The Lady in Pink - Deadly Ever After 2 (20 page)

M
y parents were dead. Had been for quite some time. The headstones said so. Neatly engraved with the words “Husband” and “Wife,” but no names accompanied them. I wondered why, but Izzy didn’t have the answer and there was no one else left to ask.

The Wife headstone held a death date more than thirty years ago, right after my birth. My father had died five years later. Had he mourned her loss? Had the very thought of losing her choked him with sadness?

I glanced over at Izzy. She stood next to me, silent, watching the gravestones as if they held the answers to our tumultuous partnership. Surprisingly, her being by my side eased a little of the shock at the deaths of the people who’d borne me. Oddly that was all I felt. No grief or pain. Maybe that would come later. And maybe it wouldn’t. After all, I’d never known either of them.

Were they good people?

Did it matter either way?

They were dead, buried in a mysterious cemetery open only twice a year, once in the spring and the other time in the fall. Unless you were fairy royalty; then you simply fluttered your wings at the gatekeeper and he let you and your glaring companion right in.

The cemetery was oddly beautiful, with marble headstones of the old city’s elite. My parents were buried closer to the back, under a forest of trees, the perfect place to bury bodies—and their secrets. I wondered who’d done just that. Who had loved them enough to pay for their burials? Was it the same person willing to kill to keep their blue-haired secret?

“From what I learned, they loved each other very much,” Izzy said quietly. “Your mother—her name was Cybil. She died with your father’s name on her lips.”

I turned away from her, not wanting to hear another word about the woman I would never know, the woman who gave me life. “How’d you find them?” When I couldn’t, I added silently. Maybe this was meant to be, a way of showing me I wasn’t quite the badass investigator I’d thought. Rather than humble me, Izzy’s investigational prowess filled me with equal parts pride and self-disgust.

“I asked Christine.”

I spun back toward Izzy. “What?”

“I asked Christine,” she repeated, biting her bottom lip. “I somehow caught her in a moment of clarity, and she told me about Mr. and Mrs. Smith, about . . .”

“About what?”

“Their deaths.”

“When?”

Her forehead wrinkled. “When did they die?”

I shook my head. “No. When did you go to see Christine?”

“You’re not going to like my answer,” she said.

“Try me,” I said, though I had a strong feeling she was right.

Taking a few steps toward the graves, she ran her hand over the cold marble of my mother’s headstone. “The day James was found at your apartment. I saw Christine that morning.”

And James came to kill me that afternoon.

Too much of a coincidence to think there wasn’t more to it.

Had Izzy’s visit to Shady Wings started this mess? I didn’t see how ... unless someone at the home had notified James, the guy who paid the bills, of Izzy’s visit and the questions she had asked. Or maybe he’d had a plant there all along? Just waiting for someone to show up and ask questions? I pictured the sweet fairy girl manning the reception desk. She’d known who Izzy was at first sight. Then again, the old bastard who’d cracked me in the knees with his cane seemed like a better suspect, mostly because of the three-inch-long bruise still imprinted on my leg.

I returned my attention to Izzy as she said, “I’d stumbled upon Christine by accident. I’d read your file, noticed the name, and remembered a visit to Shady Wings during my stint as the Tooth Fairy.” She gave a small laugh. “I went to a lot of nursing homes. That and Friday Night Gnome boxing tournaments are a Tooth Fairy’s bread and butter.”

“You remembered one old lady out of hundreds? How?”

She closed her eyes. “When I was at Shady Wings I said the word ‘blue’—completely at random, mind you. Christine’s eyes went wide and she started rambling about a fire and a baby boy named Blue.” She paused as if gathering her thoughts. “I didn’t mention it at the time because we . . . weren’t on the best of terms.”

I barked with bitter laughter. “Meaning you thought you could lord it over me.”

“Maybe a little,” she said, ducking her head. “But it didn’t click in place until a few days ago. The next day I went to Shady Wings.”

“That’s why you wanted to go with me when Alice first found Christine. You wanted to keep me from the truth.” I paused, waving a hand at the impersonal headstones. “From knowing they were dead.”

She slowly shook her head. “Not that they were dead, exactly.”

“Then what?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “To keep you from knowing how they died.”

 

Months after my birth, by all accounts, my mother had died at my father’s hands. He’d electrocuted her. The very same way I’d feared I would one day take someone’s life. My father had then spent the next—and last—five years of his life locked in a prison cell.

I was far more like the man who gave me life than I’d known.

I prayed we wouldn’t share the same fate.

H
ours after learning of my parents’ deaths, I sat in my moldy office, reading and rereading the newspaper article about my mother’s murder. The newspaper referred to them as a husband and wife from New Never City, never once mentioning their names.

Or the fact that they had a little blue-haired baby.

Was my mother’s death the reason my father had dropped me on the doorstep of the orphanage? Was he horrified by what he’d done? I pictured Izzy’s face, pale in death, and felt a lump rise in my throat. I now understood a little better why I’d been abandoned. Though I now had even less of a reason for James’s attempting my murder and the two fires set to destroy the file. Both my parents were dead, so who was left to care about from the past?

Now that I was armed with the truth about my childhood, it was time to do a little digging into the night of my mother’s murder. While I could’ve simply picked up the phone and delegated the duty to one of the other Reynolds & Davis investigators, I needed to do this myself.

As much as I hated to admit it, Izzy was right—the truth hadn’t set me free as I’d believed it would. Instead I was left with myriad questions that I might never find the answers to. But foremost in my mind was the fact that I would never be normal. My father had gone to his deathbed an electrified monster. What made me think, even for a second, that I would avoid a similar fate? I just prayed Izzy wouldn’t be the victim leading to my own murder trial. The thought left me cold.

I vowed, then and there, that whatever we were, once I found the person behind this, I would put as much distance as I could between us. Izzy would forever be safe from my electrified touch. My heart ached at the thought of leaving, but the risk was too great now that I knew the fairytale ending to my own parents’ storybook marriage. The writing was plain to see. I would eventually lose whatever tiny bit of control I had over my power, and someone would die.

I pictured my mother, whose face I knew only from the faded newspaper article, and swallowed hard. Then I typed the date of my mother’s death into the search engine on my computer and the name Cybil. Ten thousand results popped up, filling the screen with scenes of death, pain, and destruction from that date.

Just not any of the pain, death, or destruction I was looking for. “What the hell?” I asked the empty office. “The Net has pictures of fairy-on-gnome porn, yet they have nothing on a thirty-year-old murder.”

Tapping a pencil against the desktop, I considered the ramifications of zero results. What did it mean? Was it possible I had the wrong name? Maybe I had the wrong date, I thought. But the newspaper article was dated the following day. A shiver ran up my spine. Was it possible for someone to hack the entire Internet, ridding the world of whatever secret he or she wanted to hide? With one small exception.

Me.

As the thought crossed my mind, my office door creaked open.

I turned toward the noise as a shot rang out.

I
awoke with a gasp, gulping large breaths of oxygen into my starved lungs. Thankfully the mask across my nose and mouth kept me from hyperventilating, though at the same time it added to my general anxiety. I blinked a few times and my eyes started to focus. White walls. White floors. White ceiling. Pink wings. The New Never City ER.

I ran my hands over my body, searching for new holes.

“Blue,” Izzy yelled. “Stay still.”

Rather than listen to what I’m sure was pretty good advice, I moved my hands up my face and then across my head, noting the gauzy covering on the top of my head. “What the hell happened?” I asked, ripping off the mask. I couldn’t remember a damn thing that had happened past sitting in my office chair while I decided what my next move in the investigation should be.

“You were shot,” Izzy said, her voice as sharp as nails on a chalkboard. “In the head.”

I prodded the wound. “I’m guess it’s just a flesh wound or you wouldn’t be standing there glaring at me like it’s my fault.”

“I’d still be pissed, as you put it,” she frowned, “but you’d be in a body bag.”

Point taken. Someone had tried to kill me. Again. At this rate I was going to start taking these attempts to murder me personally. I guess Izzy was right, though. I really did have a hard head. I licked my dry lips, thankful to be alive. “Good thing we don’t hire better shots.”

“What?” she asked in a near shout. “You think someone at the office did this?”

Oops. Too late I remembered that I hadn’t filled Izzy in on my latest pool of suspects. Hell, I hadn’t even had the chance to tell her about Alice’s innocence. “Um, Izzy . . . ,” I began, and then told her about my suspicions. She watched me through veiled eyes, but the thinning of her lips and slight fluttering of her wings suggested she didn’t quite appreciate my forgetfulness. Not even a little bit. I quickly reminded her about her keeping my parents’ deaths a complete secret to even things up.

“I can’t believe one of our employees did this.” She ran her finger over the wrapping on my head. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” I laughed. “They wanted me dead. I thought that much was apparent from the extra hole in my head.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s not a hole. It’s more of a gouge.”

“Gouge, huh?” I fingered the wound again, unable to feel anything through the heavy wrappings. “Bet it makes me look extra-manly.”

She chuckled. “Not really. In fact, it makes you look like you just got a haircut from a blind mouse.” I winced, but Izzy wasn’t finished, “You really are lucky to be alive. If Clark hadn’t heard the shot and raced down the hall, who knows what might’ve happened?”

Fucking Clark. The damn guy was underfoot every time I turned around. Now I owed him my life, when what I really wanted was to take his when I pictured Izzy’s mouth pressed to his. “I would’ve taken care of it,” I said.

Neither of us believed a word of that.

“Did he see anyone?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He saw a shadowy figure escaping down the hallway but couldn’t give the cops a good description.” She paused, her wings fluttering slightly. “He was much too worried about you.”

Great. I now felt even worse for wishing an STD on the guy.

“What were you doing at your office anyway?” Izzy asked when silence filled the curtained room. “You never stay later than the first ten minutes of happy hour.”

I laughed at her joke, which sent a wave of pain through my brain. I quickly quieted. “I was trying to learn more about my mother’s death and dear old dad’s subsequent prison stay. I thought ... if I found out more ... I might find out the who.”

“The who?”

I nodded, instantly regretting it. “Yeah. The who. As in who cares about a murder thirty years ago?”

She frowned, rubbing her arms with her hands as if warding off a chill. “You can’t still think this is about your parents.”

“What else could it be about?” Sure, I’d ruffled a few feathers of the winged and nonwinged variety, but most of those wings were either soothed by the former Tooth Fairy or now walked with a limp. This had to be about what had happened thirty years ago.

Had to be.

Because if it wasn’t about that, bullet to the head aside, we were in very serious danger.

I
walked out of the hospital a few hours later, wearing a pilfered hospital gown and slippers after Izzy refused to aid my escape by getting me clean clothes. Of course, the doctors had argued over my impending departure as well, but the bleeding had stopped and the bullet hadn’t hit anything vital. According to Izzy it would’ve had to travel pretty deep to hit my pea-sized brain.

Ignoring her and the doctors, I shuffled out of the hospital, a large swath of blue hair missing from the top of my head. I wasn’t concerned, though. Not until I caught my reflection in the window of a passing taxi. I looked like death. Blood had stained my skin, turning my pale face the same color as a tomato.

That explained why not a single taxi pulled to the curb in response to my whistle. Izzy walked up behind me, and a few seconds later, a cab tore across two lanes of traffic to stop in front of her. The driver barely paid me a single glance. Izzy helped me inside, much to my dismay, and we set off for my apartment.

The cab hit a few bumps along the way, causing me to wince in pain. Izzy, true to her winged evilness, patted my arm and said, “Suck it up.”

To which I replied with a manly whimper.

When the cab pulled to the curb in front of my apartment building, I slowly got out, my head now pounding. I longed for an extra-large glass of whiskey and hours of uninterrupted sleep. Neither of which I would be getting this dark night.

Not if Izzy had anything to do with it.

She insisted, once we made the torturous climb up the stairs, on keeping the whiskey from me as well as denying me much-needed sleep. “The doctor said I need to wake you up every few hours,” she said, helping me into my bed. Once I was settled, she tucked a blanket around me and then sat on the edge of the bed next to me. Silence filled the room, as did a slight chill. “I’m scared, Blue,” she finally whispered.

I shared her fear, but for a far different reason. A part of me, a stupid, foolish part, wanted to pull her into my arms, to take away the fear, but I couldn’t. I would only end up hurting her. Like my father had my own mother. Instead I feigned sleep, letting out a snore. Without another word, she slowly stood and left the bedroom, the glow of the moonlight reflecting off her wings and illuminating the room.

Once she disappeared behind my bedroom curtain-door I sat up, running a finger through the swath of missing hair on top of my head. I really was lucky to be alive. I smiled into the darkness. Someone was getting nervous. And that was good. Nervous people made mistakes. And mistakes made it a hell of a lot easier to catch them.

Then it would be over.

And I would leave.

Forever.

 

After I ditched Right and Left, again, I headed to the oldest and wealthiest part of town. A place too good for streets of gold; instead they were paved with platinum. This was the sort of place a man like me would never fit in. Not that I cared one way or another. I wasn’t here for myself. I was here for Izzy. I sucked in a lungful of cigarette smoke as I gathered my courage. A woman in a black-sheep coat strolled passed, her upper lip rising with disgust. I tipped my invisible cap, showing off the swath of missing blue hair. The woman gasped and hurried away.

Smiling, I threw my cigarette down, crushing it under the heel of my expensive loafers. I double-checked the snub-nosed .38 in the holster on my side. Better safe than sorry about last night’s attempted murder. My head still pounding as a vivid reminder of my near-death experience, I headed for the ornate door of the fancy mansion in the heart of the city. My mind was focused on the mission at hand.

A mission I was fairly sure would end badly.

But it had to be done. I owed Izzy as much.