Charming Blue Read online

  Tank was serious.

  And Tank was never this kind of serious.

  Jodi blinked away the aura, returning to her normal sight. “I still don’t know what I can do.”

  “Go talk to Blue,” Tank said. “He might have some insight into what’s going on.”

  Jodi shuddered. “You mean consult one serial killer about his probably successor?”

  “I mean,” Tank said, “that maybe Blue will recognize the guy or the pattern or something.”

  “Why don’t you talk to him?” Jodi asked.

  “I can’t,” Tank said. “Someone put wards around rehab center.”

  “If there are magical wards, I can’t get in either,” Jodi said.

  “Wards against fairies,” Tank said in exasperation. “Last I checked, you weren’t a fairy.”

  “Thank heavens,” Jodi said.

  Tank’s wings started fluttering. “So you’ll go?”

  “I don’t want to,” Jodi said.

  “Think of it as a favor,” Tank said. “For me.”

  That was the second time Tank had said it was for her. Only this time, by invoking the word “favor,” she was making it real. Now Jodi was truly shocked. Favors were debts, and fairies avoided going into debt.

  “You’re serious,” Jodi said. “That’s really putting yourself out, Tank, for people you don’t know.”

  “I know Blue,” she said, still rising.

  “And he’s worth all of this?” Jodi asked.

  “I think so. I know you don’t, but I do.” Tank shrugged, then grabbed onto the leather seat top to maintain her balance. “You should think those women are worth your time, right? So you’ll do it, okay?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She flew upward, then backward, away from Jodi, as if the conversation upset her. As Tank flew, she opened her palm. A wand appeared in it, glistening with gold fairy dust. She tapped one of the windowpanes, coating it in dust, and then flew through it.

  Jodi got up and hurried to the window just in time to see the pane reappear. Tank hadn’t had to go through reception when she arrived. She could have just opened the window like she had done a moment ago.

  But she had made this formal, and she had offered payment in the form of a favor. A favor from someone like Tank was very valuable.

  “Crap,” Jodi said. She hated things like this. But she was involved now. She hadn’t officially accepted the job, but both she and Tank knew she would do what she could.

  Even if that meant sitting in the same room as the most loathsome, smelly man she had ever met.

  Even if that meant she had to talk to Bluebeard.

  Chapter 3

  Jodi really didn’t want to go to rehab—no, no, no—so she put the Amy Winehouse song on repeat and blared the damn thing through her car’s stereo system. The song had been going through Jodi’s head ever since Tank left her office, and it was actually the song that convinced Jodi to go.

  Winehouse had died badly, partly because of her intransigence, and these women—these Fairy Tale Stalker victims—might die badly as well if Jodi didn’t go to rehab to see Bluebeard.

  At least the drive was nice. She always liked the drive to Malibu, particularly as some of the worst of the city fell away and the air lost its tinge of smog. She thought once she was ten miles out of the smog that she could smell the ocean, although that probably wasn’t true.

  Most people complained about driving in Los Angeles, and while traffic was hell, Jodi didn’t mind. She bought the best car she could, realizing that to the mortals she worked with, a car was more than a transportation device; it was a statement. So she owned a convertible, extremely expensive, but not so expensive that she would risk both it and her life if she parked it in certain parts of the city. Red, because red was a power color (not because she liked it), and a Mercedes so that it had all the bells and whistles and rode like a dream.

  As a result, the last stage of the drive to the coast felt like it should—hair whipping back, scarf keeping it out of her face, gigantic sunglasses protecting her eyes, music blaring, the sun making everything glisten. Moments like this kept her in Los Angeles even though a good part of her industry had moved to Vancouver, BC. She didn’t like the gray or the rain or the trees for that matter. They reminded her too much of the Kingdoms, and made her feel more like a housekeeper and less like the master of her own fate.

  Her own fate and the fate of several others. Before she left, she slipped Gunther two thousand in cash from her wall safe, which would keep him for a few months. He would use a lot of the money for essentials besides rent. Gunther worried. The least she could do was ease some of that. She hadn’t promised him work this time, just told him she would do her best. Maybe then he would tell her why he didn’t want to go back to the Kingdoms.

  Maybe the reason he didn’t want to leave was as simple as the gray and the rain and the trees. Or maybe something bad had happened there, and he needed to get away. Gunther was particularly close-lipped, even for a troll, and he seemed incredibly sad. He had wrapped his chubby stone-like fingers around her heart and made her feel responsible for him, even though she knew she wasn’t.

  Maybe that was how Tank felt about Bluebeard.

  Jodi had done some checking. Tank took Bluebeard to rehab ten times, twice in the past year. She would wrap him in fairy dust and get her tribe to fly him to the rehab center, dumping him on the grounds. Odd that she couldn’t get inside anymore. Jodi would have to investigate those wards. They had to be a recent change.

  She had heard about the last rehab flight: It had happened after an altercation at a book release party at The Charming Way in Westwood. Bluebeard had shown up drunk, disturbed the mortals, and the magical had to get him into a back room before Tank could take control of him and send him on his way. That had been about thirty days ago. Tank clearly had access to the rehab center then.

  The rehab center was quiet and exclusive, not the most famous one in the world, but one most celebrities used now when the paparazzi staked out the Betty Ford Clinic. The center was on some very expensive land in Malibu, on the hillside overlooking the city.

  Jodi had been there a few times to visit clients. This place could handle the magical and over the years had some magical healers on staff. She didn’t know if there were any healers now, or if anyone magical worked there at all, although the wards against fairies suggested that someone magical other than Bluebeard was near the center.

  Once she got to Malibu, she had to take back roads to get to the center. It was deliberately hard to find because so many patients were celebrities or exceedingly rich, which passed for celebrity in modern culture. She had to go through three different checkpoints. Fortunately, she knew to call ahead.

  She had even known who to talk to, thanks to Tank. Tank had scrawled the name of the center and the name of the counselor in charge of Bluebeard in fairy dust on the top of Jodi’s desk. Jodi had no idea if it would just fade or if she had to clean it off, something she supposed she, the daughter of chatelaines, should know.

  Still, she had left the problem to Ramon. She had called the counselor, a man named Jamison Hargrove. He had sounded amused when she said she needed to talk with Blue. Fortunately, the counselor thought Bluebeard’s Greater World nickname was Blue, because the one thing Tank had neglected to tell her was the name Bluebeard used in the Greater World.

  Tank understood the power of real names for the magical, but she didn’t understand the importance of fake names in the mortal world.

  Hargrove had asked Jodi her relationship to Blue. She said, quite truthfully, that she didn’t have one, but that she needed information from him on a life-or-death matter. Hargrove didn’t question that.

  He even promised she could see Blue, but he said he couldn’t guarantee that Blue would talk.

  “He has an aversion to women,” Hargrove said. “It would probably be best if I sat in on your conversation.”

  No kidding he had an aversion to women, Jodi barely stopped he
rself from saying.

  “Does he get violent?” she asked. Because if he got violent, then the deal with Tank was off. Jodi knew that Bluebeard wasn’t a violent drunk, but she had no idea what kind of man he was when he was sober.

  “No,” Hargrove said. “He’s not violent at all. I’m not worried about your physical safety, Ms. Walters. I just believe I might be able to coax him into a conversation.”

  “Sorry,” Jodi said and mentally added that she was sorry in more ways than Hargrove realized. “I need to talk with him alone. Confidentiality and all of that.”

  She didn’t say confidentiality for whom, figuring she didn’t have to. Hargrove was a therapist after all. His life’s blood was confidentiality.

  “I must at least insist on observing,” Hargrove said. “We will watch the video and make sure there is no audio to protect your privacy.”

  “How do I know that you’ll have the audio off?” Jodi said.

  “You may check our layout,” Hargrove said. “I’ll send it to you. We have three rooms outside of the doctors’ offices that we call confidentiality rooms. We run our groups in those rooms, as well as allow meetings with other doctors there. If you give me your email address, I’ll send you the URL.”

  She did that and called it up on her computer while talking to him. The rooms were as he presented: they had security cameras but no audio.

  “If you don’t believe he’s violent,” she had said as she was poking around the layout of the center, “then I don’t understand why you need to observe.”

  “Well, um, honestly,” Hargrove said, sounding a bit less confident than he had a moment earlier, “I’ve never seen Blue interact one-on-one with a woman. I’m curious.”

  “About what?” Jodi had asked.

  “Whether he can even look at you,” Hargrove said. “He doesn’t look at the women here.”

  She thought that was odd. “Not at all?”

  “Not at all,” Hargrove said.

  She shuddered and almost canceled right there. But there were those women to think about. Besides, Jodi didn’t entirely trust Tank’s judgment. Tank liked Bluebeard. Tank might be willing to believe that Bluebeard didn’t do anything. But it wasn’t unheard of for some of the magical to have more than one type of magic at their disposal. If Bluebeard had charm and the ability to appear and disappear at will, that would explain a lot about the deaths he caused in the Kingdoms.

  And it would implicate him in the so-called stalking incidents here.

  Jodi thought of all of this as she made the final turns into the rehab center. She had reached the road that branched off into driveways for visitors, staff, and patients. The patient road was larger because it had to accommodate buses. No patient could leave his car parked up here and had to travel down to patient parking five miles away by bus.

  Visitor parking, on the other hand, was relatively close at hand. No one had bothered with landscaping here; this part of the complex was deliberately unattractive. The center discouraged visitors and used the visitor area to warn off potential patients who didn’t realize that they faced years of hard work.

  The parking lot was flat, open, and small. It had no cars other than hers, so she parked next to the guardhouse near the sidewalk. Every time she came here, she frowned at that guardhouse. If that didn’t make inhabitants feel like prisoners, nothing would.

  Then again, studios had guardhouses leading into them, so maybe the guardhouse just made the Hollywood types feel at home.

  Before she got out of her car, she finger-combed her windblown hair.

  As she opened the car door, the guard came out of the guardhouse, smiled at her, and gave her a laminated badge with her name on it. She had talked to him on her previous visits.

  “I’m not supposed to say welcome back,” he said, “but it is nice to see you again.”

  “You too,” she said with her warmest smile. People remembered her. It was part of her magic, and it sometimes caused problems, particularly when they realized how long-lived she was. The magical lived for hundreds of years, aging slowly.

  Someone once explained to her that the difference in lifespan between the magical and the mortal had something to do with the lack of magic in the Greater World, but she didn’t entirely believe it. What she did know was that the long lifespan felt natural in the Kingdoms (because everyone had it) and quite strange here.

  She clipped the badge onto her shirt’s collar, grabbed her phone and her purse, and headed into the building.

  This part was a flat Southern California design, lots of windows and angles, built to blend into the hillside. The problem was that lots of windows and angles made it easy for paparazzi to snap photographs from a significant distance away, so the main building, back behind this one and available only to patients, was built in a New England saltbox style. The residents who had recovered sufficiently to move to the second stage of treatment moved to small bungalows on the grounds and were not given any cooking or cleaning assistance. They were to learn how to fend for themselves, something that some of the famous found quite novel.

  It cost a lot of money for Bluebeard to stay here. It wasn’t that unusual for the magical who lived in the Greater World for a long time to have money, but it did strike Jodi as odd that a falling-down drunk would have kept enough money to afford anything, particularly a place like this.

  An employee opened the main door for her and, as she expected, Jamison Hargrove was waiting for her.

  Hargrove looked like a therapist out of central casting. He had a weathered face that settled into an expression of compassion, warm brown eyes, and dark hair silvered at the temples. He wore a light cotton shirt, white pants, and expensive sandals.

  When he saw her, he extended his hand. “Ms. Walters.”

  She shook it. “Mr. Hargrove.”

  “I thought you might want a tour of the facilities before you saw Blue,” he said. “In particular, I thought you might want to see the area I’ll be observing from.”

  She shook her head. “I’m on a tight schedule. I hadn’t planned to make this trip in the first place.”

  Hargrove’s lips tightened just a bit, probably an expression his patients didn’t even notice.

  “Is there some problem with Blue?” she asked.

  Hargrove blinked once, clearly trying to decide what to tell her, maybe trying to decide what he could tell her. “He—um—doesn’t want to see you.”

  She bit back anger. She had driven a long way for this.

  “But you believe you can get him to talk with me,” she said. Otherwise, she suspected Hargrove would have called.

  “Yes, I do. Let me take you to the meeting room. He’ll join you in just a few minutes.”

  She pointedly glanced at her phone, both so Hargrove thought she was checking the time and also looking for messages.

  “I promise you,” Hargrove said. “It won’t be a problem.”

  “I hope not,” she said as she followed him to the meeting area. And she didn’t add the rest of that thought. The last thing she needed was some kind of problem when the man she was meeting was Bluebeard.

  Chapter 4

  The yoga class near the pool had ended. Normally this was Blue’s time; he swam for nearly an hour, alone, in the heat of the day when no one wanted to be outside, not even sunbathing. He was of the private opinion that the midafternoon yoga class was an endurance event, even though he had no firsthand knowledge of it. He simply watched from a distance, waiting for everyone to quit so that he could swim.

  He didn’t sign up for group activities. He only interacted with people when the interaction was required as a term of his incarceration here. Not that he was really and truly a prisoner; he could leave at any time. But he always felt a bit stifled when he followed the rules—any rules—even though this rehab center was the safest place he had ever known.

  He rather liked that people watched him 24-7. He rather liked that they were there to protect him from his darkest self.

  Of
course, they had no idea how dark that self really was.

  The pool water glistened and he wished he could dive into it. The pool was Olympic-sized and well maintained. The cabana to the left was open on both ends and had what the staff called a bar in the center. Even though it wasn’t really a bar. A bar would serve alcohol, and that would defeat the purpose.

  Still, he could go in there and order a drink with ice in a cool tall refreshing glass as practice for that day in the future when he would be on his own again. As if this kind of nonsense ever worked. When he got out of here two months from now, he would go on a bender that would last at least three days.

  He’d found it took at least three days of solid drinking to make his clothes truly foul. It also took three days of solid drinking to ruin all the “good work,” as Dr. Hargrove called it, and make Blue look like a die-hard alcoholic.

  He wished he was. He wished he liked the taste of booze. He didn’t. He hated the stuff and the way it made him feel.

  It was only the alternative that kept him drinking.

  The fact that he was thinking about a drink was telling: he almost never thought about alcohol while he was here. He stopped pacing near the door of the guest facility and realized his hands were shaking. Not hard like he had the DTs, but as if he was terrified.

  And maybe he was. It had been a long, long time since he let himself feel any emotions about anything.

  He glanced at the glistening water, saw the bottom shining in the sun, the center’s healing hands logo in multi-colored tiles on the bottom. He stared at those hands when he swam above them, thought about those hands as he did his laps, wished that hands could truly be healed, particularly hands that had done horrible, awful, terrible things.

  Like his hands.

  He shoved them in the pocket of his khaki pants, then squared his shoulders. He had to go through with this or leave the center.

  Dr. Hargrove had told him that someone would be watching the interaction with this Jodi Walters at all times. Someone would monitor, security would be outside, nothing would go wrong.