House of Slide Hybrid

by Juliann Whicker

  I frowned at her, but she seemed unaware that she’d just insulted me. Again. “So, what are you going to buy?”

  “Who knows, a pair of boots if I can find anything I like, but what about you and Osmond?”

  “Me and…” I trailed off, not quite capable of saying those two words in the same sentence, however short it was.

  “You like him, I don’t care if it was hallucination inspired, I saw the way you looked when he put his hand on your shoulder—like you were about to swoon. Tell me that you don’t like him.”

  I shrugged. “Doesn’t everyone like him? He’s pretty nice, right?”

  “Please. I think that if I suggested it, he would ask you to the Valentine’s dance.”

  “No,” I said, grabbing her arm, feeling a rush of humiliation. “He would only ask me out of pity because I’m Devlin’s little sister, not because he likes, me. Besides, I think someone else was going to ask me.”

  “Who?” she asked, looking at me for too long before she returned her gaze to the road that was dry in spite of the snow piled on either side of it.

  “Um, I forget his name, but in English class, we talk a lot, and I think he mentioned something about the dance, so I will definitely be very excited to see him Monday. He’s nice.”

  “Not as nice as Osmond. No one is though. It’s a pity that I don’t like him, I used to try to, but it’s not like that with us, kind of thought you’d be like that, but this is better. Healthy.”

  “Everyone likes Osmond, Snowy. It’s stupid to think that I’m smart for liking someone everyone else likes when I’m so…not like everyone else.”

  “You do like him!” she crowed, like she hadn’t already deduced that fifteen times. I rolled my eyes. “Maybe he likes you, at least, maybe he’d like you if he thought about you like that, which he probably hasn’t, I mean, can’t think about you like that when you were a zombie, and not when you had Lewis’ soul, and not when you’re all depressed and obsessed with the guy who didn’t actually exist, but now, if you’re actually more you, maybe he’d like you.” She sounded less and less certain as she went on.

  I chortled, and shook my head. “Snowy, the chances of Osmond liking me in my pony shirts and braids is so slim, it’s laughable, and the thing is, I’m going to be this, whatever it is I am, whether or not people like it. Maybe I’ll like Osmond, and it’ll be the crush I should’ve had in third grade, and it will be best if he doesn’t like me. I seriously can’t handle the thought of anything intense between us. It’s overwhelmingly goo-brain-inducing to see him all muscly and stuff. I think that I’d faint if he actually did something romantic.”

  She glanced at me, a glance that was analyzing my argument for flaws she could work with. “Fine,” she said at last. “I won’t tell Osmond that he should like you, and you can live in your little pink crush world until you get over it. Hopefully the Osmond thing will last because he’s really a good guy, not just crush worthy, but an honest to goodness person you could be happy with.”

  “Like Smoke?” I asked.

  “Smoke is…” she frowned as she thought about it. “Maybe. I used to know him so well. Now, I’m not sure anyone knows who they are, not since your brother…anyway, we’ll have to see.”

  “I could tell Smoke that he should ask you to Valentine’s,” I offered.

  She laughed, like I’d said something hilarious then when she finally stopped cackling, she started talking about her wardrobe and what she was looking for to fill in the supposed gaps. I didn’t ask her how she could have gaps in something that was so clearly full, at least her closet had been the last time I’d seen it.

  When we got to the city, she drove a few blocks down from where the building had been, the building my mother had basically taken out, well, we’d all helped. I tried not to look, but felt my gaze drawn back to the place, to the landmark where things had fallen apart so brilliantly.

  “Let’s start at the mall,” she said brightly, ignoring the site as obviously as I did.

  “Great!” I said matching her tone but neither one of us were buying it.

  The mall was far more interesting this time around. I didn’t feel an automatic disgust when I looked at stuff, instead I was attracted by pretty, sparkly, girly things that made Snowy laugh at me, but I didn’t care and she’d apparently come to the realization that I was going to be a dork with or without her. She ended up pointing out a store to me that I wouldn’t have noticed on my own, not with the dark neon and kind of scary looking people going into it, but they had pony t shirts, in my size, and ballerina tutus, and sparkly tights mixed with all the black stuff, but best of all, they had dye.

  The girl at the counter had a wild assortment of tattoos and piercings, but she also had pink cotton candy colored hair. She looked so pretty, and when I asked her how she did it, she talked to me for ten minutes about bleach jobs and proper ventilation, and wearing hats so parents wouldn’t be any wiser. She pointed out the dyes, and there was a blue pony mane color that I thought would look amazing with my eyes, and match the sheer tights that had blue sparkles on them.

  When she saw what I wanted to buy, she pursed her lips and said, “Shoes. I’m thinking black with buckles and spikes, maybe an animal print skirt, or something like that. This is too girl, if you know what I mean. You’ve picked everything in this shop that my little sister would wear, and you don’t want to look like a seven-year-old.”

  I opened my mouth to ask her why I didn’t want to look like that, before I closed it again. “Right,” was all I said, and she managed to feel like I’d agreed with her at the same time I wondered where I could find some sparkly shoes.

  When I left the shop, I didn’t go directly to the extremely classic, well-tailored shop where Snowy was looking for a college interview suit—no doubt she would be interviewing colleges, not the other way around. I looked in the window and saw Snowy’s white head bent over a mannequin examining something fascinating about a black jacket that looked exactly like all the other black jackets, as far as I could tell.

  There were restrooms down a hall where I could change my clothes and do something drastic before I had the chance to get talked out of it. I told Snowy where I was going, to the bathroom, and she didn’t get suspicious. I suppose the last hundred times I’d gone to the bathroom hadn’t been all that interesting, but when I got there, I couldn’t help the slightly mad smile as I stared at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes danced, the dark blue with gray flecks as I plugged up the sink with paper towels and proceeded to follow the girl at the counter’s directions, almost perfectly.

  Snowy’s scream fifteen minutes later echoed through the room off of the tiles, on and on.

  “Um, hi?” I said, hoping that the blue had had enough time to set.

  “What did you do to yourself?” she demanded, grabbing my shoulder to stare at my head in transfixedly horrified fascination.

  “Blue? I thought the pink was cute, but blue is my favorite color. I think I got it all spread evenly, but I’m not sure.”

  “Did you bleach it? What did you use?” She fished in the garbage can for the boxes and stared at the box for what seemed like hours. “Your mother is going to kill you. Wow.” She looked up at me, and then the shock was replaced by a look of determination. “Maybe if we get back fast enough she’ll be able to fix it.”

  “It’s just hair,” I said, not wanting to fix it. I wanted blue hair, like my pony. I bent over the sink though, since it was probably time to wash it out and there was no way Snowy was going to let me drag this out any longer. It was a hurried job, and I could see when I came up to look at myself in the mirror that the blue was streaky, not to mention that the dye had stained my face, in fact, one ear was entirely blue.

  “Dang. I look kind of bad.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You did say that you didn’t want Osmond to like you, right? Why did I let you out of my sight? Satan is going to kill me.”

  “What?” I asked, hearing his name unexpectedly. “Why w
ould he care? He doesn’t even have hair.”

  “I left you alone while I shopped, instead of staying so close to you that you couldn’t breathe.” She got a funny look on her face then stood up straighter. “Fine, why shouldn’t you have blue hair if you want blue hair? Life is to be lived, right? It’s no one’s business what you want to do with your hair, or your life. If you want to do something stupid, more power to you.”

  I stared at her, not sure who she was talking to, but she was obviously addressing someone who wasn’t in the room. “Thanks?”

  “Oh, let’s go,” she said, spinning on her heels, apparently at the end of her rope with people who dyed their hair blue in the secrecy of public restrooms. She stopped at the entrance to fish a cute knit cap out of her bag and pulled it over my head, tucking the wet ends of my blue hair under my coat.

  It was while she was busy making me presentable for our escape when I heard the groan. It wasn’t loud, but it was followed by a thunk that reminded me of something I tried to forget but sometimes dreamed about. I jerked away from her and moved towards the sound, the men’s bathroom while I saw in my head people fighting, the sound of flesh being crushed playing over and over on top of the footsteps that echoed on the tile hall. I was running when I hit the doors, landing in the men’s room in a crouch, ready to fight, to join the par-tay.

  “What are you doing?” Snowy’s voice broke through the weird echoes in my head, making me realize that the Hotblood with burning eyes who was staring at me even as he leaned over the body on the ground was not someone I could fight, even if I still had remnants of Stephen’s instincts. I didn’t have a Hotblood’s strength, and the instincts melted away as I stared at the Hotblood and realized that in the middle of his fury, he wouldn’t even notice killing me. I frowned then as I looked at him and realized that I knew him in a vague way you kind of know people who work for people you kind of know. He’d been in Ace’s warehouse.

  “Ace doesn’t want you to kill him,” I said, saying the first words that came to mind.

  The heat in his eyes flickered as he heard that word, ‘Ace’. Good.

  “Dari, what are you doing?” Snowy whispered, close behind me, clearly uncertain whether fast movements would be ideal while the Hotblood looked so unstable, flecks of blood dotting his skin and the tiles of the room while his teeth were pink with blood. Either he’d eaten something raw lately, or whoever was on the floor had given him a nose bleed.

  “He’s stupid, but you can ignore that. Ace wants him alive.” I was working on a different kind of instinct, the kind that came with feeling his anger and knowing that I couldn’t touch that with leaning, even if I had the leaning thing under control. I did not want an angry huge Hotblood coming after me or Snowy even if she had something exciting in her purse.

  “You’re…” he said slowly, the sound of his voice rough and growling.

  “Dariana Sanders, Daughter of the House of Slide, at least I might be at some point. I didn’t catch your name when I saw you at Ace’s warehouse,” I said, stepping forward and holding out my hand.

  His eyes went to a manageable level, where I didn’t feel like they were lasers drilling into me as he focused on me, forgetting the body on the floor. I didn’t look at it, not wanting to distract him from me—however stupid that idea was.

  “I’m Snowy,” Snowy said, giving him a sort of wave and a flirtatious, ‘I’m so cute’, smile. “He’s so hot,” she said in an undertone that there was no way he could have missed.

  His eyes never left my face as he stared at me until finally, he blinked, and when he opened his eyes there was sanity in the nice blue green color.

  “Hello there,” he said in a deep voice that had a flirty tilt to it. He turned casually to the sink and ran water as he glanced at us over his shoulder. “I appreciate the interruption since, you’re right—Ace doesn’t want this one dead.” He pursed his lips even as he splashes water up his arms, his face, leaving a trail of pink on the white ceramic. “You might have come too late though.” He nudged the body with one boot while he turned a smile at us that would have been slightly less chilling if his teeth weren’t still stained.

  “These things happen,” Snowy said, sounding understanding, at least the part of her that was pretending that she wasn’t freaking out and so furiously angry that her eyes would be drilling holes in my head if there weren’t still a Hotblood in the room, a dangerous Hotblood who could still turn fury at any moment.

  “Not for awhile,” he said, turning an irritated scowl to the body. “This one has no respect, made me forget myself.” He stood for a moment looking down at the figure, looking thoughtful, but I could feel the building anger. “I think maybe I’ll leave now, get some distance from this… You can take things from here, I imagine.”

  I nodded my head as I said, “Sure. No problem,” when in reality, I had no idea what I’d do with a body in the men’s room.

  He gave Snowy a sultry smile that he seemed to be able to manage whatever the state of his temper as he passed us, leaving us alone with the body.

  When he was out of sight, Snowy started shaking her head. “I hate that I’m about to say this, but you stay here. I’m going to go call someone.”

  I opened my mouth to protest that I didn’t want to stay in the men’s room with a corpse, but the look on her face was so completely done, that I only smiled and nodded.

  “Sure. I won’t do anything stupid, or anything at all. I’ll stand here. Right here.”

  She kept shaking her head even as she left the room, walking down the hall back towards the mall, the shoppers, and the Hotblood wherever he’d gone.

  The body made a sound, a groan that made me move instinctively towards him before I caught myself and forced myself to stay where I’d been, where I’d promised Snowy I would stay. There wasn’t really anything that I could do to help him anyway. I wasn’t a doctor and Snowy had felt ready to shoot me if I did something even slightly irritating. In some ways, she was more terrifying than the Hotblood we’d interrupted in the middle of his fury.

  It seemed to take forever before Snowy came back. I heard her outside the door talking to someone with the tone of voice that was so decisive and authoritative that only a complete idiot would question her. With that voice, she could get anyone to do anything.

  When she came through the doors, she was alone, but I caught a glimpse of some yellow stands with ‘out of order’ in bright red.

  “Your uncle will be here shortly. So, what happened?” She stood there with her arms across her chest for a long time before I could think of something to say that I hoped wouldn’t make her even crazier than she already was.

  “I’m not sure, maybe some kind of flashback?” I offered, staring at the bottom of the guy’s boots, the guy who had made Ace’s flunky lose his temper. “I wonder what he said that was so disrespectful. He was really mad.”

  “He was cute though.”

  “They’re all cute.”

  We didn’t talk after that, even though Snowy had gotten over her anger, she was still irritated with me. Every time she looked at me, she had to roll her eyes or shake her head; it was the hair even though most of it was tucked out of sight.

  When Grim walked in the bathroom, I exhaled in relief, at least until he started asking questions. No, I didn’t know who the guy had been except that he worked for Ace. No, I didn’t know this guy who was unconscious maybe dead. No, I didn’t know whether or not he was alive. No, I didn’t know why I had to go charging into the men’s room to interrupt a lethal Hotblood, this last from Snowy who apparently thought that Grimm’s questioning style was far too gentle.

  “Snowy, why don’t you and Dariana go back to Sanders,” Grim said, giving her his best and biggest smile, which only managed to look mournful.

  “What’s going to happen to him?” I asked, looking at the body, dressed in black jacket and black jeans with one arm draped over his face like he’d been trying to protect himself, as pointless as that was.


  Grim shrugged, looking disinterested. “Snowy, you did a good job setting up out there. Ace should be here any time to clean up the mess. I’ll stay until then.”

  I realized that Grim hadn’t made any move towards the body in spite of the fact that he was a doctor, that he was someone who could help.

  “You’re going to let Ace take over when his guy’s the one who did this? How is that a good idea?”

  “Like you’re the queen of good ideas,” Snowy put in. “Let’s just go.”

  “What would you suggest, Dari? This is Hotblood business, and we don’t meddle in their affairs more than is strictly necessary, however much they complain to the contrary.”

  “At least check his pulse,” I said, looking down at the body, thinking that his hands looked really big compared to the rest of him. Grim looked at me solemnly but still did not move.

  I took two steps towards the guy on the floor before I stopped abruptly with my nose inches from Grim’s chest.

  “Hotbloods are not safe,” he said simply.

  “He’s a Hotblood? How can you tell?” I lifted my chin so that I could look him in the eye. Blue hair, or no, I wasn’t going to let them turn over some near dead person to the parties that had roughed him up in the first place—if you could call bleeding and unconscious on the floor ‘roughing up’.

  “The temperature of his blood is hot. Blood is something I’m always certain about. He’s clearly not dead, however,” he frowned slightly as if he were listening to something difficult to hear. “His heartbeat is not stable. With Hotbloods it is the heart to go first, in life and in love. All right, since you discovered him, he’ll be your responsibility.”

  I nodded although I had no idea what that meant or why he’d changed his mind so suddenly. “Let’s get him to the hospital then,” I said assertively.

  Snowy sighed. “Grim, look this is fun and everything, but I’ve got to get home.”

  “I’m not leaving the Hotblood until I know he’s safe,” I said, looking at him where he lay on the floor. Would he ever be safe again? Who did I think I was, thinking that I could protect a Hotblood if he was disrespectful to another Hotblood? It wasn’t any of my business, so why had I felt compelled to get involved in this mess? I shrugged, not knowing why, but knowing that I couldn’t watch someone get hurt without doing something about it.