I held the laughter in, but keeping myself from smiling proved impossible.
“Do I look like I give a shit what you do or don’t do?” I asked. “You and I are going to be besties for a while. That means I go where you go. Hashtag deal-with-it.”
Nicola huffed and spun on her heel. She marched out of the kitchen and into the adjacent solarium where she slumped down into one of the chairs. Pulling one foot up under herself, she took out her phone and proceeded to ignore me while Ada served us breakfast. Perfectly content to eat in silence, I dug into the best French toast I’d ever tasted. The bacon was perfectly crisp, the coffee was hot and smooth, and the orange juice was even better than the glass I’d had earlier. If putting up with Nicola’s impertinence was going to be rewarded with food like this, I’d happily deal with her sarcastic attitude all day long.
It also didn’t escape my notice that I had a considerably larger helping of strawberries on my plate than Nicola did. Ada flashed me a conspiratorial smile when she brought me another serving of bacon, letting me know I had at least one ally in the house.
Chapter Three
After drinking three cups of coffee and eating only a few bites of breakfast, Nicola pushed back from the table and announced that she was going up to her room to change. She suggested I was welcome to join her if watching was my kind of thing, but she didn’t wait around to see how I reacted. Even if she had stuck around, daring me to chastise her, I wouldn’t have risen to such obvious bait. While I didn’t enjoy Nicola’s boundary pushing in the slightest, I also couldn’t blame her for it. Even in the short time I’d been in the Bloedermeyer family home, it was easy to see the emotional distance between father and daughter. With no mother or siblings in the picture, Nicola was left largely to her own devices. A total lack of parental supervision might be the one thing most teens dreamed about more than anything else, but in my experience, it had only left me craving any kind of stability. I’d rather have had annoying parents lecturing me instead of the complete lack of oversight I’d experienced after running away from my last foster home.
“She’s not so bad beneath it all,” Ada said as she cleared Nicola’s dishes. “Mr. Bloedermeyer is under much more strain than he lets on. The family’s recent troubles haven’t been easy on Nicola. I’m sorry she’s taking it out on you.”
“It’s fine,” I said with complete honesty. “I get where she’s coming from. She won’t shake me as easily as she did the last guy.”
Ada paused, placing her stack of dishes back on the table. She smoothed the front of her apron in a nervous gesture before continuing. Her eyes darted from mine to the tablecloth, as though she was too afraid or ashamed to look me in the eye.
“Please don’t take her anger personally,” Ada said in such a quiet voice I had to strain to hear her. “She’s been… difficult since her mother passed away last year. I hear her crying in the middle of the night sometimes. I don’t think she realizes how thin the walls are.”
Unsure of what to say, I nodded my comprehension.
“You won’t let her know I told you this, will you?” Ada asked, her eyes widening at the thought of what would happen to her should Nicola think the housekeeper was spying on her.
“Of course not,” I assured her. “Thank you for telling me. It helps me know where she’s coming from. I’ll try to have patience for her.”
“I’ve been with the family for two years now. Nicola is like a little sister to me,” Ada said, “I hope you won’t think me foolish, but it’s as though this family has been cursed by an evil spirit. Nicola refuses to accept that she might be in any kind of danger, and her father is at a loss for how to protect her.”
“I’ll keep her safe,” I promised. “Mr. Bloedermeyer didn’t hire me to be her friend. She can lash out at me all she wants. I’ll still do my best to protect her from whoever is trying to use her to get at her dad.”
Ada smiled and nodded curtly in thanks before collecting the dishes and returning to the sink. I didn’t know what to make of the housekeeper. She cooked amazing French toast, that was for sure. There was something more, though. They way she looked at me made me uncomfortable. I’d scanned the house with my mage sight, but not a single bit of magic energy had popped out at me. Nothing about Ada made me think she was part of the threat against Bloedermeyer or his daughter. Then again, it wouldn’t take much to fake a few shy smiles and expressions of heartfelt concern. I’d learned the hard way that there were plenty of ways for gifted or fae to hide themselves from my second sight. Ada could very well be a malicious fae creature slowly draining the life essence from Nicola while she slept.
Or she could just be the housekeeper.
The sound of the TV in the other room dragged me out of my thoughts. When I went in to check, I found Nicola flopped on the couch, flipping through the channels. She’d changed into a pair of black tights and a baggy white sweater with Gucci written in block caps across the chest. I might as well have been a piece of furniture for how completely she ignored me. Content to let her do her thing, I settled into an armchair and watched show after show flip by.
I was only half paying attention to the TV — the other half of my brain trying to figure out if there was a real threat in the house or not — when an image of a bear chasing a skier caught my attention. The footage from a helmet-mounted camera was shaky, but there was no mistaking the furry bulk of a grizzly bear running full tilt down the mountain behind an unaware skier. The guy with the camera shouted for his friend to look behind him, sparking a panicked descent with bear still chasing behind.
The crazy scene was suddenly replaced by two women fondling hideous jewelry on a shopping network. Nicola flipped channels again, a stream of commercials and daytime TV shows flickering by at lightning speed.
“Go back a few channels,” I said.
“What?”
“The bear chasing the skier,” I told her. “Go back to that station.”
“Excuse me?” Nicola flipped forward several more channels. “My father might have hired you follow to me around, but that doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do.”
The easy way to do this would be a light kinetic blast to the side of the head. Nicola would be out cold, or at least too dazed to argue. Hell, I probably didn’t even need to use magic. She was small enough I could take her. A pillow over the face for just long enough to make her lose consciousness. It’d probably get me fired, thrown in jail, and sued for more money than I’d make in the rest of my life, but that might just be worth it.
“Please, Nicola,” I forced myself to say. “This could be related to my job.”
“Fine,” she replied, hammering the channel back button. “But only because there’s nothing else on right now.”
The footage of the skiers had been replaced with a newscaster in a studio. A file image of a grizzly bear was superimposed on the upper right-hand corner.
“— remains in critical condition. The bear, however, was put down by conservation officers to prevent future attacks. Authorities still don’t know what might have provoked the animal to attack a skier, suggesting rabies or some other neurological issue may have caused the bear to act so violently.”
“Is this a local news station?” I asked after they’d moved on to another story.
“Yeah.” Nicola turned the TV off. “Looks like Blackcomb mountain. Crazy, huh?”
Crazy indeed. As I understood it, bear sightings were fairly common in Whistler. As the village expanded and encroached on the surrounding wilderness, it presented tempting feeding opportunities for animals that would otherwise have relied on plentiful supplies of berries. Bears had been bold enough to walk right into people’s kitchens where they opened refrigerators and helped themselves to the goodies inside. It was rare for a bear to ever attack a human in these incidences, rarer still for them to outright chase someone who hadn’t come between a mother and cub.
Weirder still was that it had happened in the middle of winter. That bear should have bee
n deep in a months-long hibernation.
“Sorry, what?” I looked up from my thoughts to see Nicola walking out of the room. She’d said something to me, but I hadn’t been paying attention.
She stopped in the doorway, staring at me like I was a special kind of stupid. “I said, I’m going shopping. Let’s go.”
I followed her to the front hall where Ada was waiting to help me into my jacket. Nicola didn’t seem to want one, but I wasn’t the kid’s mother. If she wanted to freeze her ass off in the name of looking cool, that wasn’t my concern. She slipped into shoes that looked more appropriate for a trip to the mall, and I wondered how she was going to make it down to the village without slipping and falling on her ass every few feet.
The SUV and driver were gone, most likely having taken Mr. Bloedermeyer to his office. Pulling up in its stead was a nearly identical vehicle. A similarly uniformed driver hopped out and opened the back door for us, waiting until we were seated to close it behind us. Heated leather warmed my already chilled bum. The temperature inside the car was as warm as the house, and I began to understand how Nicola could go out in sub-freezing temperatures without a jacket.
The drive into the heart of the village took less than five minutes. Nicola hopped out of the SUV without looking up from her phone or saying a word to the driver. I followed her into the closest store where she complained about the lack of decent shopping in the area. The price tags on most of the things I glanced at were so high I was afraid to even think about trying anything on. Judging by how Nicola grumbled about most of what she looked at, she considered them little more than second-rate stores hardly worth the time and energy spent browsing rack after rack of non-designer clothing.
That didn’t stop her from spending a small fortune at three different shops. The bags multiplied quickly, and soon I was pressed into service as a porter to help carry them. Over the course of two hours, Nicola bought enough new clothing and accessories to last me the rest of my natural life. I doubted they’d last her the rest of the month. On a whim, she grabbed a cute new ski jacket for just over three grand. When she took the jacket to the till, she also threw in a new pair of high-tech ski goggles without bothering to try them on.
Our last stop before returning to the SUV was a lingerie shop. Despite my clutching bags from half the better stores in the area, the woman behind the counter tracked me like I was about to steal something. It was only when she saw Nicola that she smiled and suddenly became overly eager to help us.
Nicola picked out a few items and disappeared into one of the change rooms. Desperate to sit down for the first time in two hours, I dropped the bags at my feet and fell into a plush velvet chair in front of the small curtained changing area. I was about to pull out my own phone to send Chase a barrage of hate messages for getting me into this in the first place when Nicola swept the curtain aside to stick her head out.
She pointed to a pale blue lacy thing hanging over a chair near her change room. “Hand me that?”
I fetched the hanger for her.
“Do you really think I’m in danger?” Nicola asked through the curtain. “My dad won’t tell me much about what’s going on, but he seems more anxious than usual.”
“I honestly don’t know,” I told her. She hadn’t closed the curtain all the way, and I had to turn away in my chair to keep from seeing flashes of skin and underwear through the gap. “I don’t doubt someone is trying to sabotage his new development, but it’s not exactly common for environmental activists to attack people directly.”
“I think he’s overreacting.” Nicola pulled the curtain aside and posed in the skimpy blue bra and underwear I’d handed her. “Too slutty?”
“I… uh,” I felt my cheeks flush red, and I quickly looked away again. “I don’t think it’s really appropriate for me to comment on that.”
I could feel Nicola rolling her eyes at me as she tugged the privacy curtain back into place. If she’d been trying to fluster me and throw me off guard, she’d done a hell of a job of it. After hours of shopping and practically being ignored, I was having a hard time keeping up with what could well be a genuine attempt at gauging my concern for her safety. Either that, or it was just another way for her to show me how little control I had over her.
“Have you seen anything odd lately?” I asked when I’d recovered my wits a little. “Anyone following your or acting strangely?”
“Not really,” she said. “Then again, this is Whistler. The definition of normal here is a little more flexible than most places. Between the extreme athlete wannabes doing crazy stunts and the fact that pretty much everyone is blissed out on pills or weed most of the time, there’s a lot of random shit happening at any given moment. How much is my dad paying you, anyway?”
“Not nearly enough,” I muttered too quietly for her to hear. More audibly, I said, “That’s not information I’m able to disclose at the present time.”
Fully dressed again, Nicola stepped out of the change room making a mocking face while she repeated what I’d just said.
“Are you, like, FBI or CSIS or something?” she asked. “You don’t look like a cop.”
“Freelance,” I told her. “Hate to break it to you, but you don’t rate high enough for any government agencies to care.”
“I’m surprised I rate high enough for my father to care,” she said softly while she collected her items and went to the front desk.
This was probably where I was supposed to interject with some kind of reassurance that her father cared deeply about her, but as I’d told Ada back at the house, that wasn’t my job. Other than the risk of an overworked credit card causing one of the payment machines to explode, I’d yet to identify a single threat against this girl besides her own shitty attitude. Sure, I knew a thing or two about teenage angst, but that didn’t qualify me to act as the girl’s therapist.
“Why aren’t you in school,” I asked as we loaded her bags into the back of the waiting SUV.
“I finished last semester,” she said. “I did a summer program at the Sorbonne last year that gave me enough extra credit to finish early.”
Nicola skirted around the side of the vehicle and hopped into the back before I could ask for details. By the time I joined her, she was back on her phone, her body language quite clearly suggesting she was done being friendly with me.
Happy to let the cushy heated seats warm my tired body, I sat back and tried to relax for the whole five minutes it took to drive home.
Chapter Four
What remained of the afternoon passed uneventfully. Nicola retreated to her room to unpack her new acquisitions while I made another tour of the house on my own. Choosing speed over power, I set a few rudimentary wards at key points around the house. They wouldn’t do much to deter an uninvited intruder, but they’d alert me if anything containing magic energy crossed the threshold. No fae, magic user, or enchanted item could enter the home without triggering the protective spells. Learning from a previous experience of having my wards disabled, I added a little something extra that would also alert me if someone tried to tamper with them. Even keeping them as small as they were, it was exhausting work that took me most of the afternoon. By the time I’d woven the last and most prominent ward around the frame of the front door, I was ready for the meal Ada had been working on for the last several hours.
Mr. Bloedermeyer wasn’t there, and I learned from Ada that he rarely made it home before midnight most nights. When he wasn’t at the office working into the evening, he was out entertaining investors. Ada informed me that he came home and went straight to bed most nights, only to rise early the following morning for meetings with people working from time zones that were already well into their day. I was told not to expect to see Mr. Bloedermeyer very often during my stay, and that suited me fine. The last thing I needed was someone watching over my shoulder all the time. I didn’t do well with micromanagement, especially when the client didn’t know exactly what it was that qualified me to do my job effectively.
Nicola and I ate in silence at the small farmhouse table in the kitchen. She stared at her phone the entire time, and I did my best to pretend I was alone. Ada was proving herself a true master in the kitchen. The beef Wellington she’d prepared was one of the most amazing things I’d ever eaten. It would have been right at home in a Michelin starred restaurant. Or so I guessed. I’d never been in anything fancier than an Outback Steakhouse. The pastry-covered beef (of which I enjoyed three helpings) made the memory of my previous best meal pale in comparison. It was as though I’d only ever fished stale food from dumpsters until the moment I sank my teeth into the first perfectly cooked bite of prime grass-fed meat.
And it was only Monday. Ada had spent all afternoon preparing a dinner that Nicola barely glanced at after snapping a photo of it for her dozen odd social media sites. She nibbled a bit of the pastry, ate her side salad over the course of twenty minutes, then left the table. In the same amount of time, I’d consumed my weight and more than my daily wages in fancy beef.
After being told sternly that I was most definitely not allowed to help clear dishes, I went to check on Nicola. I found her firmly ensconced on the couch, fashion magazine on her lap, phone still clutched like it was the only thing keeping her alive. The TV blared some inanity in the background, and I decided she was fine on her own. As dark and wintery as it was outside, she wouldn’t be able to sneak out without getting a ride. I escaped to the front living room where I’d be able to see the headlights of any vehicles pulling into the driveway.
The irony of the situation didn’t escape me as I settled into a nearly identical pose of my own. I flipped through the pages of an old issue of Dwell magazine while checking in with Chase on my phone. He claimed he’d started working on a job with our mutual friend, Karyn. He wasn’t giving up many details, but promised it wasn’t anything too dangerous or illegal. Given the trouble he and I had gotten into over the course of the last year, I worried a little about what he considered dangerous. He was capable of taking care of himself, though. And as much as I wasn’t sure about Karyn’s motives, she’d been there to protect Chase the last time we had to work together.
Black Ice (Black Records Book 3) Page 3
