“Troy, darling!” she said, sweeping in like a modern-day Scarlett descending the staircase at Tara. She was dressed in bejeweled sandals, white jeans, and a bright coral top showcasing the rest of her gravity-defying assets. Her light blond curls had been swiftly pulled back in a style only confident older women could pull off, and not for the first time I wondered how old she really was. She looked anywhere from twenty-eight to forty-two, the high side fathomable only because Cher had told me she was “ages” older than us.
Eyes glazed, Troy began spewing sexual pheromones so potent I got dizzy. Suzanne’s eight-mile-a-day runs must have paid off in ways never fathomed by a superhero. Or maybe it had something to do with that piercing I’d seen earlier.
“I’m going to go check on Cher. You kids have fun,” I said, breathing shallowly, wanting to get out of there before Troy started humping her leg. Yet Cher appeared just then, looking like a newborn Bambi, legs not quite steady, but clearly determined.
“Are you okay, baby?” Suzanne asked, rushing to her side.
“You should sit down, Cher,” I said, doing the same. “Let me get you a cool washcloth or something.”
Troy shook himself from his lust-saturated state. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She was hit by a piece of lead,” I said. And who knew a number two could pack such a wallop?
“Don’t worry, honey,” Suzanne said, drawing Cher across the room to a chenille-covered armchair. “You’ll be fine. Nothing a glass of wine won’t fix.”
“I’ll get it,” I said quickly.
As I headed to the bar tucked just around the corner, Troy started in on a story about how he’d once rescued a girlfriend from a homicidal rodeo clown who’d used the pro circuit to stalk women in five different states. I scooped some ice into a steel shaker and rolled my eyes. Taking care of innocents was rewarding, but sometimes it was also a pain in the ass. After all, innocent really meant human, and humans were flawed, capricious creatures, and sometimes downright mean. Taking down a rapist or molester was easily the best part of my job.
The worst? Standing by, like now, and watching the petty slights, the sleazy intentions, and the domestic dramas…things we had no obligation, and indeed no right to interfere with. People had to make their own mistakes, but that didn’t make it any easier to stand aside and watch bad choices and shortsightedness play havoc with lives.
“Here you go,” I said, returning to Cher with the cocktail. I offered an encouraging smile at her puzzled look. “Vodka instead of wine,” I told her, before lowering my voice to a whisper. “Fewer calories.”
Cher teared up before accepting the drink with shaking hands. “I love you.”
A quarter of an hour later Cher was revived enough to kneel with me in her mother’s hangar-sized closet, where we shoved aside enough evening gowns to supply Suzanne with a new car, if she wanted one. These disks, I thought, leaning back on my heels, changed everything. At the least they meant I no longer had to pick Cher’s brain about things I should know, risk raising her suspicions, or hope she’d slip up and deliver salient bits of information in an unguarded moment.
A moment like now.
“So if you’re not starting up your business again,” she said, exposing the floor safe, concealed stylishly beneath an Hermès scarf, “I guess that means you’re still trying to find Ashlyn?”
Ashlyn.
My exuberance over the backups died. Dammit, Olivia.
“Olivia?”
I swallowed hard, not entirely trusting my voice. “It’s just…Joanna didn’t want me to do that, you know?”
She scoffed. “You used to say that was all the more reason to do a thing.”
“Well, that was before she died trying to save my life,” I retorted, and had to bite my tongue before I said more. I had died in a way, I thought. Died in trying. Died in failing.
Cher took a moment before answering. “And that means you can’t continue looking for her daughter?”
It was an effort, but I kept my voice even. “Joanna didn’t have a daughter.”
“Your niece?”
“I don’t have-”
“A child that’s a part of your family no matter the circumstances under which she entered this world? No matter who the father-”
“Stop!” I yelled, then winced, squeezing my eyes shut. “Please…stop.”
I remained unmoving until my breathing had evened out again, but it was too late. My mind had opened. The scented memories of blood and new life slipped out like water leaking from fissures in a dam, slight cracks I’d been patching up for a decade, hoping they wouldn’t expand and give. I was afraid if they did I’d be swallowed up, ferried away on them like a piece of driftwood. I shook my head, told myself they were unimportant, and cemented them away tight.
Cher fumbled with the combination in the elongated silence, and I reached out to steady the martini tipping in her left hand. She shot me a thankful smile-and an apologetic one-then reached inside and pulled out three disks. “Here you are.”
“Thanks,” I said quietly, accepting them.
Cher closed up the safe and sat back on her heels. Biting her lip, she tried to put on a happy face. She and Olivia argued so rarely that the smell of her discomfort overpowered even the leather from all the shoes lining the closet. “We still on for a mint mudbath tomorrow?”
Shit. I’d forgotten about that. “Uh, Cher? I’m going to have to pass.”
“Why? Are you ill? Injured? Is it fatal?” She was joking, but I could tell it was strained. I laughed brightly like I knew Olivia would, and watched some of the strain ease away.
“No, but something came up,” I said, which was true. “I have to go out of town for a bit,” I added, which wasn’t.
But it wasn’t like I could say, Hey, I have the chance to kill the man who’s haunted my dreams for a decade. After that I need to hang at my superhero hideout for a bit. Try to find out what plans my evil birth father has concocted for our demise.
“You’ve been going out of town a lot lately,” she said, and I bit my lip at her suspicious tone. Cher would never suspect the truth-at least not without finger puppets to explain it-but she wasn’t supposed to be suspicious of Olivia. And any deviation from normal could tip off the Shadows to my real identity.
Those who didn’t already know it, I thought wryly.
I decided to play the sympathy card…though I’d done it so much recently it was a bit worn at the edges. “Sometimes I just have to get away, Cher. You know…from the apartment, from this town.” A vision of Olivia plummeting to her death came to me unbidden, and I swallowed hard. “From this life.”
“Your life isn’t so bad,” Cher said, softly encouraging. “I mean, you could have dark roots.”
I smiled as a sigh shuddered out of her. “Or wear a shoe size so large Manolo doesn’t make it,” I said, having studied up for an occasion such as this.
“Or have been born in an age where men abducted women and sold them into slavery.”
“And pulled them around by their hair,” I said, getting into it.
“What?” Cher paused. “You don’t like that?”
I laughed. I hadn’t always liked Cher; we’d had a fierce, if unspoken, competition for Olivia’s attention while she’d still been alive, but she’d grown on me these past months. Like a fungus. But the good kind.
Now that things were easy between us again, she passed me her martini, watching as I took a small sip. “You’ll miss the Valhalla party. Some are saying it’ll be the party of the year.”
I shrugged. It couldn’t be helped. I’d be tucked safely into the sanctuary by then, and who knew what Warren had planned for me there.
“We’re on the VIP list, of course,” she said, taking back her drink. “So’s Troy.”
I grimaced, unable to help myself. “What does she see in him, anyway?”