Charming Blue (28 page)

Had she lied about that?

“And he’s been inside his apartment the entire time, looking at the computer,” Gunther said, still watching Blue.

“Good. I
knew
it. Thank you, Gunther. Thank you.” She sounded relieved. Blue didn’t like that she was relieved. That meant a small part of her still thought Blue would do something to her.

But didn’t a small part of him (maybe not so small) still believe that he could harm her without knowing it? It was impossible to hold one belief for such a long time and not have it creep back in at the most inopportune moments.

Then Jodi, sounding panicked again: “Gunther, where did you get this phone?”

“John handed it to me and told me you’re in trouble. Are you in trouble?” Gunther was still watching Blue, as if he expected Blue to lie.

“I’ve had better days,” Jodi said, “but I’m fine, really. Tell… John… that I’ll talk to him soon.”

And then she hung up. Again.

Gunther frowned and looked at the phone as if he couldn’t believe that she had hung up on him. Blue had had trouble with that same thing earlier.

“She doesn’t sound fine,” Gunther said.

“She’s not,” Blue said.

“She calls you Blue,” Gunther said.

Blue nodded. He didn’t want to explain this, not now. “I need a car, Gunther. Or a way to get to her. Can you help me with that?”

“Yes,” Gunther said. “I know someone who drives. He can get us to Jodi’s house quickly.”

Blue didn’t like the “us,” but he didn’t argue. He couldn’t argue, not really. He needed to get there, and he needed to get there now.

Chapter 36

The “someone who drives” whom Gunther knew turned out to be the selkie in the kidney-shaped swimming pool. And the selkie didn’t even own a car. He acted as driver for one of the mermaids who didn’t like transforming her tail into feet to get across town. Apparently, she found touching the accelerator painful, but she said that pushing on the brake was excruciating, and she preferred not to do it at all.

Which meant she had more accidents on her record than allowed. Which meant that her license got revoked.

Now she made the selkie drive her everywhere, and since it was her car, she insisted on coming along.

They all did. Blue wished he could drive, but he hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car since the 1940s, and that hadn’t ended well. The whole drinking and driving thing was true: one shouldn’t do them together.

The group had trouble just getting to the car. The selkie—whose name was Bosco—had peeled off his pelt as soon as he got out of the pool, transforming into a naked man. Then he claimed it was too hot for clothes and started to lead them all toward the parking area.

“At least drape your pelt over your privates,” Blue snapped, but the selkie looked at him as if he was crazy.

“If I do that, dude,” the selkie said, “I go back to my seal form. It’s not good for driving.”

They had an argument—a too-long argument—about clothes, until the mermaid tossed the selkie a Hawaiian shirt and shorts so loose that the selkie might as well not have been wearing pants.

Then the mermaid decided to come along. She transformed too, but put on clothing (some kind of sarong) and tiptoed toward the car, a blue 1950s convertible so long that it looked like a boat. The mermaid kept the keys until the group got to the parking lot. Then she handed the keys over reluctantly.

She was a stunningly beautiful woman, the kind any man would have been attracted to, and she knew it. She was blond and blue-eyed, and muscled in the way of mermaids and modern women, and she had a cute little upturned nose that made her look more innocent than she probably was.

She shoved Gunther out of the way so that she could sit next to Blue in the backseat, then she leaned toward him, smelling of fish, chlorine, and Chanel No. 5 and said, “My name is Marilyn” in a wispy little voice that he knew wasn’t her normal tone.

He gave her a dismissive smile. “John,” he said, then he leaned forward, giving the selkie the address.

Gunther sat in the front seat with his cell phone (Blue’s cell phone, really) open to a screen with a map and two blinking icons showing where they were. The selkie drove fast, and the mermaid complained, mostly to get Blue’s attention, which he wasn’t giving.

He had forgotten that part of his life, the part where women, influenced by his charm magic, tried to interest him. They usually failed. There was always an air of desperation about them.

But then there was an air of desperation about this mermaid with her fake name, bubble-top convertible, wispy voice, and 1960s sarong. He had seen men who were better Marilyn Monroe impersonators, but of course he didn’t tell her that.

He just wanted out of this car. He wanted to get to Jodi’s.

And then, in a blink of an eye, he was.

Jodi’s house was three miles from the apartment complex, but only because they had to drive around Hancock Park. If Blue had walked across the park, the house was only a mile or so away, and he wouldn’t have wasted all that time getting the car, making sure the selkie was dressed, and putting up with the gropey mermaid.

As the car pulled in front of the little green hedgerow that separated the driveway from the street, Blue vaulted over the car door and landed on the street. He ran around the car while Gunther, the mermaid, and the selkie yelled at him. He headed into the driveway, searching for Jodi.

He didn’t see her, but there were a lot of people milling about, most dressed in Kingdom clothing—breeches, blousy shirts, and long skirts. The air smelled of sulphur, and a small cloud of something floated up from behind the Spanish-style house.

He ran around cables and steaming caldrons and jars of various magical ingredients. He saw at least two eyes of newt and a pickled dragon heart. He also saw a row of colored bottles, probably filled with potions.

The house’s front door was blocked by two gremlins and a Minotaur arguing about something, so he decided to go around.

It worried him that no one had noticed him. Shouldn’t they have noticed him by now?

The only path he saw went around the house’s south side, so he took it and nearly ran into Jodi’s back. She was standing on the edge of a patio, Tank fluttering near her, a woman that Blue didn’t recognize explaining something about the pool.

Blue was so relieved to see Jodi that he nearly grabbed her and enveloped her in his arms. At the last minute he stopped, raised his hands as if he was being arrested, and stepped backward.

He had never done that before, never spontaneously touched anyone. Or at least, hadn’t done it in centuries. The very impulse worried him.

“Jodi,” he said softly.

She turned, smiled in relief, and then she hugged him, her body warm against his, her head coming up to his shoulder just perfectly.

She smelled of sunshine and lavender. He wanted to close his eyes and inhale. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and never let her go.

Instead, he kept his hands up, looking at Tank over Jodi’s shoulder in a silent plea to be rescued. He couldn’t let Jodi treat him like this. It was too warm, too personal, too intimate.

After a moment, Jodi stepped back. She was smiling at him. She didn’t seem to notice that he hadn’t hugged her back.

“I am so relieved to see you,” she said. “You have no idea.”

Apparently she hadn’t noticed his odd reaction at all. No one had ever been relieved to see him.

He let his hands drop, and as they did, they brushed her shoulders. He wanted to tell himself that touching her was an accident, but it wasn’t. He wanted to touch her, to acknowledge her in some way.

Then he let his hands fall to his side, but he didn’t step back. He should have stepped back so she couldn’t touch him again, but he didn’t. He couldn’t quite bring himself to do that either.

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

And so she did.

Chapter 37

The thing that struck her was how little Blue looked like that image that she had seen in her bedroom. She had noticed the difference before, but it was clearer now. Blue was big and solid and handsome and strong, and putting her head against his shoulder seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Hugging him had been a spontaneous reaction: she had been so relieved to see him, so relieved that he looked different from the thing that had been inside her house, so relieved that he was clearly
him
that she felt an odd joy when she saw him.

Then she turned around and saw his face, the surprise on it, the vulnerable look, a window right down into him, and she realized that he probably couldn’t remember the last time someone hugged him.

So she told him the truth, that she had been
relieved
to see him, although she hadn’t told him the whole truth, which was that she was happy to see him too, that she had actually needed him beside her for this—and that word “need,” that word startled her a bit too.

He had blinked twice, then taken a deep breath, all the while clearly struggling for control of his face. He got it, but he didn’t have control of his hands. They had fallen to her shoulders, brushing them lightly, before he let them drop to his side.

His hands wanted to touch her—gently—and he hadn’t wanted to let them, so he had clearly compromised. He had touched her just so briefly that he probably hoped she hadn’t noticed.

She had noticed. How could she not when the slightest brush against his skin sent a tingle through her?

He wanted to know what happened, and she turned toward the sliding glass doors, explaining everything, but she refused to move away from him. She almost wanted to lean against him as she spoke. She needed the reassurance.

That thing—that creature—had frightened her. The fact that it had actual substance frightened her more. And the fact that it had somehow crashed through her sliding glass window soundlessly terrified her.

Blue put a hand against the small of her back, sending another of those tingles through her. Then he gently moved her to one side as he stepped past her.

He didn’t make it to the pool. One of the techs Selda had sent had installed an invisible crime scene barrier around the pool, the sliding glass doors—hell, probably the entire house. Jodi didn’t know, and she tried to pretend she wasn’t angry about that. It was her house after all.

But her house had been violated.

Still, the crime scene barrier was see-through, and Blue, after he bumped against it, peered through it like a kid looking at a carnival ride that his parents had forbidden him to go on.

Then he came back to her, his gaze on hers as he walked. She could still feel the light pressure of his hand against her back, the impression of his muscular chest against her cheek. She wanted to touch her face like a giddy schoolgirl, but she didn’t.

It’s relief
, she told herself.
Just
relief
.

But she didn’t believe it. She was falling for him. Whether it was the mythical charm or the fact that he had been so hurt for so long and he had stood up so well against it, or maybe she was just plain lonely or—heaven forbid—maybe there was something about him.

If it was something about him, the real him, that deep down man that he had kept hidden, then she was doomed. Not doomed to die like his other fiancées had, but doomed to love him, and she didn’t want to love him.

She didn’t want to love anyone.

She liked her independence. The relationships she had tried in the past had never worked because she had been too independent, too disengaged. Too strong.

And up until this moment, she had been the strong one with Blue too.

“You didn’t hear the glass breaking,” Blue repeated, as if he was trying to get that fact in his head.

“I ran out front,” she said. “I didn’t hear the glass shattering. You’d think I should have heard the glass shattering.”

“You’d think.” He looked over his shoulder, a frown on his face. This time he didn’t clarify that the creature/image/thingie had looked like him. Apparently he saw that as a given now. “You came out through the door, and you closed the door behind you.”

“I didn’t close it,” Jodi said. “That implies a careful movement. I pulled it open and then pushed it shut, a movement I had done—slower—countless times before.”

In fact, in her memory, she could actually hear the sound of the door whooshing open and then closed along its slider, then the slight bang as it shut.

Blue sighed and looked over his shoulder, as if he could get more answers from that door itself.

“Well, that solves one thing,” Blue said.

“What’s that?” Jodi asked.

He didn’t look at her right away. The setting sun caught his jaw and illuminated his face, and she suddenly saw just how classically handsome he was. Like a painting, not a painting of a young man, not a fashionable image of someone starting out. A painting of a man in power, a man making a decision, a true man, an adult who knew how the world worked and had an idea how to make it work for him.