My heart fell cold and plummeted to my toes.
“Cher?” I asked in a small voice. The last I’d seen her, she’d just been tossed none-too-gently from Tripp’s back. Where she’d only been because of me. Just like Olivia.
Oh God. If something had happened to the vapid, shallow, softhearted ninny because of me…
As I searched Suzanne’s swollen red eyes, the fine lines of worry around them crinkled, belying her age. “She’s in the hospital, but she’s fine. They’re making sure the bump on her head is no more than just that.”
“Like we should do with you,” the tech put in, blotting out Suzanne as she shone a light into my eyes.
I let out a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding, and blinked away the spots and threatening tears. Suzanne gave me a watery smile when I again met her gaze, while a stethoscope was pressed to my back. The tech had the endless pockets of a circus clown.
“But what happened to you?” Suzanne asked as I was dragged to the bright interior of one of the ambulances and pushed onto a stretcher despite my obvious fitness. I concocted a story about being woken by the sound of sirens, alone in an alley, sans pocketbook. I was halfway through an explanation of the alley’s other inhabitants when a man sidled up next to Suzanne.
“Excuse me.” He had a cop’s inflection, though he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I sat up, ignoring the EMT’s protests, eyes flicking to the badge at his waist. “Can we finish your statement now?”
Suzanne looked at me with injured eyes. “They won’t let me go to the hospital until I finish telling them everything I know.”
Like she was a criminal.
I turned a cold eye on the cop. “Her daughter is there.”
“Stepdaughter,” he clarified, and Suzanne and I both narrowed our eyes. “And if we get this over with now, we can find the man who did this to her much faster.”
I put a comforting arm around Suzanne, who’d begun softly weeping. “You clearly don’t have children.”
His brow lifted. “And you do, Miss Archer?”
The professional tone altered into derision. I leaned forward, slipping a fraction inside of his personal space. “I have people I care about, if that’s what you’re asking. I was with one of them when she got knocked unconscious by…” A Shadow agent. A rotted man. A grave-dodger. “…a cowboy.”
“Then maybe I should take your comments as well.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, matching the arctic chill in his voice, and before he could protest, I sat back. “I’m suddenly feeling a little dizzy.”
The EMT glommed onto me like she’d been waiting for those words, and my arm was cuffed before I blinked. The officer shifted into view over her shoulder, mouth thinned. “Then maybe I should contact you at your workplace instead?”
“Sure,” I said lightly. I pointed with my free arm into the distance at the tallest, brightest building in the sky. Valhalla Hotel and Casino. Which I now owned. “You know where it is.”
His eyes narrowed into pinpricks. “Yes, being a casino heiress seems to pay very well. Though even the loftiest job can’t keep you safe all the time, huh?”
He dug out a business card and handed it to me, and one to Suzanne as well. “You ladies contact me if you manage to think of anything useful.”
Suzanne, missing the slight, just sniffled as she deposited the card in her purse. I crossed my legs and gave him a carefree smile, letting it fall when he joined a handful of other officers across the lot. After a moment they looked over, shaking their heads and muttering under their breaths. I knew how Suzanne and I looked in our designer wear and bleached hair-like two fireflies trapped in a bottle between the late night neon and harsh ambulatory lights. I didn’t need superhearing to know they thought us frivolous and useless, our brain matter as thin as tissue. Everyone made judgments based on first impressions, and police officers were most often proven right. Besides, how could those men know that beneath this waxed, perfumed, sculpted frame was a former heroine with a vigilante’s heart?
Then again, most people had some form of street smarts lurking beneath their chosen exteriors. Even Suzanne had some iron to her spine. She ran marathons, had raised a teenager on her own, and navigated the annual sale at Nordy’s with a warrior’s instinct. I glanced over to find her cleaning her nail beds.
Well, a shark’s instinct, anyway.
But Suzanne’s sort of savvy, as well as Cher’s, was harmless. Admittedly I hadn’t always felt so benevolently toward them, but after being turned into Olivia, I’d lost the ability to sum a person up based on their skin alone. I no longer judged them for using their looks to shape their realities. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were operating a Ponzi scheme. Their need to shellac, color, and buff every possible body part was a bit obsessive, but it didn’t hurt anyone else. So big deal.
“Don’t pay attention to it, Livvy-girl.”
I hadn’t realized I was glaring at the clustered men until Suzanne spoke. I shook my head, my hearing taking a momentary dip until equilibrium returned. “They’re jerks.”
“Well, that’s as obvious as Terry’s need for attention,” she said wryly, causing both me and the tech-clearly the one to treat the distraught man-to snort. “But what did I tell you years ago, when you were broken-hearted for your sister and embarrassed about your runaway Momma?”
I frowned, not knowing. Olivia had never shared it with me. “Um…hot pink is the new black?”
She kept her gaze even and didn’t smile, that iron spine peeking through. “That it ain’t your business what other people think of you. Especially assholes.”
“But they’re wrong.”
“Which is their right.” She shrugged and started playing with some cables, letting them drop when the tech cleared her throat. “Can’t change it. Might as well ignore it.”
“Is that what you do?” I asked, then cringed when I realized I’d just told her people thought she was a bimbo.
“Yes,” Suzanne said resolutely. “I ignore the gossips and naysayers and, yup, the assholes, and just go about doing what I gotta do to claim my own life.”
I glanced back at the party bus containing booze, boas, and stripper poles.
She followed my gaze, pursing her lips. “You know, people criticized me when I married an older man, first saying I was a gold digger, then sayin’ I was the one who put him in his grave.” She swallowed hard at the memory. “But we shared a powerful love, even if it was short-lived.” She lifted her chin as she returned her gaze to me. “So I was never embarrassed about it. After all, I knew true love…”
“And how many people can claim that?” the EMT put in, sighing. Suzanne nodded.
Frowning, I thought of my childhood sweetheart, Ben, whom I’d outgrown through time and experience. Then of Hunter…who’d thrown me away.
“After Cher’s daddy died,” Suzanne continued, oblivious to my silence, “I was also criticized for tryin’ to raise a girl closer to my age than not. I neither had kids nor knew the first thing about ’em, but I knew something those assholes didn’t.”
“What?” asked the tech, wrapped up in Suzanne’s story. I wondered too.
Suzanne’s responding smile was fierce. “I needed that little girl’s love, just as I’d needed her daddy’s. And my little Cher-bear needed mine.”
Olivia had too. She’d escaped to their home after our mother abandoned us, and while I shut down-thinking I’d caused the abandonment-Olivia could only find ways to endure it.
Suzanne addressed the tech now, chatting like friends over tea. “So now people are talking about Arun like he’s a golden egg. Like I laid a trap and he slipped right in. But I’ll just chin up and ride through that too. Ride all the way into my late years like I’m straddlin’ the sunset. And you know why?”