A Taste of You

by Jennifer Stevenson

  Something heavier than the elixir bottle hits the wires caging us in. It slithers and tinkles and clanks it way down, and falls beside me.

  It’s the coin.

  I grab for it, but Nick picks it up first.

  I shriek, “Nick, don’t!”

  I can hear it whispering already.

  I’m too terrified to swear.

  The coin gleams golder than gold in Nick’s palm.

  what do you want? I can give it to you. anything you want, anything at all.

  Desperately, I taste Nick’s energy. He isn’t full of crazed hope and yearning and confusion, as I expected.

  He’s calm.

  “You,” he says. He’s talking back to the coin.

  Here we go, I think.

  I can give you anything, the coin whispers.

  “I remember you,” Nick says.

  “What?” I say.

  The coin glints in the speck of sunlight on his palm, and it seems smaller, duller, paler. I squint, focusing my vampire eyes harder. Now it looks like a battered quarter with a smudge of old paint on it, something you’d stuff into a parking meter or a jukebox.

  make a wish.

  Nick says, “Can you undo it? What you did to me?”

  I hold my breath.

  I don’t take magic. I give away magic.

  “Don’t move!” I hear Donna Draper say.

  Wires are slithering off the pile on top of us. Slowly the shadows retreat, the weight lightens.

  “I can’t!” says the kid’s voice above us.

  Nick says grumpily to the coin, “You’re a hell of a fairy godmother.”

  The whisper comes again.

  you have what you wanted.

  The coin’s whispering must be as loud in Nick’s head as it is in mine.

  now what else do you want?

  The wire over us shifts some more, slithering away one length at a time. Sunlight pours down brighter and brighter on us.

  “Don’t!” I blurt. “Nick, it’ll ruin your life!”

  Nick looks up from the coin.

  Our eyes lock.

  The last thick loops of wire collapse around us, leaving us exposed in the sunshine.

  Nick rolls off me, red in the face.

  My derby peeps stand by on their skates, looking worried. They set up a cheer when I clamber to my own skates.

  Katterfelto bustles up to make mystic passes over Nick, tapping him here and there.

  Nick grins at me like a fool.

  He slips the coin into his khakis pocket.

  I can’t believe he hasn’t asked the coin for anything yet.

  I look around at my teammates. “You don’t look very happy.”

  Irrita Belle points up. “Look.”

  I squint toward the sun. There, looming over us all, its headless body bent double, is the silent, motionless tower.

  “I thought it was gonna grab you,” Belle says, white-faced.

  I look again, and I see one long steel arm points straight down on the pile of wire. Where we were just lying.

  “Holy shit,” I say.

  At that, they crowd around me, thumping my back, hugging and crying. It’s just like the first night I ever bouted, only better. Because I’m not terrified this time to let them touch me. I’ve never felt so full of energy.

  Katterfelto finishes messing around with Nick and turns to me. “Ve saw it discharge into you. I was vorried. All that prana at vonce.”

  I blink. I look up at the tower. “I think I’d like a shower,” I say.

  “How about a back-rub?” Nick says, grinning. The horndog.

  I turn to Katterfelto, unable to stop myself from smiling back. “And then I want to stand in front of your psychespectrometer again.”

  Fist Kist fusses over me, dabbing at my scuffed-up face with baby wipes.

  Behind Nick, someone is helping a young kid down off the tower. My hackles go up. The kid has to drop into their arms, because he’s pretty little. He looks to be about seven. His clothes are falling off him. They’re grownup clothes, too big for him.

  I recognize Sageman’s expensive chinos and belt, his smell of old money.

  But as Donna and Steamy Roller roll up the kid’s shirtsleeves and the cuffs on his enormously-too-long pants, he looks up at me.

  He’s Sageman all right. But so different. His eyes are shining like a kid’s at a circus. The smell of calculating evil has vanished. He looks familiar, and yet completely unlike himself.

  Happy.

  How weird is that?

  The kid looks at Katterfelto. “You were right. It is the ultimate weapon.”

  “What happened to you?” I blurt.

  The kid Sageman raises his eyebrows in a very adult expression. “First I asked for someone to defend me.” He waves an arm in a very Sageman-like gesture at the tower over our heads.

  “Then I asked for eternal youth.” The kid flaps his arms in his grown-up clothes and smiles wryly. For an instant I see the sixty-year-old Sageman in his face, but with a sense of humor the old Sageman never showed me.

  He shrugs. “And then I learned to love myself.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say. I wouldn’t have trusted the old Sageman to buy me a Coke.

  But this kid—

  I reach out tentatively with my energy field, and I touch his.

  He’s glowing inside.

  Just like Katterfelto and Beulah and their wino friends.

  Frankly, he tastes really good.

  I flinch away. Freaky!

  Katterfelto claps his hands together. He looks like Grover from Sesame Street being offered a great big cookie. He beams at the kid Sageman and shakes his head.

  The kid looks at him.

  Together they say, “The ultimate weapon.”

  Beesh and Rapture Snatch make me sit down so they can take my skates and pads off. I let them. I shut my eyes against the sun while conversations happen around me.

  I’m making a mental list.

  One, get Katterfelto free of Sageman. Check. Weird, but check.

  Two, keep the coin out of Sageman’s hands. Check. Nick has it now, and for a miracle he’s not asking for something hair-raising that will ruin his life the way wishing on the coin ruined mine.

  Three, I’m not dead yet. Taking stock, I recognize two reasons for this — no, three. First, Nick wants me. Nick is five feet away, but it feels as if we’re still touching. He hasn’t taken his eyes off me. The black eye he showed up with has faded already.

  It occurs to me that he must have benefited somehow from that huge bath of prana that fell out of the power tower when its wires snapped.

  Huh. Have to look into that.

  Second reason I’m not dead? My teammates. Even if Nick had finked out on me, I think I’d have stayed alive to help them, the way they’re helping me. I can’t throw that help in their faces and quit. They don’t even care I’m a vampire.

  My eyes sting a little. I close them and turn to face the sun again.

  Third reason, huh, third is the total miracle of having been staked through the ribs like a movie vampire by Sageman at his most evil, and then whacked upside the head a dozen times or so. Who would have thought a little pain could motivate me to live?

  Okay, a lot of pain.

  Or maybe I’m just that perverse, that once somebody wants me dead, I refuse to die.

  I open my eyes to see Nick watching me.

  He comes over and takes the baby wipes from Fist Kist and starts cleaning blood out of my scalp.

  I say, “What does this mean? You won’t send me off to Hinky Guantanamo?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m beginning to wonder if I even have a commission.”

  My forehead wrinkles at that.

  “My badge. My license to mess with your life. Sageman told me some things, here and there, and I pieced some of it together. I was beginning to have doubts about him before you turned up. That’s why I didn’t want to leave him alone with you.”

  “You stayed o
utside in your car,” I say, giving him a sappy my-hero look. “And you bugged him.”

  “How do you know that?” he says.

  “Later, babe.” I snuggle against him. “Tell me more.”

  “So, yes, I bugged him. That’s how I figured it all out, when I overheard him say he would have me kidnap your mother so you would turn him into a vampire.”

  “Whoa. Agent Nick comes clean.” I grin at him.

  “And just now, while they were cleaning you up, I talked to him some more.” Nick fiddles with the baby wipe, looking puzzled. “That kid is Sageman all right. He told me he used to be CIA, but he’s retired. Since the outbreak of magic he’s been hunting down magic on his own. Collecting stuff. Powers, spells, whatever. He got the idea of pretending to run his own magic intelligence agency about five years ago. He put together a front company to process our paychecks. He’s been using people — me, the guy you killed, a few others — paying us on a shoestring because his retirement money is running out, getting us to do the legwork he’s too old and sick for. He was after immortality, and he thought magic could get it for him.”

  Nick looks behind him at Katterfelto, who is sitting on a curb with the kid Sageman seated beside him. They’re deep in what looks like a very adult conversation.

  “I guess he has what he wanted,” Nick says.

  I’m speechless.

  He turns back to me. “So I’m out of a job. I don’t really know what to think. I’m worried that I’ll get sued by everyone Sageman sent me after. I don’t have eighty-five thousand dollars for you,” he adds, looking guilty.

  I snort. “I knew that. I knew that days ago.”

  He blinks. “Who told you?”

  “You did.” I consider explaining that, between my super-senses smelling every time he whangs up a boner and my power to taste his mood, he doesn’t have a lot of secrets from me.

  I’d be dumb to admit all that to someone I want to spend my life with.

  Or maybe I’d be dumb not to. Look how it paid off with my derby sisters.

  Besides, I’m bursting with secrets I want to tell Nick. He may get a little mad, but there’s a solidness inside him when he looks at me — a warm certainty, a fluttery sweetness that wakes fluttery sweetness inside me, too.

  Shoot, eventually I’ll have to confess that I can turn into mist and spy on a naked Federal agent doing pushups.

  “So you admit,” I say instead, “that your job sucks and you had no business messing with my life. Your agency was bogus after all. Go on. Say it. Say ‘you told me so.’”

  He silences me with one of those big hot kisses.

  That’s really nice.

  When I can think again, I start thinking of a fourth reason not to die.

  I remember my last conversation with Jilly, and Jilly turning her back on me when I told her to quit drinking. I remember how much I hated her this morning as I fled her hospital room in a mist.

  My chest tightens around my heart. I don’t want her to die with us fighting like this.

  Although I do want to yell at her for messing with my ... boyfriend?

  He wants to kiss me. Guess that means something.

  “Somebody ought to call Venus,” Tuda Juster says, looking around at the mess.

  Donna Draper shakes her head. “Somebody will. Anonymously. In about two weeks, when she gets back from the Bahamas. Jeez, Tude, you want to get her in trouble again?”

  Sacker sighs. “She’s right. If Venus finds out and asks us about it, we’ll just say we kept it quiet because of the Hinky Policy. And if she doesn’t find out—” Sacker glances around at the team.

  I make a noise in my throat.

  “What do you want us to do?” Sacker says, looking me in the eye.

  I’m drawn to look at Nick. I can’t stop looking at him, can’t stop feeling his presence like the bonfire he always is. Deliberately I try to look away. Doesn’t matter. I can feel him there.

  Katterfelto has thrown his arm over the kid Sageman’s shoulders. They’re talking quietly.

  “Come to Dr. Katterfelto’s lab with me,” I say to Nick.

  “What?” Nick looks at me in disbelief. “That guy has you totally bamboozled.”

  “Hey, he turned Sageman into a good guy,” I say. “C’mon, you know you’re dying to see it.”

  I can see Nick is wavering.

  “Plus, I want to look at something there,” I say, “And I’m not going home until I do.” I look at Nick again, gosh that feels good, and I blush hot.

  “C’mon, buddy,” says Rapture Snatch, taking Nick by the arm just above the elbow. “We’re going for a ride.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  We stop at the hospital for Nick’s cell phone. When we walk in Jilly’s room, she clucks at the gore all over my derby clothes, and she hands him the phone.

  “I thought you youngsters couldn’t be without your phone for five minutes,” she grumbles.

  “Is that why you picked my pocket?” Nick says. “To make sure I came back?”

  “Of course,” Jilly says.

  “I’m fine, Ma, since you asked,” I say pointedly.

  “Of course you are, darling. Now. What have I missed?”

  I tell her about the morning’s work, and that now we are headed over to the lab to look at our auras on Katterfelto’s rainbow machine because — I falter.

  “I know, honey,” Jilly says. “I sort of always knew.”

  I open my mouth and give up. As usual, Jilly’s got me speechless.

  “Nick told me about the coin,” she says.

  I turn a look of dumb agony on him, like a retriever waiting to be chloroformed.

  “She found it first,” he says.

  That shocks words out of me. “She what?”

  Jilly says, “I spotted the coin at work. It was on another girl’s table, but I saw it first, and it spoke to me, and I swapped it for a quarter out of my apron.”

  “Somebody left it as a tip?” I can’t believe this.

  Nick says, “Once it gives you something, it wants to meet someone else. It fools you into giving it away, or spending it, or losing it.”

  I stare at them, Jilly, Nick, Jilly. I’m trying to process this. “What did you ask for?” I ask my mother.

  Jilly shrugs. “I asked to be lucky.”

  “Lucky,” I say numbly.

  “It’s always better to be lucky than smart,” says my mother, the queen of dumb luck. “If you’re smart, you have to act smart. You always have to be thinking.” This is so Jilly.

  Well, that explains that.

  She says, “I’m sorry your wish didn’t work out for you, honey. Has Nick told you about his wish?”

  I remember that Nick has the coin in his pocket.

  My blood goes cold. I turn on him. “What did you ask for?”

  “I didn’t. Not this time.”

  I glare at him. Don’t tell her you have it! “Wait. What do you mean, not this time?”

  He says, “This isn’t the first time I’ve held it. When Sageman first dropped it on us, it offered me whatever I wanted. But I recognized the voice. I’d heard it once before. In Pittsburgh.”

  “Oh,” I breathe.

  “Yeah. I was pawing through a desk drawer in a burnt-out convenience store manager’s office, and I heard a voice. It was like listening to myself. Only a few hours before that, I’d found my house was a smoking hole in the ground and my family’s bodies outside. I was blaming myself. I was crazy with guilt. The coin offered me anything I wanted.”

  I swallow. “Well?”

  “You remember how you said to me, ‘what if someone offered you your heart’s desire? Would you ask for what you want? Or would you ask for the means to get it for yourself?’ Well, that’s what I did.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I knew I couldn’t bring them back. I thought the coin was the voice of God. So I prayed for the strength to fight the magic. And I prayed that I could know, know beforehand, when it was going to happen
and where.”

  “So you could save somebody else,” I say, getting it.

  “We wish alike.” He takes my hand, smiling in that way that makes me want to cry and hit him and make love to him all at the same time. “You’re so damned independent. It must be why I loved you instantly.”

  Jilly says, while I’m all soppy and reeling from this, “I need to apologize to you.”

  Uh-oh.

  If I ever get too sentimental, my Ma can always scare it out of me.

  “What now?” I say cautiously.

  “I realized something, talking to your boyfriend here today.” Ma looks at her lap and fiddles with the nurse-call button on its cord. “I knew what happened to you, back then. I figured it out, when the neighbor boy went missing and you got so cold and distant and afraid to touch. And I didn’t tell you.”

  She takes a big breath — Jilly being brave.

  Looking me in the eye, she says, “I should have reassured you. You didn’t want me to know, and I let you think you were keeping your secret, and that was wrong. I told myself you wouldn’t want my sympathy.”

  My throat is closed tight around a hot lump.

  She says curiously, “You could have asked the coin to stop me from drinking.”

  “Could it have done that? Really?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But because you didn’t, I have a chance to find out if I can do it for myself.” Her smile twists. “Better late than never, huh? I haven’t had a drink in eleven days.” Her expression brightens to its usual dippy sunniness. “And Roger says I’m in remission!”

  The door opens. “Roger says what?” In comes Jilly’s stolen chief surgeon, all red face and bonhomie.

  Jilly introduces Nick to Doc Roger.

  “Back up,” I say faintly. “You haven’t had a drink for eleven days?”

  “I found out how far my luck would take me,” she says. “I decided I don’t like liver cancer. But I guess my luck still works, if I meet it halfway. Roger,” she adds, simpering at the chief surgeon, “says the damage is reversing itself.”

  “Oh, come on,” I say. But I believe it. That’s Jilly’s luck.

  “It’s a miracle,” Doc Roger says, taking my mother’s hand in his and looking sappy. He’s got a big, noisy aura, and his prana is almost as happy as Jilly’s. That must make it fun to have him for your doctor.