Charming People

by A. L. Tyler

  “I’m sure. I want you in my life.” I couldn’t even find the right words. “I don’t want to be alone anymore. I trust you.”

  “That’s a mistake,” he whispered.

  I rose up on my elbows to kiss him. The feel of him against my bare skin was driving me insane. “I know. The job. I trust you, it’s okay.”

  He kissed me, his hand returning to grip the waistband of my jeans. His kisses trailed down my neck, between my breasts...

  He paused again, laying his forehead against my chest as he sighed.

  Something was wrong. I started to raise myself on my elbows, worried that my racing pulse had created some sort of potentially deadly conflict within him. “Nick?”

  He looked away, and then lifted his head, eyes closed like he was praying, breathing deep.

  “Nick?”

  “The picture. It’s not Samson Grift. It’s Sam Driftwood.”

  Chapter 29

  I wasn’t sure that I had heard him right. “What?”

  Nick sat up, moving away from me. He looked me directly in the eye. “The picture you found of Samson Grift at Felony Red’s isn’t Samson Grift. It’s Sam Driftwood. It’s your father, in that picture—”

  “What—” I sat up, inching back to my side of the car. “What are you saying, Nick? You’re in that picture. You and Robert are in that picture, and now you’re telling me...” Nick raised a hand to his mouth, looking away. “You knew the whole time.”

  The world was spinning. I didn’t know which way was up. I didn’t bother to put my shirt back on before getting out of the car, pulling on my jacket against the cold and slamming the car door shut.

  Nick’s door closed milliseconds after mine.

  “He was a brilliant breaker,” he said. “I’m not doing him any lip service. Brilliant, Jette, and not just a breaker—he was considered one of the best. Of everyone the Bleak had at their disposal. He was picked for this job because we needed an inside man, and he most closely matched the description.”

  I felt like I was going to be sick. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I shook from the cold and something else. “Stop talking.”

  “He underwent two years of training building up to it. I worked with him to perfect his mannerisms, and when we were done, he pulled it off brilliantly.”

  This was why no one knew if Samson Grift was alive or dead. Or, maybe in the Bleak’s custody.

  Maybe not.

  “Samson Grift is dead, Jette. I was there when he died. He was executed for his crimes, but the Bleak wanted an insider to his connections. Samuel Driftwood stepped in to take over his life.”

  “Stop. Talking.” I brought both hands to my forehead, stepping back twice before I found the house and leaned against it. They would kill both of us if they knew he’d told me.

  “He’s not imprisoned,” Nick said finally. “The story is that the Bleak claim to have killed him to save face over the fact that he escaped. Samson Grift—Samuel Driftwood—is still out there. He’s still an agent in good standing. He’s still out there.”

  He left me. He knew he was going—forever—and he left me.

  I turned to face the house, leaning into it and letting the stonework on the exterior bite into my forehead as I tried to remember to breath.

  All of those years. He was a free man, all of those years, and not once had he—

  “Jette.”

  I whipped back around to face Nick, hardly able to fight the rage I felt. This was not something I was meant to know. It wasn’t something I’d ever wanted to know, either.

  “You convinced me,” I said, hearing the hollowness in my voice. “I knew what I was looking at, and you convinced me.”

  He straightened his collar, re-buttoning his shirt. I saw the pain in his eyes, but I didn’t care. For all I knew, it was fake. “I had to protect him. It’s what you would have—”

  “No. No, no, no. You didn’t just lie to me. You convinced me. You made me trust you, and I was looking at a picture of my own father... You convinced me. You practically brainwashed me.” I licked my lips, and I could still taste him. I started to pace, wanting to crawl out of my skin. “How did you do that? How could I—I haven’t even known you three months, and now I’m half naked in your car and you’re telling me—gods, Nick, what did you tell me? Why did you tell me that?”

  I stopped pacing to fix my eyes on him.

  He blinked and looked down with a small nod. He took a deep breath before locking eyes with me again.

  “I had to protect you.”

  I didn’t want to believe it was true. “But, the box. The box that Robert said was behind my house, and you said you would go with me to dig it up?”

  He closed his eyes, pure guilt washing over his face. “I had a friend go there the night you mentioned it. The box is gone. Sam left a note in there, for you, in case—”

  There were no words.

  I turned and walked toward my front door, fetching the spare key for the front door from the place I had magically concealed it beneath a window. When I went in, Nick was still standing by his car. I slid down against the closed door.

  My cat, Bobby, raced over, meowing and purring excitedly. He launched himself into my lap and butted his head against my chin as I heard Nick slam his door shut and start the engine. The car retreated down the drive, and I was still sitting in the dark of my entryway, sure I had imagined the whole thing.

  My father had abandoned me to the streets. I’d devoted my life to freeing him and destroying the government that was unfairly incarcerating him—the government he had abandoned me to support. And Nick...

  He had brought me back from the brink. I was preparing to throw my life away for my father on principle until he lied to me.

  Convinced me.

  Seduced me.

  I laid a hand on Robert’s soft fur and he meowed in appreciation. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I let my hand fall to the floor, taking a deep breath. My fingers landed in something soft. A pile of dust, which was perfect: now, everything was a mess.

  I cursed my lack of interest in vacuuming as I glanced down.

  Sawdust.

  My eyes snapped up to scan the room. There was no reason for sawdust to be in my house.

  It’s here. Somewhere.

  No phone. No way to call Nick, or Marge, or anyone. I’d told Marge about the Mockers once: the cult of wizards who used death rituals to make living dolls that did their bidding. Creepy, button-eyed things with blank expressions, they were made of sawdust, fabric scraps, and broken souls. They moved without weight and murdered with all the emotional detachedness of doing one’s dishes. They were also known to do the dishes, coincidentally—they were magically created servants, doing anything their master instructed.

  Some of them, and especially the assassin dolls, were impervious to magical attacks. Stronger than gorillas.

  I lit a fireball in my hand anyway. If I could get to the kitchen, and the knives, I would at least have a weapon. I assessed the room as I leaned forward on my other hand, preparing to stand.

  My line of sight up the stairs was clear, and so was the hall on the second landing. I hadn’t switched on the lights yet, but from now on—sulkiness be damned—it was the first thing I was going to do when walking into my house.

  I gave the couch a wide berth as I peered over the back of it, and a basket of unfolded laundry nearly gave me a heart attack.

  Are they smart enough to hide? Maybe. Probably. I avoided the basket until I was at the pass-through to the kitchen, and that was when the smell hit me.

  Rot. Old eggs, fermenting fruit, and rancid bacon.

  Oh, gods. Breakfast, and all-night diners, had always been Alex’s thing.

  My eyes landed on the kitchen table, piled high with food that must have been prepared days ago. Flies swarmed around a bowl of chopped bananas and oranges and looked like living chocolate chips on a foot-tall stack of pancakes. The cutting board and knives were still unwashed on my kitchen island. T
he buttered pans were still sitting dirty on the range.

  Then it sat up. The sound of the spells springing to life sounded like a music box winding up.

  I jumped and cursed as Bobby hissed three times and let out a long, low growl next to my feet. The fireball in my hand misfired into the bountiful wasted meal on the table as the child-size doll, barely three feet tall and faster than an angry wolf, ran at me. I recoiled my hand and tried to call the spell again.

  A cloth hand closed on my wrist like a vice. The magic flame died.

  I pulled at every loose end of the enchantments that held it together, trying to break it, trying to silence the terrible clicking grind of its mechanics. And every time I seized hold of a stray sound and wanted to hush it in my mind, it twisted my arm with a promise that the bones would break.

  I finally relented, and so did the doll.

  Bobby was still hissing and growling. I stared into bottle-green button eyes. It had an uneven, stitched mouth that puckered to one side like an innocent grin, and a face made from old floral drape fabric. Yarn hair hung limply at the sides of its face, crusted with pancake batter, mud, and signs that Bobby might have been at it while the doll lay motionless in wait. It was dressed in toddlers’ overalls, threadbare fabric feet sticking out the bottom.

  But it was the nose that drew my attention the most. The doll had been made with a long, hooked, cruel nose, almost like a plague doctor’s mask. It was ugly, and next to the domestic fabric and child’s mouth, it looked obscene.

  I froze in my terror. If my heart hadn’t stopped already, I wished the creature would get on with it—staring into that face any longer would haunt me for life.

  The doll watched me, holding my wrist with inhuman strength. Its long nose drew near my face as it pulled me down and raised its other hand.

  This is it. This is how it ends.

  I prayed. I closed my eyes.

  And when nothing happened, I opened them to see the rose the doll held before my eyes. He only held it, waiting, glaring, because he wanted me to take it.

  I wasn’t touching it. My hearing told me it wasn’t cursed or hexed, but all the same, I wasn’t taking any chances.

  It felt like an eternity that the doll kept me, waiting, holding my arm so I couldn’t leave or cast. I had just started weighing the odds of my survival if I punched it in the face when it cocked its head and let me go.

  It set the rose on the counter next to me. It stepped away.

  Then it danced toward the front door, like a puppet on invisible strings, and left. The door swung open in the night as the sound of its fabric feet retreated down the porch.

  I collapsed forward onto both hands. I wanted to vomit, but I was shaking too hard.

  This was Alex. This was his foreplay. He knew where I lived, and when I was gone, and that I had used magic instead of a sitter to watch my cat.

  And he wanted me to know about my death before it happened. That it was going to be him.

  I picked up my cat, and I used my ametrine travel ring. I went the only place I knew I could go.

  Chapter 30

  Nick’s apartment was still empty when I arrived. All of his wards were still intact, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. Mine had sounded right, too.

  I stood in the long hallway by his front door, waiting, and hoping he was coming back. Because what if he went on a long drive? What if he had another case?

  I was shaking, and Bobby was cowering in my arms, and I didn’t know how long I could stand there, still wearing my jacket and a bra and no shirt, looking back and forth down the hall.

  Waiting for someone to kill me.

  I stayed on my feet. I didn’t want to let Alex get to me, but the fact that I could have been beaten to death next to a pile of rotting eggs and waffles shook me to my core. I’d let my emotions get the better of me, and thanks to that one slip...

  No. I wasn’t going to slip again. I wasn’t going out like that, and if that freaky-nosed plaything came at me now, I was going down swinging. Alex was a jealous man. I refused to believe he’d been watching me so closely without knowing about Nick.

  Gods, what would he do to Nick?

  I was a certifiable wreck when the elevator door dinged and Nick stepped off. He hesitated when he saw me. I saw a hand reach toward his gun.

  For a moment, I was severely tempted. I bet he would have given me one hit before aiming, with what happened in the car and all that.

  I tried to keep the snarl out of my voice. It pained me to come to him for anything. “Mocker’s doll. In my house.” I heard my voice crack. “It made breakfast.”

  Nick lowered his hand, rushing toward me. I jerked away from his touch, and he held his hands up in acceptance.

  “Did you kill it?” He stuck the key in the door and unlocked it, gesturing for me to wait while he did a quick look inside the apartment.

  I listened for the insidious sound of that wind-up, but there was nothing.

  “No.” Our eyes met. Bobby gave another hiss, this time the annoyed but not frightened tone that he reserved for Nick. “It tried to give me a rose, and then it left.”

  “Don’t move. I’m going to check the apartment. You’re staying here tonight.”

  I rolled my eyes. My urge to hate him was just slightly weaker than my urge to stay alive, and I didn’t leave.

  Nick returned and nodded me in. When the door shut and the wards sealed again, I finally felt a little safer.

  And incredibly, stupidly broken.

  “Are you okay?”

  I set Bobby down. He crept across the strange, new landscape, sniffing at Nick’s furniture. “I’m alive, Agent Warren. I’m approaching you, as a handler, to report that someone is trying to kill me. You need to make some phone calls.”

  He took it. He didn’t even flinch. “Jette, I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t come here for that.”

  “I know.” A small breeze. I had turned to go, and he was in front of me again. “But the moment I make those calls, there will be other people here, and there are things about your situation that I think you should know, because—”

  “I know enough!” I raised both of my hands, suddenly filled with the desire to rip my hair out. “Because you told me! And you shouldn’t have, and now—”

  “What?” His voice held a touch of anger. “Now what? You would have wanted me to go along, and let it happen, and know that it wouldn’t have been what you’d wanted if you’d known? No. I’m not like that.”

  I gritted my teeth. He was blocking the hall to my bedroom on purpose. “Why not? Gods, Nick, I finally had my shit together! I finally saw a future, and you were in it, and then you took it away! I trusted you! You made me trust you, and then you told me it was all a lie.”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t. It wasn’t a lie, and that’s why I told you the truth.”

  “Do you think you get points for that?” I demanded. “You were fine lying to me, right up until tonight, and that was your arbitrary line in the sand? You can work with me, live with me, buy me food, take me on vacation, kiss me—the whole time! You knew the whole time.”

  His jaw tensed. I was under his armor. “I drew the line at you trusting me. I knew if I went ahead, and you found out later—and you’re smart, Jette, you would have found out—I would have lost you for good.”

  I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. “You drew the line a little too late.”

  Nick looked away as I shouldered past him. Bobby gave Nick a growl as he rushed to follow and got under my feet.

  “I don’t have the kind of pull it takes to keep someone like you out of trouble.”

  I should have kept walking. “What?”

  “You stole the damn Jarvais Topaz. You were one of the Bleak’s most wanted criminals. You seriously believed that saving one kidnapped kid from a group of weekend warrior hunters would excuse you? That any call I could make would excuse you?”

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t like being toyed with. “Spit
it out. I’m tired.”

  It wasn’t true. After looking that doll in the face, I didn’t think I would ever sleep again.

  “He made a deal.” Nick’s voice was strained. He was so desperate that his anger was getting hard to contain.

  Crossing my arms, I turned to face him.

  His eyes burned as he shook his head. “Did you think that your synesthesia went unnoticed all those years? Did you think you were just lucky that they didn’t take you away with him?”

  The pain of that day, standing locked out of my own house in an early fall wind while a Bleak agent walked away, sprang fresh to my mind. My lips quivered with fury. “Lucky isn’t the word I would use.”

  Nick scoffed. “You’re a resource to them, Jette! People like you, with abilities like yours, they go into hiding. Like Angel. Or their parents bribe everyone they meet, like Skyla, to keep them off the Bleak’s radar.”

  I shook my head. “No, synesthesia is different. It’s unpredictable. It takes years of individually motivated practice to—”

  “I’m sure that’s what he told you.” Nick raised his eyebrows. “Speaking as someone who knew him, your father never liked the Bleak. None of us do. But he worked for them because he was brilliant and they had his kid in a vice. And I’m a vampire, Jette. The only reason I’m not dead or living in a penal colony like those lost wolves is that I do what they tell me to do. I worked with your father. I helped him become Samson Grift. I told no one, until tonight, because I know the deal he made when he left you. He made them promise you immunity. The Bleak doesn’t do favors like that for vampires, and not even phenomenally talented ones like me. You stole the Jarvais Topaz. You got caught. You are alive and free today because the Bleak would not cross an agent that possesses that much power to ruin their little empire.”

  I breathed slow and steady. What he said made a lot of sense. Too bad I wasn’t ready to hear it.

  “Have you spoken to him?” I asked. “In all the years since turning him into Samson Grift. Have you communicated with him at all?”

  I wanted to believe him, but Nick was a fantastic liar. I would never be sure again. “No.”