Under the Rose (31 page)

I was getting a little sick of hearing that, and also, I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t just palmed some cheap trinket. But I’d seen Jenny wear this crucifix before. “Fine,” I said, regretting it already.

Jenny walked up to the counter, whispered a word to the still-stunned clerk, then ran out the back door.

“So, girly,” he said, pocketing a fifty, “you still want your coffees?”

Outside, I scanned the dismal streets for Poe while balancing two paper cups and an umbrella handle and brainstorming ways to, as Jenny said, “get rid of him.” We’d been working together so well, too. I was still trying to figure it out when Poe rounded the corner, saw me, and came splashing up.

“Where have you been!” he said with a scowl. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“Everywhere but in the store you left me in front of?”

He put his hands on my shoulders. “You have no idea what I thought.”

“I have a pretty good idea, actually,” I replied, shaking him off. I handed him his cup. “I’m the big conspiracy theorist in the group, remember?”

“Can you just lay off the backtalk for two minutes? I wanted to show you something. I think we can get in through—”

But I’d stopped listening.
“Backtalk?”
I repeated, imbuing the word with as much venom as possible. “
Backtalk?
Who do you think you are, my great-aunt Amelia, wielding her wooden spoon?”

He rolled his eyes. “Sorry. It was just an expression. I was joking.”

“Joking.” I searched the memory banks. “Since when do you have a sense of humor? I seem to recall a certain individual who tried to drown me the last time I made a joke.” Poe had been cruel to me during my initiation. Focus on that.

“Okay, now I
know
you’re mocking me. I said I’m sorry. Can we get on with it?”

He wasn’t going to make this easy, was he? “Not if you plan to keep patronizing me like this. I don’t even get why you’re still here, James. What’s your plan? Trying to get in good with Gehry?”

“No, not anymore. I thought we went over this. It’s Jamie, and I’m a gardener now, remember?”

“And unless you want to
stay
a gardener, don’t you think you’d better get out of here? Keep it up, and you won’t have any friends in politics left.”

He placed his cup on a window ledge and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Wherefore the sudden concern?”

“It’s not concern,” I replied smoothly. “It’s that pesky paranoia of mine. So here’s my theory: You say you want to help. You feed me nice little bits of information, and then you make sure you tag along every step of the way. You’re not here to help me. You’re helping them. What better way to get back in their good graces?”

“Are you insane?”

Yes. “You knew I would track her down eventually, and you made sure you’d be right beside me.”

“You
are
insane. Amy, you couldn’t track a train by yourself.”
That’s right, Poe. Make it easy.
My eyes began to burn. “And in case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t exactly found her, either.”
Ah, Poe, how little you understand.
“Is this how you get when you haven’t had your nap?”

“Right. My nap. Always good to have the condescension as well as the misogyny in your arsenal, isn’t it?”

Oops, maybe a tad too far. Poe reeled back as if struck. He stood there for a moment, in the rain, blinking at me. Then he raised his hands in surrender. “I fucking don’t get you women.”

Enter Misogyny. Or, at the very least, chauvinism.

He looked at Jenny’s building, then shook his head. “This was a dead end anyway. I’m out of here. See you around, Amy.” He turned and walked off.

I stood there until my coffee got cold.

Jenny was seated in a tall-backed booth when I arrived at the near-empty restaurant. I stashed my dripping umbrella, wondered briefly what had happened to Poe’s, and slid into the seat across from her.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“I pissed him off and he ditched me.” I dropped her necklace on the table and waved to the waitress. “Double cappuccino?”

Jenny slid the menu at me. “Are you hungry?”

“Mostly for information. Now, tell me what happened before I’m tempted to commit assault with the pepper shaker.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “Where do I start?”

“Anywhere. Your involvement with the website. Your disappearance. Your alias. Your fake apartment. How about explaining why the hell thirteen inches of your hair are sitting in the Grand Library right now?”

“I screwed up.”

“I know that part. Tell me how. And start with whether or not anyone has been hurting you.”

She worried her bottom lip, and her eyes grew glassy. “Not as much as I’ve been hurting myself. The Diggers are all bark and no bite, you know.”

“Tell that to the man who broke into my room yesterday,” I snapped.

“Someone broke into your room?” she asked.

“Yes. And yours.” I was losing my patience. Where was that cappuccino? “Now,
what happened?
Begin with the part where you betrayed us, and then I’ll see if I’m interested in sticking around for the rest.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. When I joined, I didn’t know what to expect. I mean, I was told Rose & Grave worshipped the devil.”

“Then why did you join?”

“I was a sleeper agent,” she said matter-of-factly as the waitress arrived. The woman gave Jenny a skeptical glance, set down a cup of cappuccino, a milkshake, and an omelette with French fries and departed. “It was Micah’s idea. When the Diggers started grooming me, we thought it was the perfect chance.” She waved in the air with her fork. “To…get them.”

“What went wrong?”

She dug into her food. “To start with, you did. And the other girls. You were really nice to me and I was kind of into the whole battle—you know, down with the entrenched patriarchy and all that stuff Demetria says. It made the society seem really human to me. Before I was in there, I pretty much thought it was all blood rituals.”

“Like the initiation?” Mmmm…cappuccino.

Jenny snorted. “I thought the initiation was going to be much worse than it was.”

Clearly, no one had threatened to force her into sexual slavery.

“I thought it would be real blood, for starters. And Persephone? Please.”

I put my cup down. “You were prepared to drink real blood?”

“Gross, right?” Jenny slurped from her milkshake. “But it was for the cause.”

“I’m trying to think of a cause that would tempt me to drink blood.”

“Jesus died for my sins. I think the least I could do in return is drink something nasty. But I felt like I was being mocked with that initiation. So close, and yet so far from any real heresy. And definitely from any real evil. It was like walking through a haunted house at a carnival. I don’t think anyone was taking the Persephone stuff seriously.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in haunted-house rides.”

“I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been on them. I don’t want them banned or anything. It’s just silliness.” She thought about it for a moment. “It’s very complicated, what I believe. I mean, when I was younger, my parents loved Halloween and stuff. My mom, she’s Filipino, and my dad is Puerto Rican. They both have a lot of traditions that go back to superstitions, and I remember them being really fun. I even carved pumpkins and stuff at the church I went to growing up.”

“When did it change?”

“I’ve been kind of moving away from my parents’ beliefs—and from Catholicism in general—ever since I came to school. Micah says—” She broke off. “The point is, Rose & Grave wasn’t what I thought it would be, so as it turned out, there weren’t really any covens to destroy, you know?” She caught me eyeing her plate. “Want some?”

It did smell divine. I picked up a fork. “So you went Stockholm. Bet your boyfriend wasn’t happy about that, huh?”

Jenny’s expression turned grim. “Not exactly. I still thought you guys were evil. I decided I hadn’t looked far enough. Like maybe they were saving the real stuff for later, after they thought they could trust us. I kept searching.”

I clenched my jaw. “And then? When did you decide you hated us?”

“I didn’t!”

“You acted like it.” I glared at her. “You told your boyfriend about stuff we said at the meetings. You told him about my C.B. Don’t deny it!”

“I won’t,” Jenny said softly. “I’m sorry.”

I wiped at my suddenly misty eyes. “
Why?
What could my sexual history possibly have had to do with devil worship!”

“Micah was…impatient.” Jenny scratched at the back of her neck, as if looking for her braid, for something to do with her hands. “He wanted to know more. He wanted to understand what I saw in you guys.”

“And did he?” I fought to keep from shouting. “Did he understand?”

“No. And the more we talked about it, the less I understood, too. I think that’s the real reason we’re supposed to keep it all a secret. It doesn’t translate well to barbarians.” She laughed mirthlessly. “If Micah ever heard me refer to him as a
barbarian…
”

I could just imagine how he’d react. I rubbed my cheek. “And then?”

“I’m not like the rest of you, that’s for sure. I could see that once the C.B.s started. I was so afraid of doing mine—or not doing it, as the case would have been.”

“None of us are like the rest of us,” I said. “That’s pretty much the point.” Still, I’d been nervous as well, so it wasn’t as if I could blame her.

“I started thinking maybe Micah was right.” She dropped her chin. “I hated being there. Not you, but being there, because I wanted to like you guys, and I wanted to be like you guys, but I knew it was wrong.”

“To like us or to
be
like us?” I shook my head. “No one’s asking you to change who you are, Jenny.”

“Well, the person
I am
dislikes people like you. She isn’t supposed to go drinking with Demetria or think George is kind of cute and charming or want to confide in his most recent victim.” She shot me a glance.

“Okay, one, I’m
not
a victim. Two, you’re not supposed to know about that. And three, so we’re nice people. Whatever happened to
love the sinner if not the sin
?”

Now she raised her head fully. “Oh, please, Amy. Everyone knows about you and George. We’re not morons. Remember how I caught you two making out?”

Eep.

“And I’d kind of forgotten that last part. With Micah, everything was
You’re either with me or against me.
I know that now.” She picked up a fry, then put it back down.

I took it as a sign that she’d finished, and began scarfing her meal in earnest.

“And the longer I waited, the more he started dropping hints that I was against him.” There was a catch in her voice as she said this. “I couldn’t bear that. He’s so—I’ve never met anyone like him. He’s so amazing. So sure in his faith. So pure.”

“The man spit on me and called us both whores of Satan,” I said. “Purity ain’t exactly one of his virtues.”

Jenny burst into tears. Oops.

“I just…I just…What could I do? I couldn’t lose him. And I thought he was right. You guys were pretty bad—I mean, not
bad
bad, but not what I—Never mind. It wasn’t such a leap to go from there to evil. And Micah—”

“What? He said he loved you?” I asked in a mocking voice.

She nodded miserably, and grabbed a napkin to blow her nose. “He said people needed to know what kind of things the Diggers did. He said it would be such an act of…” She broke into sobs.
“…loyalty.”

Poe hadn’t punched him hard enough.

The waitress arrived. “Is she all right?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “Can I have another cappuccino? And do you think you could add a splash of Grand Marnier?” I needed a drink to get me through this.

“You got it.”

“You see?” Jenny had seen to her Kleenex needs by now. “Micah would have had a fit if he saw me drinking this early.”

“You’re not drinking, though, Jenny. I am. And I’m not asking you to join me.”

“Fine.
Being
with someone who would drink this early.”

“Who cares what Micah thinks?”

“I do. I did. He makes me so happy. Every time I’m near him.” She sniffled. “But I couldn’t do what we’d planned,” she said. “Deep down, I didn’t want to. Maybe I knew how stupid I’d been. That’s why I was so angry at you. It’s as if you people, and liking you at all, was keeping me from what I really wanted.”