Damn Him to Hell (34 page)

I’d lose track of all the asshats I’d visualized out of my way if I did it too often. I needed to remember to give them term limits when I cursed them. For now, I was hoping that once they learned their lessons, they’d work themselves out of whatever I’d thrown them into. Or maybe they’d make radical changes in their lifestyles and the world would be a better place. Not sure the frogs had minds enough to do that, though. That had been fun at the time, but a major big boo-boo on my part now that reality had set in. Maybe I ought to gather the frogs and take care of them until I figured out how to fix things.

Tim jogged down the stairs, saw me in the front parlor, and came in jiggling my car keys. “Thanks, Tina,” he said diffidently, handing them back. “Pearl wouldn’t get in the car with an invisible driver, but we did okay.”

Milo leapt down to say hi to Tim, and I dropped the keys in my bag. “You’ll learn to control it eventually,” I assured him. “Guess I need to give you driving lessons, though.”

He shrugged. I’d taken him to Goodwill a few months ago to help him pick out clothes since Pearl had thrown all his out when he’d first turned invisible. He was outgrowing them already, thank goodness. He was wearing a tie-dyed pink wife-beater and lemon-green mini-shorts today. And his shaggy, nondescript hair needed a cut. I thought he could be one of the good guys that the Zone made into good men—like Bill.

“It’s like having family, y’know?” he said cryptically.

I smiled as I took his meaning. “Pearl can be your grandmother, but Nancy Rose has to be your mother, not me. I’m just the annoying older sister. And you’re my bratty baby brother.” I’d never particularly wanted siblings, but Tim was a good kid.

He nodded solemnly. “Can you make Andre better?”

“I would if I could, but I’m no doctor. I guess we wait to see what happens.” I hated that. I’d already tried visualizing our patients out of their comas, but apparently fixing things wasn’t in the interest of justice. It hadn’t worked. I should run over to my place and grab my tablet now that I was awake, see if Fat Chick or someone knew the answer.

“Can I have the keys back to visit Nancy Rose at the hospital?”

I pointed at the kitchen. “You can go make us some sandwiches. You need a driver’s permit and lessons before I let you in my car outside of an emergency.”

“You can’t blame a guy for trying.” He ambled off toward the back of the house.

I returned to petting Milo and watching out the window. I could go in and check on Andre, but I wasn’t much of a nurse. The baby docs had all gone home now that their patients had been taken from them. Maybe I should hire one to help out Julius. Like I had any money to do that.

I was hurting bad and needed to do something.

I’d almost convinced myself that talking things out with Sarah was worth the risk when a familiar male voice jarred me out of my reverie.

“Any chance of getting food around here?”

I swung my legs back to the floor and stared at the doorway. Andre leaned against the doorjamb, wearing impeccably draped dark trousers, a blue silk shirt open at the neck, and a hungry gaze that had my insides performing acrobatics.

I
’m not ashamed to say that I flung myself into Andre’s arms and kissed him. It was one hell of a good kiss, if I do say so myself. Andre might make me crazy, but man, he had some major mojo happening. He hauled me off the floor, flattened my breasts into his solid chest, grabbed my ass, and applied a whole lot of tongue until my head reeled. And other parts south. All those hormones mixed with ecstatic joy—
combustible
. I might even have been crying while I ran my hands through his silky hair.

Julius’s coming down the stairs interrupted us. Andre muttered an expletive and reluctantly lowered me to the floor, taking full frontal advantage while he was at it. I wasn’t averse to some titillating body
contact and a good whiff of unshaved male. I needed to make certain he was solid and real and all there. I didn’t even want to punch him out for a change.

He was still my client, though, so I shoved away as my senior partner hurried in, his face alight with delight and relief.

“I’ll help Tim fix lunch,” I muttered, leaving the two of them alone.

“I’ll go with you.” Andre caught my arm, not letting me escape that easily. I’m not much on succumbing to alpha males, but I made an exception this time.

Andre’s kitchen was even fancier than Julius’s: larger, with more granite and stainless steel and fancy machinery that had probably never been touched. I was amazed Andre allowed Tim anywhere near it. I pried myself away from Andre’s grasp to examine the refrigerator’s contents.

“I am not going through this hell ever again,” I warned as I removed goodies. “I need explanations. You can’t just rise from the dead when no one else can and pretend everything is normal. That’s the stuff of zombie movies.”

The echoing silence even had Tim glancing up from the array of food I’d spread on the counter.

“Why don’t Tim and I make some nice sandwiches?” Julius said politely. “The two of you can go in the other room and catch up.”

That sounded ominous. Tim scowled when Andre grabbed my arm, but he had even less authority than me around here.

Andre dragged me out of the kitchen instead of
snarking, and I tensed with anxiety. Andre treating one of my questions seriously meant the answer had to be bad, indeed. Might as well clear the air while I had a chance of him listening. “How come the gas made
me
go ballistic and not comatose, but you, the macho man, went the other way? How can you wake up and the others can’t?”

He dropped me back on his couch and loomed over me. “I’ve been inoculated,” he said. “Not a word of this goes beyond this room, understand?”

His dark eyebrows pulled down in a scowl and his whiskered jaw created the kind of bad-boy image that made my heart go pitty-pat. He looked sane. But his muscles were tense enough to make me think I’d just revealed national secrets.

“You’re my client. They can’t even make me talk in a court of law,” I informed him, growing more worried by the minute. “
Inoculated
with what? Crazy gas?”

“They didn’t have the gas back then.” He paced up and down his gorgeous brown and cream silk rug. “I was using anything I could get my hands on when I came back from overseas.”

“Crap.” I dropped my head in my hands, my overworked imagination picturing über-cool Andre with three-day-old scruff and needle tracks up his arm.

“Paddy used a mixture of magic element in treating my mother,” Andre reminded me. “I thought comatose would be better than the hell I was living. But I tried it in smaller quantities.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I get it. I’ve smoked a joint or
two, and I didn’t have the excuse of shattered nerves from being shot at and tortured. Get to the point before Tim sneaks in.”

“The magic formula knocked me into a dreamworld, but not enough to keep me there, like my mother. So I shot up anytime I wanted escape.” He stopped there.

I flashed him my best glower. Andre just stood in the middle of his elegant apartment, exuding fiendish magnetism and arrogance. I wanted to dump a bucket of chocolate fondue over his head and bite him. Maybe sensing my antagonism, he dropped into his fancy leather pedestal recliner—the one remarkably similar to Dane’s.

“That’s it?” I asked in disbelief. “So because you played with fire back then, you can get gassed now and you just take a nap and come back better than ever?”

“It’s not all good,” he warned. “There are side effects. I don’t have hallucinations, but if I go into emotional overload, whatever is in my system reacts in reverse. I go comatose without need of gas.”

Okay, I’d seen that. I’d seen him go gray around the edges. I’d seen him pass out. I knew he sometimes disappeared at inconvenient times when I needed him most. Magic gas kicking in. Got it. Didn’t like it, but at least it was an explanation. And better than going berserk. Even explained his practice of über-coolness.

I worked through some of this, but it just wasn’t enough. “How come Sarah came back? And the others didn’t?”

“You brought Sarah back. Don’t ask me how. The others . . . They didn’t have my immunity.” Swinging his long legs onto the ottoman, he dragged his hand through his hair and frowned. “Paddy believes the same thing as Bergdorff—that the element has a healing ability that can be distilled. In a way, it healed my psychosis. And it cured my mother’s cancer. But we were experimenting with different levels of the drug, different mixtures.”

“So this stuff Acme is working on really is like a drug that can cure cancer?” Wow. Damned good thing I hadn’t blown up the plant. “But didn’t Bergdorff say we’d ruined his last batch?”
Shit
. We’d probably doomed the world, if so.

“What good does curing cancer do if it sends the patient to another dimension?” Andre asked grumpily, leaning back. “It’s like living another life beyond the veil, really freaky. I’ve learned to jerk myself out of it in sheer frustration, but the others . . . Maybe they
prefer
dreamland to reality. Or maybe they don’t know it’s not reality.”

I rubbed my brow as if that would help me absorb this new revelation. “You mean, you’re not just sleeping? You’re hallucinating or something?”

“Or something,” he agreed. “What time is it? I need a drink.”

“You don’t drink,” I reminded him. “For good reason, apparently. Explain ‘or something.’ ”

He didn’t want to. I’d learned to recognize Andre’s evasive tactics. But this was too important for me to stay uninvolved. I set Milo back down and pointed him at Andre. “Get in his face, will you?”

I could swear, my cat almost laughed. And then he roared as I’d heard him do when offended, launched from the floor at Andre’s head, and tilted the whole damned chair backward with his heavy weight.

The resulting crash brought Tim and Julius running. Andre was lying flat on his back, buried under a hefty blur of ginger fur, cursing blue blazes while Milo kneaded his chest. It’s possible my kitty took a bite or two, because Andre yelped and shoved the cat away.

“We’re learning a new game,” I told Julius, wearing my most sincere expression. “Go back to your sandwiches. Andre doesn’t like losing.”

Julius is a brilliant man. Verifying that his son was furious but unharmed, he led Tim out of the range of danger.

“What the devil was that for?” Andre demanded, returning to his feet and straightening the chair. “You’ve trained an attack cat?”

“Milo is a natural, and I sicced him on you because this is no time for you to equivocate. I’ve
counted
on you to watch my back, while you were hanging out in Shangri-la. I need to understand why.”

“I don’t know what you’re warping into, but you’re developing a Wonder Woman complex with your frog voodoo,” he grumbled, taking a high-backed wing chair with four legs instead of a pedestal base. “What you really want is to save the world and magically bring back Bill and the others. You have to get a grip. It’s just not happening. Don’t you think I would help if I could?”

“Not totally sure,” I admitted. “You might miss Bill
at the bar, but you don’t care a whit about the others. So make this about your mother.” This line of questioning had no rhyme or reason. Andre would have saved his mother if there were any way of doing it. But I just couldn’t get past the possibility that if Andre and Sarah could come back, there had to be some way of saving the others. “Where do you go when you’re not here?”

“I told you, it’s a dreamworld. It’s not real. My mother is there sometimes. I thought I saw Bill this last time, and Sarah before she woke. But take my word for it, I’m really in my bed. Witnesses tell me I haven’t stirred, just like the others. My subconscious is simply mixing stuff up and making it seem real, like in dreams, except I remember some of it when I wake up.”

“I remember some dreams when I wake up. This must be different if you’re not telling me about it. What do you do in these dreams?” I felt as if I’d burst through my skin if I didn’t get answers. I’d taken out Bergdorff for him. Andre
owed
me explanations.

He glared. “Time in dreams isn’t linear like in the real world. I see and do things over there that sometimes happen later, here.”

I dropped back against his plush sofa and processed this with disbelief. “When you told us we wouldn’t find the will at Gloria’s, it was because you’d dreamed it was somewhere else?”

“I dreamed we wouldn’t find it,” he corrected. “But I didn’t dream
where
to find it. And things don’t happen in logical order. Years ago, I dreamed of being attacked by soldiers, so I built the arsenal closet. It was pretty pointless until last week.”

“Paranoid dreams.” I wanted them to be more. I wanted them to be a clue that would help save our zombies. I swallowed my disappointment. “I don’t suppose you’ve dreamed anything about us saving the comatose?”

“No, not a thing,” he said wearily. “Can we let this go?”

I didn’t want to. I wanted a blow-by-blow description of this world he repeatedly returned to when stressed. I wanted to go there myself, but I was apparently one of the morally questionable who went berserk when gassed. And I wasn’t about to shoot up. No pleasant dreamworlds for me.