Charming Blue

by Kristine Grayson

  “I do him a favor,” Tank muttered. “The biggest favor anyone can do for another person, and then he calls me a bitch.”

  “What?” Blue asked. “I didn’t call you anything.”

  “‘Ms. Walters’s pocket dog, Tank, is female as well,’” Tank said, mimicking Blue’s voice exactly. “What is that if not a bitch?”

  Blue blinked again, then looked at Jodi, who couldn’t help herself. She smiled. He smiled too, and it seemed to soften him.

  Not to mention what it did to those marvelous blue eyes.

  Wow. He hadn’t even turned on the charm, and she could feel it. She was going to have to watch herself.

  “I’ll drive you out of here,” Jodi said, partly so he wouldn’t have to answer Tank on the bitch comment. “And I’ll help you figure out what to do next.”

  He let out a small breath. All of that power, all of that confidence, seemed to fade with the breath.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I just have to grab a few things and then I’m ready to go.”

  “I’ll take these papers to the car,” Jodi said.

  He nodded and hurried toward the door. When he reached it, he turned.

  “Thank you again. You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. “Believe me, I know.”

  Chapter 23

  It took them about a half an hour to get out of the rehab center, and most of that was Blue. Jodi was surprised when he showed up with only one small duffel—an old leather one that looked well used.

  “He has to get new clothes every time,” Tank said from her perch on Jodi’s shoulder. Earlier, Tank had spelled the security guard so that he couldn’t see her, but apparently the spell didn’t apply to everything she said. So she annoyingly settled on Jodi’s shoulder (“Trying to avoid those nerve endings with my sharp little pointy feet,” Tank said as she climbed on, also apparently never forgetting a negative comment) and gave a play-by-play.

  Jodi was leaning on her car, watching the door. The guard was standing in his guard booth, looking worried. The booth had turned white with bird crap—probably gull crap—and there were feathers everywhere. It looked like the aftermath of an epic bird battle, one that Tank had clearly started.

  She had smiled when they came outside, so she had enjoyed the evidence of her chaos as well.

  “Why does he get new clothes?” Jodi asked quietly.

  The guard was watching the door as well. She didn’t know if he had been told that Blue was coming out or if he had deduced it. Or if he was still worried about the birds.

  “Well,” Tank said in Jodi’s ear, “first, he always wore those blue velour fake velvet things when he was drinking, and second, he never washed them.”

  Then Tank shuddered so hard that Jodi’s shoulder vibrated. Jodi wanted to grab her and move her but didn’t dare with the guard this close.

  “So,” Tank said, “I drop off his empty duffel outside when I drop him off, and the staff fills it with real clothes.”

  “Good heavens, this place must be expensive,” Jodi said.

  “He can afford it,” Tank said.

  “How can he afford it if he’s been drinking it away?” Jodi asked.

  Tank sighed but didn’t answer. Apparently, Jodi wasn’t cleared to know. Or maybe Tank was making assumptions.

  Either way, the duffel looked like it was filled to capacity. Jodi expected Blue to carry it to her convertible and put it in the backseat. Instead, he walked over to the guard and handed him some paperwork.

  The guard frowned at it, then tapped it with his fingertips. “You sure you want to do this, buddy?”

  Jodi let out a small sound of surprise. Did everyone here know Blue? And more importantly, did they all care about him?

  “They don’t know who he is, do they?” she asked Tank softly.

  “Oh, yeah, like he tells them in a drunken rage—Don’t bug me. I’ve beheaded women. He drinks to forget, and to not engage, and jeez, do you tell all of the mortals that you work with how long you’ve lived or where you were born? Of course not.” Tank slapped a tiny hand against the back of Jodi’s head.

  “Do that again,” Jodi said in that same soft voice, “and I’ll feed you to the seagulls.”

  The seagulls still circled in the distance. Jodi had the distinct impression that they were waiting for Tank. Clearly, seagulls did not forget a slight. The seagulls she attacked and their little seagull friends had formed a posse and they were searching for her.

  Fortunately, she had hidden herself from them too.

  Every five minutes or so, one seagull would fly over the parking lot. Every ten minutes or so, that gull would release a bird dropping nearly as big as Tank. Jodi wasn’t sure if that was deliberate—if the gulls actually knew what Tank was and were trying to find her by coating the area in white bird crap—or if the birds were just that messy.

  So far, the droppings had missed the convertible, and Jodi was hoping that Tank had spelled that too. Although some of the shielding came from Jodi’s own protect spell, one she put on everything she owned. She had doubled down on that spell with her car, given that she was in Los Angeles, drove everywhere, and knew the odds were against her using normal methods to avoid a fender-bender or some other kind of LA-car-related problem.

  She didn’t hear what Blue had said to the guard, if he had said anything. Blue was walking toward the convertible now, and he stopped at the passenger door, as if he was trying to decide.

  “You don’t have to leave,” Jodi said softly. “We can work this out inside. You can stay protected.”

  His gaze moved from the car to her face. It was a deliberate movement, as if he had to work on making eye contact. Maybe he did, after decades (centuries?) of refusing to look at anyone he might possibly care about.

  Her heart hammered again. She wished she could will it to go back to normal. What was she thinking? He hadn’t said “care about” earlier.

  Except that he did.

  When Tank was describing what happened to the other women, he’d said, Those heads belonged to women I cared about. Not women I’d noticed or women I thought were attractive. He had said, women I cared about.

  And that meant he cared about Jodi, right?

  She moved her head slightly, as if she could shake the thought from it. She didn’t want to think about him caring about her. She really didn’t want to care about him.

  Although she did.

  She felt very real compassion for him. If this curse thing was true (and it was, she could see it in his aura), then he had suffered like no one she had ever met before.

  It made her wonder about his so-called victims. Had they died as horribly as the fairy tale said, or did the curse simply wipe them out, cancel their existence?

  And who had that kind of power? She had never met anyone with that much magic before. It took a lot of magical ability to take a life; that was why the fairy tales were full of weird tortures (birds plucking out the stepsisters’ eyeballs at Cinderella’s wedding, for example) and not filled with weird deaths.

  Blue didn’t answer her. She had given him an out. He didn’t have to leave. But he didn’t acknowledge it. If he hadn’t looked at her, she would have thought that he hadn’t heard her at all.

  But he had.

  He took a deep breath, as if he was steeling himself, and then he slowly, carefully, put the duffel in the backseat.

  “I need to do this,” he said. “And I need to do it properly.”

  He was frightened. That impressed Jodi as well. He should be frightened. He was about to step into his life, not drink it away and try to hide from people, and that was going to be tough enough.

  But eventually, he would have to confront the cursecaster, and the cursecaster clearly had real magic. Not only that, but if the cursecaster had been doing this for centuries, then the cursecaster was, by now, certifiably crazy.

  Which meant that the cursecaster was dangerous and powerful and unpredictable. Blue didn’t have the skill
s to go up against someone like that. Charm clearly hadn’t worked against the cursecaster before.

  Jodi didn’t have the skills either, or at least, she thought she didn’t. Sometimes chatelaine magic shifted to deal with a crisis. But Blue wasn’t in her household, so her magic wouldn’t shift to protect him.

  However, she was a fixer. She could find people who had the magic to help him—or at least, she thought she could.

  Blue was still staring at the passenger seat of the car.

  “It’s leather,” Jodi said. “And comfortable. I can put the top up if you want.”

  He shook his head, then pulled the door open. He got inside as if he was afraid someone would yank him out, then he slid down in the seat.

  Jodi climbed in and started the car. “It doesn’t matter if people see you,” she said.

  “Yeah, it does,” he said quietly. “You have no idea what people think of me.”

  Actually, she did, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. At the moment, she didn’t give a rip about what they thought, and she wasn’t going to tell him that either.

  He needed to figure these things out on his own.

  Tank flew off Jodi’s shoulder and sat on the dashboard, under the windshield.

  Jodi frowned at her, then realized that Tank was protecting herself from gulls.

  “They will follow you, you know,” Jodi said.

  Tank shook her head.

  “Why did you pick on them?” Jodi asked.

  “They’re mean bastards,” Tank said. “Do you know how many of my people they’ve eaten?”

  Jodi raised her eyebrows. How could a gull eat a fairy? She wasn’t going to ask.

  “Can we just go?” Blue asked.

  “Yeah,” Jodi said, backing the car up, turning around, and heading across the parking lot. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to figure out.”

  Chapter 24

  Blue didn’t feel free. He was riding in an expensive convertible along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, the glistening blue ocean to his left, a beautiful woman beside him, and he didn’t feel free at all.

  He felt terrified.

  He was sitting up because Jodi had shamed him into sitting up, the wind whipping his hair. Hers was hidden under a scarf, her chin tilted up, large sunglasses on her face—typical Southern California beauty, the kind they made movies about. The kind of women he had always avoided—or he would have avoided, if he had tried to talk to any women at all, which he hadn’t.

  Not in a long, long, long time. Centuries, in fact.

  A man could forget a lot over centuries.

  If he had known anything at all.

  The last time he had spent more than a moment with a woman, he had been a young man. Marriageable, still living with Mom and Dad, being groomed to take over the family business. He had his education—stellar for the time, woefully lacking for now—and no expectations on him whatsoever. He could have been the worst king in the history of kings, and no one would have cared.

  Not true.

  The accurate thing was that no one would have stopped him from being a bad king.

  And he had been on track to be the worst king ever. If he, like his father, had ignored all those dead women…

  Blue shuddered, even though he wasn’t cold. Tank was huddled on the dashboard, her wings pasted against her sides. She looked miserable.

  For years, Blue had asked Tank what she saw in him, and she had always smiled at him, telling him that he had misunderstood his own life.

  And now, apparently, she had been right.

  Jodi turned the car onto Sunset Boulevard, which wound its way through the canyon. He had no idea exactly where she was taking him, but he found it metaphorically appropriate that she took him down a road linked to a movie about lost opportunities and faded glory.

  He didn’t know if she wanted to talk, but he knew he didn’t. As they drove along the foot of the Santa Monica mountains, he watched the scenery go by. Ahead, he could see the smog layer over Los Angeles, and it made his stomach twist.

  He wasn’t sure what he was doing. He had been impulsive, and that wasn’t good. Impulsive had never worked for him.

  Or rather, it hadn’t worked since he impulsively left the Kingdom and moved into the Greater World. Where he decided to stay drunk to protect everyone around him.

  He leaned an arm on the window and looked out, the warm wind whipping his face. What could he do, really? Break a curse he hadn’t even known existed? And then what?

  Those women, all those women, would still be dead.

  But Jodi wouldn’t.

  He snuck another glance at her. She had a small smile on her face as she drove. She had been frightened of him a few days before, and now she seemed comfortable with him, able to spend time with him, willing to help him, even though it was going to cost her.

  It had already cost her.

  That visit in the middle of the night by someone—something—that looked like him. He tapped his fingers on the outside of the car. That was how it all began. And she thought she could defeat it.

  Tank and Jodi believed the curse could be beaten.

  But at what cost? And what would happen afterward? What kind of life could a man like him have? If indeed there was a curse, and the curse got broken, and he was now free.

  He had no idea who he would be, what he could be, what opportunities he would have, if any. His past was gone, the Kingdom gone, not that he wanted to go back there. Even if the magical images of the heads were gone, he would probably always see them.

  He rubbed his thumb and forefinger over his eyes.

  One day at a time. That was what Dr. Hargrove and the others had preached during rehab. One day at a time. Sometimes it was one hour at a time. Sometimes one minute at a time.

  Live in the present. Don’t look at the regrets of the past—you can’t change them. Move forward, sometimes by inches, counting each sober moment a victory.

  He would have to count sober moments as a victory as well, even though he wasn’t an alcoholic. Alcohol had been his defense, and it had finally collapsed around him. Now he needed to confront the problem head-on.

  He smiled, just a little, his face still turned away from Jodi so she couldn’t see that smile.

  Because it was an ironic smile. He might not be a traditional alcoholic with the genetic disposition and the symptoms of disease. But he had acted like a traditional alcoholic in all ways, including the most important.

  He had used alcohol as a crutch so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the problems in his life. Never mind that he had had no idea how to deal with those problems, and there had been no real help for them when they first appeared. What mattered was that he had used alcohol to cope.

  And now, he was taking away the crutch. Now he had to be himself, whoever that was, and dig to the root of the problem.

  Doctor Hargrove had been so worried about Blue as Blue left this morning. Doctor Hargrove thought Blue was abandoning his treatment.

  But Blue was actually putting it into practice for the very first time.

  He was confronting his past, making his amends, fixing the problems that he could fix—whatever it took.

  He had help—he had always had help. He just hadn’t realized it. Tank had supported him as best she could.

  And now Jodi was going to help him find a solution to the curse. Or so she said. And he had to remember that she had self-interest here. If they didn’t solve this, she would probably suffer the same fate as all those other women.

  And the women of the Fairy Tale Stalker might as well.

  He shuddered.

  This wasn’t just about him. This was about them too. He had to remember that. It might give him the strength he needed.

  And in his back pocket, he had the list of meetings that Dr. Hargrove gave him. Blue might not ever tell anyone there what he was dealing with, but just sitting there, with people struggling to maintain their sobriety—their presence in the world—might be enough for him.


  He hoped.

  Because somehow he had to find the strength to get through this.

  Not for himself.

  But for everyone he came in contact with, now and in the future.

  He owed it to them.

  And he owed it to all those women who had died in his past, deaths he could have prevented, if he had only understood what exactly had been going on.

  Chapter 25

  Blue was being very quiet, and Jodi wasn’t sure she minded. She probably should have raised the car’s top so that she could talk with him, but she wanted the time to think. She liked the way the warm wind fluttered her scarf, the smell of exhaust, the sun on her arms.

  She wished she could turn up the music, but she knew that would bother Tank, who looked just plain miserable on the dash.

  Jodi was trying to ignore that too.

  She couldn’t take him to the Archetype Place, at least not yet, given what both he and Tank said. Jodi couldn’t imagine Selda giving them a private place to talk, not without a lot of effort.

  Right now, it seemed, Jodi didn’t have time for effort. Blue was doing his best to shrink into the passenger seat, his face turned away from her as he studied the passing cars.

  She wondered if he had any regrets. She hoped he would have enough courage to tell her to turn around if he wanted her to.

  So far he hadn’t. He’d been amazingly quiet, not that it was easy to talk in a convertible with the top down. Tank was being quiet too, huddled against the windshield as if she was afraid of something.

  And considering the posse of seagulls behind them, she had something to be afraid of.

  Tank and the seagull wars. Jodi hoped those wouldn’t escalate into something awful.

  Because of Tank, they couldn’t just stop in a park or near the Santa Monica Pier. Those gulls would be all over them in a minute.

  Jodi didn’t want to take Blue to her office. She couldn’t face the questions, let alone how many clients she might lose just by being in his presence. She wasn’t sure how many would recognize him or how many knew him centuries ago. She didn’t want to risk it. In these early stages, she wasn’t sure how to defend him to the magical without revealing his curse.