Although Stefan had put on a good face for Luke, as soon as he and a strangely silent Peg were out of Antoinette’s apartment, his knees started to shake, and he had to lean against the door to keep from sinking to the floor.
Antoinette. She was a part of this. She knew that Luke wasn’t Luke, that somehow DiBartolo had stolen Luke’s body. Get real, Cobbe. She didn’t just know. She fucking engineered it, all while pretending to Stefan that nothing was wrong. Hell, while preventing him from getting close enough to Luke to discover the impossible truth.
And if he confronted her with it? What were the odds that she’d come clean even now? Offer to reverse whatever she’d done? Nada, that’s what.
A burst of laughter from downstairs jolted Stefan to his feet. Rudy. He was chatting with Katrina, one hand on the stair rail. If he looked up, he couldn’t miss Stefan lurking outside Antoinette’s forbidden door, not with Peg next to him, wearing everything short of a flashing neon sign.
He grabbed her elbow. “Come on.” Towing her to his studio door, he fumbled his keys out of his pocket. He managed to get the door unlocked and Peg inside while Rudy’s basso profundo still rumbled from below.
Closing the door, he scooped up his portfolio from the floor where he’d tossed it and set in on the worktable with hands that only shook a little bit. Go me.
“I wish we’d had more time to talk to him.” He wished he hadn’t been so stupid as to not think of using the phone to communicate before. But his own phone, with its old-school numeric keypad, would have been too hard for Luke to manipulate anyway. “He might be able to give us more details. What the masks mean. What happened.” If Peg hadn’t had her iPhone—
Wait a minute. He stumbled to the kitchenette, flung open the cabinet, and grabbed the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats. If I have another chance, I’m not wasting it. He ripped the cereal bag out of the box and drew out the zip lock with Luke’s wallet, keys, and—yes!—iPhone. “Next time, I’ll bring an alternate communication device.”
Peg strolled over and flicked the bag with her fingernail. “What’s this? Your secret-identity stash?”
“No, it’s Luke’s. I found it in the changing room the day . . .” Stefan swallowed as a fresh wave of oh-shit-no threatened to dump him on his ass. “The day after it happened. Luke must have been planning to pose for me again. As an apology.” He smoothed the bag with one hand. “We’d had a sort of disagreement, and he’d walked out. That’s why I didn’t try harder to find him. I assumed he was still annoyed. That he— That he— But all the time, he was next door, suffering. Alone.”
Stefan slapped a hand across his eyes, his palm immediately damp with tears. He inhaled one shuddering breath. Two. Three. Then knuckled his eyes more or less dry and lowered his hand to find Peg studying him with a strange expression on her face. Pity? Maybe. It contrasted oddly with her Marguerite makeup.
“Hey.” She took the bag out of his hand and gently led him to the stool next to the worktable. “Sit. You can’t beat yourself up over this. Even if you’d known, what could you have done? Zilch, same as now.”
“But I could at least have tried to be there. Sit with him.”
“Yeah, that would have worked out well, with all three conspirators in and out of the place with no warning.”
He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I don’t think Rudy’s a conspirator.”
“You didn’t think Antoinette was either.”
A fair point. “Yeah, but Rudy isn’t . . . tied to them, I guess. Not the way Antoinette and DiBartolo are connected. He was hired on referral from the doctor after the stroke. Antoinette didn’t find him herself.”
She plopped onto the other stool and arranged the folds of her caftan, bunching them between her knees. “Fine. But don’t assume he doesn’t know the score now. He might be an ally, but he’s just as likely to be an adversary—if only because he answers to Antoinette, not you.”
“Actually, he answers to the doctor and his agency.”
“Still. It’s a good idea to avoid him until we know for sure.”
Stefan sighed. “Yeah. You’re right.”
“So.” She laced her fingers in her lap. “When do you suppose we can see Luke next?”
“Maybe not for the rest of the day. It depends on whether Antoinette goes out tonight.”
Peg snorted. “If Mr. Bad News goes trolling for booty, you can bet she’ll be out. Following him, same as she was doing earlier.”
Stefan’s insides turned to ice. “You think DiBartolo is . . .” Christ, he’d felt like he was cheating by kissing Luke’s body without Luke in residence. Didn’t DiBartolo have similar scruples about cheating on Antoinette, whether the body he did it in was his own or not?
“Honey, you saw the way he was ogling those women on the street, not to mention the way he manhandled you in full view of your customers. He’s feeling his oats—and anything else within reach.”
“Right.” Stefan fought a surge of nausea. It’s not Luke. Luke isn’t cheating on me. “If that happens again, maybe we can visit Luke later tonight.”
Peg pursed her lips. “We can’t sit on our asses all day today and maybe all night too. We need to figure some of this shit out for ourselves.”
“But we’d just be shooting in the dark. Shouldn’t we wait until we get some direction?”
She went perfectly still for a moment, but not in the same “listening” mode she used with Hootie. “We may not have much time.”
“Why not?”
“He . . . ah . . .” She glanced at him from under false eyelashes like curled wire. “He could see Hootie.”
“What?”
“Looked right at him. When that happens, it means the person is close to the veil. One step away from the other side.”
Stefan’s chest seized. “One step away from death, you mean.”
“Sorry, hon.” She placed her hand over his clenched fist and squeezed. “Not something you wanted to hear, I’m sure, but you needed to know.”
He nodded. “Thanks. I guess.”
“Fuck, Stefan. You need a drink.” She pushed back from the table. “For that matter, so do I. Where do you keep your bourbon?”
“Sorry. There’s beer, but we don’t keep whiskey around anymore. We had a bad experience with it.”
She chuckled as she pulled two beers from the fridge. “What, a two-day bender and waking up with an extra guy in your bed?” She handed him a bottle and twisted the top off her own.
He set the beer on the table without opening it. “No, more like an extra guy in our head. That’s how Arcoletti’s ghost took over. He rode in on a wave of Scotch.”
She snapped her fingers. “That’s it.”
“What’s it? Scotch? I don’t think so. Luke hasn’t touched the stuff since we left Oregon, and DiBartolo was in no shape to drink before he jumped ship into Luke.”
“Not Scotch per se. But the concept of a conduit, a way of firing the switch. If he could do it at will, with any random guy, why wait so long? Why pick Luke?”
“I don’t know. Maybe . . . convenience? Antoinette—” He clutched the edge of the table as a wave of dizziness hit him. How could she do it? She was supposed to be my friend. “Antoinette wouldn’t have had any trouble getting him to come with her. He knew her.” He trusted her. Because I trusted her.
“But that’s kind of a disadvantage, don’t you get it? She picked someone well-known to people close to her, someone who would be missed. Why take that risk?” She took a long pull from her beer. “There had to be something else, something that made Luke desirable and susceptible.”
“That doesn’t follow. Weird shit happens all the time, right?”
Her eyes narrowed. “It happens all the time, or it happens all the time to you?”
Stefan blinked under her laser-beam gaze. “Well, to me for sure. I assume to everybody else too. It happened to Luke.”
“You can’t extrapolate the entire population from two individuals, pal. But I’ve wandered a l
ittle wider in the supernatural wasteland and I can tell you—you’re not normal.”
Stefan snorted. “You think the religious right hasn’t been telling us that for years?”
“Give me a fucking break. I don’t mean abnormal and I’m not talking about who you like to screw. I mean outside the norm. Unusual. Extraordinary.” She tapped her forehead. “The pathway, remember?”
“So why not take me, then? I’m here all the time. She had every chance in the world to pick me instead.” He curled his fingers around the beer bottle, the cold barely registering against his chilly fingers.
“Who knows? Maybe you had a lucky escape.”
“That’s not what I’d call it,” he muttered.
“Okay, enough with the whining. We need to find that conduit, the anchor, the what-the-hell-ever that enabled the transfer. Do you have any ideas?”
“No. As far as I know, the only contact Luke ever had with DiBartolo was here at the gallery, and that didn’t happen often. DiBartolo didn’t live here before his stroke, and Luke didn’t visit all that frequently either, so they didn’t intersect. Luke thought DiBartolo was a pretentious prick.”
“Was he?”
“Probably. But Luke has a low tolerance for pretension.”
Peg swigged her beer, her gaze unfocused. “What’s he been up to lately? Luke, not DiBartolo. We know what he’s been doing.”
“Mostly it’s been business as usual. He’s been trying to convince me to move in with him. I finally got him to pose for me, but he hated it.” Stefan opened the portfolio, with the sketch of Luke—the real Luke—on top. “He’s ashamed of his scars.”
“You brought this to my shop. Why didn’t you open it?”
“It was my proof, but then it wasn’t necessary.” He smiled crookedly. “I’ve wanted him to pose for me forever, but I had to resort to a fixed bet to get him to agree. He still griped about it. Then after he got back, after DiBartolo took over, he seemed to enjoy it.” He uncovered the second sketch and flipped it around, so she could compare the two.
“Jesus,” she muttered. “This would have convinced me.” She glanced up, her gaze sharpening. “Wait a sec. You said, ‘after he got back.’ Where did he go?”
“Someplace near Milan. He was pissed about it actually. He had to wait way longer than he should have and after he got home, his client wouldn’t respond.”
She slapped the table with both open palms. “That’s it. That’s the break in the pattern. Can you find out what his job was? What he brought back?”
“He didn’t talk about this job much.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Kind of. Since he does art-fraud investigation and I’m an artist, we’ve got common ground to discuss his commissions. But I think there was a non-disclosure agreement attached to this one or something. He was very vague about it.” Stefan rubbed his little finger, the spot Luke was obsessed with. I’ll never give him grief about it again. “On the other hand, he was pissed at me too, so maybe that’s why he wasn’t especially chatty.”
“Where would he keep his records?”
“He’s got an office in his condo.”
“Can you get in? I can lend you my hairpin.”
“Won’t be necessary.” He held up the zip lock. “I’ve got a key.”
Luke barely registered Rudy’s cheerful chatter as he bustled about the room, setting out his equipment, straightening the clutter on the nightstand, cuing up one of his audio books on his iPad. Stefan brought help. We’ll figure it out. Although Luke wasn’t sure how much faith to put in Marguerite-Peg. She was hard to read: dressed like some kind of new-age airhead, but she spoke like someone Luke could meet at a hockey game.
“Mr. D.” Rudy’s stern-ish tone shook Luke out of his thoughts. “Your heart rate is way up. Has something happened to upset you?”
Shit. The last thing he needed was to be sedated again. Luke shook his head and gave Rudy a thumbs-up. Rudy blinked, drawing his head back like a turtle. Uh-oh. I guess DiBartolo wasn’t a thumbs-up kind of guy.
“You know,” he said, tapping his lips with one finger, “I wasn’t planning to try this until you were a skosh more along on your treatment plan, but what the hey. We’ve got time, right? Unless you’ve got a hot date you didn’t tell me about?” Rudy grinned down at him, his big hands gentle as he unwrapped the blood pressure cuff from Luke’s arm.
Luke shook his head, giving what passed for a smile in his half-dead face.
“There, see? That’s what I’m talking about. You’re engaging at last. I think we can give this a try.”
Rudy dug in his messenger bag and pulled out what looked like a kid’s tablet—a flat screen encased by rubber bumpers. “See this? Your motor control is getting oodles better, but writing is still a no-go. And a cell phone screen? Pfft.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Too teeny. But this screen has nice big keys. Want to give it a try? Tell me something, like what book you’d like to listen to, or what video you’d like to watch, ’k?”
For an instant, Luke’s heart soared—he could tell Rudy to let Stefan visit. Hell, he could request Stefan. But then it plummeted. I can’t. If I do this with Rudy, he’ll tell Antoinette. Antoinette will tell DiBartolo. And without the barrier of my piss-poor writing ability, DiBartolo will force me to tell him where the fucking mask is by threatening Stefan. And even though he didn’t have the full picture of what those two assholes had planned, he knew letting them get their hands on the mask was a colossally bad idea.
“Here you go.” Rudy held the tablet in exactly the right place at exactly the right angle for Luke to read the screen, then supported Luke’s wrist so he could touch the keys without strain. This guy is damn good at his job. A niggle of guilt squirmed in Luke’s belly. And I’m about to pretend he’s not—or at least not as successful at it as he really is.
Because instead of poking the keys to beg Rudy to bring Stefan, or demand that he fetch the police, or any other damn fool thing, Luke let his fingers drag over the screen as if they were as unresponsive as an inflatable doll’s.
He turned his head away, pretending to be upset.
“It’s okay.” Rudy patted his shoulder. “If you’re not ready for that yet, we’ll just wait a while. Now, let’s get you some lunch, and then we’ll move on to our exercises.” Rudy posed in the middle of the room and executed a couple of John Travolta Saturday Night Fever moves. “I’m ready if you are.”
Luke nodded. Rudy obviously didn’t know about Antoinette’s magic masks, about DiBartolo’s evil, about their plans—which meant one of the three people who had access to him wasn’t trying to trap him here forever. In fact, cooperating with Rudy on the exercises, on the PT, on anything else, was all to the good. It would mean he was a model patient, not somebody who needed to be packed off to a care facility somewhere, never to see Stefan again, as DiBartolo and Antoinette rode off into the sunset with Luke’s body.
And if Rudy was de facto on Luke’s side—Luke was the patient, right?—then Luke had at a pretty formidable champion in his corner. He just needed to figure out how to communicate the truth to Rudy without looking like a damn lunatic.
Easier said than done. But he had nothing but time to figure out how to do it.
Stefan glanced up and down the empty hallway before he unlocked the door to Luke’s condo, as if someone might burst out of the elevator and accuse him of B and E. Which was stupid. Luke’s neighbors had met him. He had a key, for God’s sake—two, for that matter, since Luke had pressed one on him before he ever got on the plane in Oregon.
He slipped inside and pushed the door closed, wincing at the click of the latch, abnormally loud in the quiet room. Lemon scented the air—apparently, Luke’s cleaning service had been on the job although they’d had no one to clean up after. The vertical blinds were drawn to keep the westering sun from stressing the air-conditioning, but the ivory walls still glowed in the ambient light, the rich colors of the Aubusson—black and cream and rose—lush even in shadow.
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Stefan had laughed the first time he’d seen this place. In their starving-student days at the conservatory, living in the usual nest of cinder blocks, particle board, and mud-colored fourth-hand furniture, he’d never have guessed that left to himself, Luke would create this perfect Fabergé egg of a home.
Marius had been careless with his possessions, his wealth allowing him to acquire whatever he wished on a whim. Luke’s choices were deliberate. Purposeful. Hell, mindful. He didn’t do clutter and he didn’t collect anything he didn’t love.
Pretty much describes my relationships with both of them, doesn’t it?
Stefan toed off his sneakers before he trod across that pristine rug to the closet Luke called an office—as perfect as the decor was, the condo was still fricking small. Florida only had so much coastline to go around, and real estate was too precious for sprawl. For an instant, Stefan longed for the wild exuberance of the Pacific and the craggy Oregon coast, all of it public and available to whoever chose to brave it.
He sat in the chair in front of the L-shaped desk, glancing over his shoulder as if for permission to invade Luke’s privacy. He’s not here. He may never be here again if I don’t get with the program.
The screen saver—the generic Windows logo—floated on the black field of the laptop. Stefan tapped the touchpad and the login message popped up. He knew the password, and it always made him blush. His own middle name and the date they’d met. Luke had told him he’d used the same password since they’d moved in together at the conservatory.
He beat back the wave of grief that threatened to swamp him and opened Luke’s email program. His gaze immediately snagged on a message from the Prescott Gallery. Why was Marius’s family contacting Luke? Surely Luke would have mentioned it to Stefan. Maybe not. Luke still had a sore spot when it came to Marius, even though Stefan’s ex-lover had been dead for nearly three years.
Besides, this couldn’t have anything to do with the latest job. The Prescotts didn’t have any connection to Antoinette and DiBartolo and this message was too recent. The job that went sour was from at least five weeks ago, from before Luke left for Italy. Stefan scrolled down the list of old messages, but there were so many. He’d had no idea that Luke had so many jobs lined up, so many people clamoring for his services.
Tested in Fire Page 11
