Charming Blue (9 page)

“Ever?” he asked, looking confused.

“Ever,” she said.

“Has that changed over the years?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “That’s the nature of wards. They’ve always been like that.”

“That’s not possible,” he said. “The village, at the end, the entire village had wards against me. Still, one of the girls who died, she was in a house with wards against me.”

Jodi looked at him. His gaze was meeting hers and she had the sense that he didn’t even know he was doing that. She could see deep into those beautiful blue eyes, and she saw no deception in them.

Maybe she was really, really susceptible to his magic.

“That’s why my parents sent me away,” he said, “because even the most powerful wards designed to keep me away didn’t work against my twisted magic. No one was safe. So I left. I did. I stayed as far from people as I could. That’s why the Greater World was so appealing. America. Back then, it didn’t have a lot of people, and I could be by myself for a long time.”

The idea of wards that hadn’t worked disturbed him. But it didn’t disturb her as much as the beauty of his eyes did.

“Clearly,” she said, “whoever made the wards did it wrong. That happens. It’s not a common skill. Not all domestics have it.”

“But you do,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you know you’re good,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

He nodded, and finally his gaze left hers. She felt his gaze move away, as if he had been touching her and stopped.

“Look,” he said, “it’s too risky. I don’t want to know how to disable those wards. Either you do it, or we wait until they decay.”

“Tank wants to settle this Fairy Tale Stalker thing,” Jodi said, not sure exactly what she was trying to convince him of.

“Yeah,” he said. “I understand that. Tell her that—well, hell, don’t tell her anything. I’ll look at this stuff tonight, and if I have nothing, I’ll have Hargrove call you. Otherwise, I’ll get permission to call you and give you the update, okay? He already got to see me interact with you twice.”

“He wanted to see you interact with me?” she asked.

Bluebeard smiled. It was a rueful look. “Yeah. He seems to believe that something about my relationship with women causes me to drink.”

“And he thinks he can solve that?” she asked.

Bluebeard’s smile became real for just a brief second. His eyes actually twinkled.

“Well,” he said, “sometimes we all have delusions of grandeur.”

Chapter 9

No matter what happened, that man left her terribly unnerved. Jodi left the rehab center with her head spinning. She believed that he didn’t remember much about the murders, just enough to convince him that he did it. She also believed that he was doing whatever he could to prevent another, at least consciously.

The idea that his subconscious wanted to kill women who interested him… well, that was more upsetting than she wanted to acknowledge. Because she didn’t get a sense of evil from this man, and she usually got a sense of evil from evil people/creatures.

She wondered if the attraction and the charm overwhelmed her own sense of danger. She didn’t know if that awareness-of-evil sense came from her domestic magic or if it was just a part of her. If it came from her magic—and she had never seen anything to convince her that it did or did not—then something he had done had overwhelmed it.

And it would imply that he had done something to overwhelm those wards all those years ago.

She drove back to her office with the top down and songs blaring, although once she got to work, she had no sense of what she listened to. A group of gnomes huddled in her front yard like a defeated army. After she got out of the car, she discovered that they didn’t want to be classified as “little people” on a movie set, and they were tossed off for being unnecessarily political.

It took three phone calls to settle that mess, and another to deal with shape-shifter revolt on the set of the latest
Twilight
knockoff. Mostly her job was either about finesse (the gnome crisis) or about plausible lies (the shape-shifter issue). And her lies weren’t even that plausible. No one really listened in Hollywood, so long as the problem got taken care of.

She half expected to see Tank, but Tank didn’t show. Jodi left a message at the Archetype Place because that was the only way she knew how to reach Tank. But no one there had seen Tank for a week, which wasn’t that unusual. Tank did what Tank did, and usually without letting anyone know about it.

Jodi got her dinner at In-n-Out Burger—simple cheeseburger, fries, and a vanilla shake. She’d planned to eat better for years, really, and she did exercise (didn’t everyone in LA?), but on days like this, days when she couldn’t quite deal with all the various stresses, she ate badly. On purpose.

Still, she didn’t eat the burger in her car or at one of those never-quite-clean tables. She got takeout and brought it home.

Home was a 1924 Spanish-style bungalow in Hancock Park. Jodi had bought the house new, although it had taken work. Back then, people who looked like her couldn’t buy homes in Hancock Park which was, at the time, the most upscale part of the budding city of Los Angeles. Jodi had a friend from the Kingdoms who did an appearance spell, so Jodi’s looks matched the neighborhood’s desires—only for her dealings with the bank. Once she purchased the house, she went back to her usual look. At the time, the neighbors thought she was the help and didn’t pay attention to her. But others did. Nat King Cole bought a house in the area in 1948, partly because he thought the neighborhood was friendly, since he’d been to parties at Jodi’s house. Instead, he was the one credited (correctly) with breaking the color barrier—since he was the first one to challenge it.

Jodi just went around it, like she did so many other goofy and inexplicable things in the Greater World.

She was feeling the weight of those things as she let herself into the house, balancing her purse, her phone, the bag of greasy food, and her briefcase. She put the phone in its recharging cradle on the occasional table beside the door—she was damned if she was going to talk to anyone tonight—then she kicked off her shoes, walked stocking-footed across the polished hardwood floor, and dropped her purse and briefcase along the way.

She was tired, grumpy, and hungry. Normally, she would have set herself a plate at the breakfast nook in the kitchen, but she didn’t. She went straight to the family room off the pool, dropped the burger bag on the ratty coffee table she kept for just that purpose, turned on the big-screen TV on the wall, and set it to show her sixteen channels at the same time. She didn’t care which sixteen channels she watched; she just wanted faces and noise and something to think about besides hiring the magical and just how disturbing her conversation with Bluebeard had been.

Of course, the TV found three local news channels and all of them were running stories on the Fairy Tale Stalker. No new photos, no new sketches, nothing except that there’d been another sighting or visitation or whatever the hell you wanted to call it, this time in Echo Park, an area of the city he hadn’t worked before.

If indeed what the stalker was doing was work. She wasn’t so sure. It seemed to her it was someone magical getting his rocks off by scaring mortal women.

She gave up, clicked on KTLA, and watched their coverage, feeling slightly dirty as she did so. She couldn’t quite get it out of her mind that she had talked with a man just that morning who was as sick (sicker) than the Fairy Tale Stalker.

And she knew, had she met him under other circumstances without any idea about his past, that she would have liked him—if, of course, he had looked her in the eye when he was talking to her. Otherwise, she would have thought him attractive but strange. (And maybe not even human; she’d known some feline shape-shifters who couldn’t handle direct eye contact on first meeting because in the feline world direct eye contact was considered threatening.)

She shuddered at the thought. She finished her vanilla shake, packed up her mess, and patted her too-full stomach. She didn’t usually overeat like that. But she did feel better.

She had a long night ahead of her. In addition to the work she had brought home, she also had to make about a dozen wards. Despite what she had seen in Bluebeard’s magic, despite Tank’s belief that the man had nothing to do with the current stalking cases, Jodi would be remiss if she didn’t protect herself from Bluebeard and from people like him.

Someone had warded the rehab center against fairies, which meant that someone either wanted to keep Bluebeard’s only friend away from him or that someone had another agenda, one that had nothing to do with Bluebeard or with Tank or with anyone that Jodi knew.

She would have to ask Tank if she had any dealings with the staff at the center. But she had a hunch Tank would say no. Tank didn’t like to deal with mortals any more than she had to. Jodi doubted anyone at the center wanted to keep Tank out.

Still, those wards at the rehab center had given Jodi the idea. She needed to make sure her house was protected, at least for the short term. Especially if Bluebeard had told her the truth—if he had no control over what he did to a woman who came to his attention. And he was right: Jodi had come to his attention.

Tank had put her in an impossible position, and Jodi needed to deal with it in all ways—not just intellectually, but practically and magically.

She needed to make sure she was safe.

Chapter 10

Blue sat alone in the reading room, a single light on the table focused on the printouts before him. Jodi had given him nearly five hundred pages of material, organized by date, with notes on the top. She clearly hadn’t compiled this. He found on the top of the first sheet a Post-it signed by someone named Ramon (who had very flowery handwriting, and who used a scented purple pen). Ramon’s handwriting covered the notes, and the deeper Blue dug, the more grateful he became to this mystery Ramon.

Ramon was quite the organizer, and he made wading through this material very easy. Not that Blue was wading. He was reading with increasing horror.

The reading room was on the far end of the main building. He liked to think that no one else came here because it was named “the reading room,” as opposed to the library. But the reading room was the only place in the center that had books.

They covered the walls, with newer battered paperbacks scattered on various racks throughout the room. Every time he came to the center he saw new books, so he figured that patients left them when they checked out.

Sometimes he just spent the entire night in here reading fiction. He had trouble sleeping because of all the nightmares, so he tried to do as little of it as possible.

On this night in particular, he had a hunch he would have trouble sleeping, even if he hadn’t had the excuse of the documents to keep him up.

He had told Jodi more about himself than he had told anyone except Tank. And Tank had pried some of this out of him when he was drunk. He didn’t remember telling her, but she knew.

Shortly after he sat down, one of the staff brought him some bottled water and some fresh fruit.

“Another late night?” he’d asked Blue sympathetically.

Blue had shrugged. “Is there anything else?”

The people here were kind to him, and they did do the best they could to accommodate him, given their mission to “heal” him. He always supposed that they did so because of his charm and because they had no idea who he was.

He rubbed a hand over his eyes. The Fairy Tale Stalker was a misnomer. This guy, whoever he was, terrorized these women. The entire mess had started several months ago and got a short column in the local papers, primarily because the whole thing sounded so LA and ridiculous.

A man appeared in a woman’s bedroom claiming to be Bluebeard. He told her, in a “watery” voice (her term), that he would visit her again, and the next time he would make her “his.” Then his voice changed, sounding panicked. He spoke rapidly, as if he was trying to get the words out before they failed him. (Again, this was her description, in a longer piece written later.)

He said, “After you’re mine, I will cut off your head and keep it forever.”

And then he disappeared. Again, that was her word. He appeared, and then he disappeared.

She called 911, and the police did respond rather quickly (she was in an upscale neighborhood), but they couldn’t find anything. No sign of forced entry, and her alarms were still activated—she had to deactivate them to let the police in. No footprints outside the house, and she had never given her key to anyone, not even a neighbor.

The cops initially wrote it up as a “bad dream” call and laughed about it, but it was so bizarre that one of them told the beat reporter who handled local crime. That was how the story initially broke.

The man “appeared” two more times to the woman, freaking her out but never touching her, and not talking to her. The cops would have thought (maybe did think) the woman was a nut, until another woman reported the same thing.

Then another, and another, and finally, the cops got a clue that this stalker was a problem. There were dozens of theories, all of them about “special effects” and “Hollywood magic,” as if the guy was some kind of projection sent from another building. But the cops couldn’t figure out where that projection came from.