“There’s one more under there,” he noticed as he started to rise. “The one you brought in today.”
“Oh. Right.” Part of her had hoped he’d forget that one. “Yeah, well, it’s nothing much. No big.”
“I’m greedy, remember? Hand it over.”
“Okay, sure.” She stretched out for it, dumped it in his lap. “I’ll get the champagne.”
He grabbed her arm before she could get up. “Just hold on a minute, until I see what I have here.” He shoved aside tissue paper, drew it out, and said only, “Oh.”
She struggled not to squirm. “You said you wanted a picture, you know, like from before.”
“Oh,” he repeated, and the expression on his face had color rising up her neck. “Look at you.” His eyes moved from image to woman, so full of pleasure, of surprise, of love, her throat went tight.
“I just dug it out, and picked up a frame.”
“When was it taken?”
“Right after I went into the Academy. This girl I hung with a little, she was always taking pictures. I was trying to study, and she—”
“Your hair.”
She shifted, a little uncomfortable. In the picture she was sitting at a desk, discs piled around her. She wore a dull gray Police Academy sweatshirt. Her hair was long, pulled back in a tail.
“Yeah, I used to wear it long back then. Figured it was less trouble because I could just tie it back out of my way. Then in hand-to-hand training, my opponent grabbed it, yanked, and took me down. I lopped it off.”
“Look at your eyes. Cop’s eyes even then. Hardly more than a child, and you knew.”
“I knew if she didn’t get that camera out of my face so I could study, I was going to clock her.”
He laughed, took her hand, but remained riveted on the photograph. “What happened to her?”
“She washed out, made it about a month. She was okay. She just wasn’t—”
“A cop,” he finished. “Thank you for this. It’s so exactly what I wanted.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder, let the lights of the tree dazzle her and thought, Who needs champagne?
Chapter 19
SHE WOKE, THOUGHT SHE WOKE, IN THE brilliantly lit room with the glass wall. She was wearing her diamonds, and the cashmere robe. There was a towering pine in the corner, rising up to the ceiling. The ornaments draping its arching boughs, she saw, were corpses. Hundreds of bodies hung, covered with blood red as Christmas.
All the women, only women, were gathered around it.
“Not very celebratory,” Maxie, the lawyer, said, and gave Eve a little elbow poke. “But you’ve got to make do, right? How many of those are yours?”
She didn’t need the magnifying glass weighing down her pocket to identify the faces, the bodies, the dead. “All of them.”
“That’s a little greedy, don’t you think?” Maxie turned, nodded toward the body splayed in the center of the room. “She hasn’t been put up yet.”
“No, she can’t go up yet. She isn’t finished.”
“Looks done to me. But here.” She tossed Eve a white sock weighed with credits. “Go ahead.”
“That’s not the answer.”
“Maybe you just haven’t asked the right question.”
She found herself in the glass room with the children. The child she’d been sat on the floor and looked up at her with tired eyes.
“I don’t have any presents. I don’t care.”
“You can have this.” Eve crouched down, held out her badge. “You’ll need it.”
“She has all the presents.”
Eve looked through the glass and saw that gifts were piled now around the body. “Lot of good they’ll do her now.”
“It’s one of us, you know.”
Eve glanced back, studied the room full of little girls. Then looked into her own eyes. “Yes, I know.”
“What will you do?”
“Take the one who did it away. That’s what happens when you kill someone. You have to pay. There has to be payment.”
The girl she’d been held up her hands, and they were smeared with blood. “Am I going, too?”
“No.” And she felt it, even in the dream she knew was a dream, she felt the ache in her belly. “No,” she said again, “it’s different for you.”
“But I can’t get out.”
“You will one day.” She looked back through the glass, frowned. “Weren’t there more presents a minute ago?”
“People steal.” The child hooked the bloodied badge on her shirt. “People are just no damn good.”
Eve woke with a hard jolt, the dream already fading. It was weird, she thought, to have dreams where you talked to yourself.
And the tree. She remembered the tree with the bodies draped like morbid tinsel. To comfort herself she turned, studied the tree in the window. She ran a hand over the sheet beside her, found it cool.
It didn’t surprise her that Roarke was up before her, or that he’d been up long enough for the sheets to lose his warmth. But it did give her a shock to see that it was nearly eleven in the morning.
She started to roll out of her own side, and saw the blinking memo cube on the nightstand. She switched in on, heard his voice.
“Morning, darling Eve. I’m in the game room. Come play with me.”
It made her smile. “Such a sap,” she murmured.
She showered, dressed, grabbed coffee, then headed down. Proving, she decided, she was a sap, too.
He had the main screen engaged, and it gave her yet another jolt to see herself up there, in a pitched and bloody battle. Why she was wielding a sword instead of a blaster, she couldn’t say.
He fought back-to-back with her, as he had, she remembered, in reality. And there was Peabody, wounded, but still game. But what the hell was her partner wearing?
More important, what was she wearing. It looked like some soft of leather deal more suited for S and M than swordplay.
Iced, she decided, when she lopped off her opponent’s head. Moments later, Roarke dispatched his, and the comp announced he’d reached Level Eight.
“I’m good,” she announced and crossed to him.
“You are. And so am I.”
She nodded at the paused screen. “What’s up with the outfits?”
“Feeney added costume options. I’ve had an entertaining hour fiddling with wardrobe as well as taking over most of Europe and North America. How’d you sleep?”
“Okay. Weird dream again. I can probably blame it on champagne, and the chocolate souffle I pigged out on at two in the morning.”
“Why don’t you stretch out here with me? This game’s programmed for multiple players. You can try to invade my territories.”
“Maybe later.” She ran an absent hand over his hair. “I’ve got this dream on my brain. Sometimes they’re supposed to mean stuff, right? There’s something in there. I’m not asking the right question,” she murmured. “What’s the right question?”
Playtime, he decided, was over for now.
“Why don’t we have a little brunch? You can talk it through.”
“No, go ahead and play the game. I’m good with coffee.”
“I slept in myself, didn’t get up until about nine.”
“Has anyone looked outside, checked to see if the world is still spinning on its axis?”
“At which time,” he continued dryly, “I had a workout—I had soufflé, too. Then, before I came down here to enjoy one of my gifts, I worked about an hour in my office.”
She studied him over the rim of her cup. “You worked.”
“I did.”
“On Christmas morning.”
“Guilty.”
She lowered the cup, grinned hugely. “We’re really sick people, aren’t we?”
“I prefer thinking we’re very healthy individuals who know what suits us best.” He rose, lithe as a cat in black jeans and sweater. “And what would suit us, I believe, is something light, up in the solarium where we can lord it over the city while you talk through your latest weird dream.”
“You know what I said last night?”
“Drunk or sober?”
“Either. I said I loved you. Still do.”
They had fresh fruit at the top of the house, looking through the glass at a sky that decided to give New York a break and coast over it bright and blue.