seemed like such a minor one to him. His wife was dead, long dead, but dead because of him. Whether or not he had actually harmed her seemed beside the point.

“The fact is,” Jodi said, “this other man, this so-called Fairy Tale Stalker, is either seeing and being attracted to several women, or the spell is different. Maybe the curse is more sophisticated.”

“Or maybe it’s not as strong,” Blue said. “Because remember, this is supposed to be a seduction. He shouldn’t use the name ‘Bluebeard,’ and he shouldn’t be telling them he’s going to kill them. He says that in a different tone of voice.”

“He’s warning them,” Jodi said.

Blue nodded. “Which means he knows that something is wrong.”

“I wonder if he knows what it is,” Jodi said.

“We have to find him,” Blue said. “Because the next stages for these women are sheer terror, followed by death.”

“What about the heads?” Jodi asked.

He winced. He hated thinking about that. “What about them?”

“It seems a major part of the Bluebeard fairy tale is the fact that the young wife sees the heads of her predecessors. Did that happen?”

“Aside from the fact I only married once,” Blue said. “Yes. When each woman came to the castle, she could see the heads.”

“And you could see them,” Jodi mused.

“But no one else could,” Blue said.

She frowned. “That seems so strange. I’m going to have to do some research here. I mentioned before that it bothered me, and it still does. It bothers me a lot.”

She cut her last slider in half and ate one part of it.

Blue finished his last one.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “These modern women, they should see the heads too.”

“If it’s the same curse,” Blue said.

“Or the same cursecaster,” Jodi said.

“Unless he refined the curse.” Blue shuddered and suddenly regretted that last tiny sandwich. It sat like a lump in his stomach. “Unless he’s been practicing that curse for centuries.”

“On other people,” Jodi said softly. “You’re not the mass murderer, Blue. Whoever this cursecaster is, he’s the mass murderer. And he’s getting other men, innocent men, to take responsibility for his crimes.”

She was right. It didn’t stop Blue from feeling responsible, but she was right. They were talking about a mass murderer here, and the murderer wasn’t Blue.

He had been using Blue. And the Fairy Tale Stalker. And probably countless other men. The cursecaster had used all of them to commit his crimes.

Blue felt the first threads of a fury he had long buried.

“Let’s figure out how to stop this,” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Chapter 29

Whatever
it
takes
meant the first stop was the Archetype Place. Blue had said he was persona non grata there, but Jodi was going to change that. She was a fixer, after all, and she needed the expertise that the Archetype Place represented.

She didn’t call ahead, though. She didn’t want anyone to prepare for her or to muster up arguments against Blue. He sat beside her now as she turned on the side streets leading to the Archetype Place. He had gotten more and more tense as they drove the hour plus to get from Century City to Anaheim.

The Archetype Place had been built by two so-called evil stepmothers—Mellie, who was Snow White’s stepmother, and Griselda, who was Hansel and Gretel’s. Both got maligned terribly in the fairy tales as retold by the Brothers Grimm. Mellie had lost her magic trying to save Snow’s life, and Griselda had rescued Hansel and Gretel on the night their father had tried to kill them with an ax.

But the Brothers Grimm apparently had a thing against women, or they deliberately misunderstood most of the stories they had heard, but whatever it was, they had mistold almost every story they had heard.

And that thought made Jodi give Blue a sideways glance. He was looking out the window, so tense that his fingers were threaded together and his knuckles had turned white.

Had the Brothers Grimm misheard the stories about Bluebeard? Did the fairy tale about Bluebeard even come from them? She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t researched him—hadn’t even thought to research him.

But given the terrible accuracy track record of the Brothers Grimm, maybe they had screwed up Blue’s tale too. Although he did confirm a lot of it.

She frowned, wondering if she should hire someone to check him out in the Kingdoms, wondering if she had time, wondering if she dared.

She almost asked him but then decided against it. He was still looking out the window, but now he was waving a hand in front of his face. She smiled. The air from the backseat was purple—again.

When Tank rejoined them in the parking garage beneath Echoes, Jodi decided to put up the car’s top. She thought it would make the long drive easier on Tank. Jodi wasn’t sure if the wind would blow Tank out of the car. If Tank blew out, Jodi worried that she wouldn’t wake up right away and sail into a windshield or bounce under a wheel. Tank would die with a splat before anyone could stop it, and all that would remain would be little gossamer wings.

Jodi hadn’t foreseen the problem having the car’s top up would cause. Apparently, Tank had eaten her way through Echoes’s kitchen. Tank belched loudly when she got into the car. Then she climbed into the backseat and fell asleep. Ever since, she’d been letting out little fairy farts. The smell wasn’t bad, but the purple vapor trail coming out of the backseat had twice interfered with Jodi’s view of the road. She and Blue had come up with a system where they just rolled down the windows in tandem to clear the purple haze before it became impossible to see through.

Jodi pulled into the parking lot behind the Archetype Place. From the back, it looked like a gigantic warehouse. In the front, someone had painted a series of delightful murals that made the warehouse look like a series of Disney storefronts. But the back was just painted white, and Jodi preferred it.

There weren’t a lot of cars back here. Most of the folks who frequented the Archetype Place either flew there, magically appeared inside it, or walked over from Disneyland where a bunch of them worked. Jodi brought a lot of her clients to the Archetype Place because they got very discouraged working in the Industry. The Archetype Place did a lot to combat the myths about the magical perpetrated by the Industry. The Archetype Place had a wing devoted to the founding branch of PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Archetypes. Jodi was a member, but mostly she just paid her dues and kept silent. Until recent years, PETA had been too radical for her.

She rolled one window down a fraction, then got out of the car. Blue looked a bit disoriented, but he got out too.

“Should we wake Tank?” he asked.

Jodi shook her head. “She’ll join us if she wants to.”

Jodi really didn’t want Tank to join them inside the Archetype Place, but she didn’t want to say so, because for all she knew, Tank wasn’t really sleeping and might actually hear her. At the moment, Jodi wasn’t willing to seem ungrateful to Tank in any way or form.

Jodi waited for Blue in front of the car, then slipped her arm through his. He stepped back as if she had pinched him. Then he gave her a wary look.

“We have to go in together,” Jodi said. “It’s better if we look relaxed.”

“We can look relaxed without… that,” he said. He sounded nervous.

She was nervous but decided not to show it. “You have to stay at my side. It’s easier to keep you there when I have your arm.”

He nodded, then shook his head. “No. No, I… Just no. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She hadn’t meant to set off quite that reaction. After all, she had touched him in the restaurant. But not quite in that way. Even though she had gone into the Archetype Place a million times with a client on her arm just like that, none of the clients felt quite the same way. None of them had such firm biceps (how did a heavy drinker get such firm biceps?), and none of them made her feel tingly with just the slightest brush.

It probably was better not to have her arm threaded through his. She could concentrate better if she wasn’t touching him.

“At least stay by my side,” she said. “I don’t want to lose track of you.”

He nodded distractedly, a small frown creasing his forehead. His nerves were affecting her.

Jodi and Blue walked to the smoked glass doors in the front of the building. Jodi pulled them open and stepped inside the coolness. Something about the Archetype Place smelled like home. She’d discussed it with others of the magical, and they all described the smell differently.

For her, it smelled faintly of hot chocolate on a cold winter day mixed with a trace of wood smoke, and just a hint of cinnamon. When she was growing up, both chocolate and cinnamon were luxuries that very few people had access to. She had indulged only rarely, and only on the most special of occasions.

Still, the smell always soothed her, and she always smelled it when she came into the Archetype Place. She knew it was a domestic comfort spell—it was one of the earliest spells she had ever learned—but that didn’t make her appreciate it less.

Beside her, Blue didn’t seem to be soothed. He seemed so tense that she felt like she could shatter him with the flick of a fingernail.

No guests sat in the reception area. The Frog Prince had reception, again. He’d been working it a lot lately.

Froggy was probably the most handsome man that Jodi had ever met (until she met Blue, that is), but he preferred to remain in his frog form. His beloved wife had died a few years back, and ever since, he had stopped taking care of himself. Selda had given him a job in the Archetype Place so that she could keep an eye on him and dump him into a pool of water when she felt he needed it.

He looked like he had been in some water recently. His skin was a shiny forest green, and the ridges on his back looked healthy, not bony. His feet were splayed across a lily pad that doubled as a desk blotter, and Jodi thought she saw a dead fly in one corner.

It made her shudder. She had heard of people who took on the characteristics of their other form, but she tried not to think about what that meant.

Froggy’s golden eyes had met Blue’s, and for the first time since she met him, Froggy actually looked cold.

“We’re here to see Selda,” Jodi said.

“Not him,” Froggy said without taking his gaze off Blue.

“I’ll just wait in the car,” Blue said. “I probably shouldn’t be here anyway.”

Jodi caught his arm and held it, even though she knew he didn’t want her to. She also realized, as she felt the developed muscles that went all the way down, that she wouldn’t be able to keep him here if he didn’t want to stay.

“You can be here,” Froggy said, “or have you forgotten that you signed the
I’m Not Evil
pledge to get in here? Or should I say, have you forgotten
again
?”

Blue’s muscles had tightened, not because he was going to hit someone, but because he’d been surprised. He shook his head, then frowned, then looked at Jodi.

“See? I shouldn’t—”

“
We
need to see Selda,” she said to Froggy, “and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“
He’s
not allowed to see Selda ever again,” Froggy said, “and you will take no for an answer because
I
work for her.”

“Then get her for me and we’ll change this,” Jodi said.

“No, really,” Blue said. “I don’t mind. I can—”

“You be quiet,” Jodi said without looking at him. She held his forearm, effectively preventing him from moving. Then she said to Froggy, “You tell Selda we’re here. Tell her we need to talk about the Fairy Tale Stalker, a curse, and Bluebeard.”

Froggy tilted his head so he looked at her from one bulging eye. “This job means a lot to me.”

“Selda won’t fire you,” Jodi said.

“She might,” Blue said softly. “You don’t know what I did last time I was here—”

Jodi held up her free hand, effectively silencing him. “You’re right. I don’t. And I don’t want to know. Froggy, if she fires you, I’ll hire you, all right?”