There was the dull thud of a door shutting somewhere in the house, distracting Luna. She looked away, cursing under her breath.
“Luna?” a voice called. A female’s voice.
Luna looked torn. She reached down and pressed her palm against my throat, momentarily cutting off my air. I held my breath, readying myself. If she was planning to kill me, she was first going to have to fight me.
“Don’t you dare move. I will find you and kill you right now,” she said. She pressed down into my throat with one final jolt and got up, leaving the room.
I barely waited for the door to close before I got up. My limbs still felt rubbery, and as if they were moving of their own accord, and my muscles felt stiff and achy. My head pounded and I swooned with dizziness. I held on to a nearby desk—a giant glass-topped boat of a thing that matched Vanessa’s desk at Hollywood Dreams—to keep myself steady. I could hear voices—Luna’s and the other female’s—echoing from elsewhere in the house. Now was my chance to get out of there.
Slowly, my legs building strength beneath me, I made my way to the door. I pushed my ear against it. Nothing. I opened the door a crack and peered out. Nobody.
I crept into the shadows of the endless hallway. At one end, I could see part of a den, a shiny black baby grand piano the centerpiece, looking spiderish, its fangs clicking at me. I blinked away the hallucination. At the other end, I could see that the hallway emptied out into what was maybe a vestibule. The house was so enormous, I had to blindly choose a way to go. I made my way toward the vestibule, lurching and grunting and sweating.
As I got closer, the voices grew louder. Across the vestibule was an archway to an ornate living room, complete with a brass-decorated wet bar and what looked like an authentic bear rug—which almost appeared to be breathing—sunken two steps below the vestibule. The room was dominated by a cavernous fireplace, the mantel adorned with dozens of brass statues. Beyond that was what looked like a kitchen, the voices emanating from within.
I gave the front door a longing look, noting the enormous chandelier that hung directly over my head, and between the kitchen and living room, on the far end, a spiral staircase that led to an upstairs loft walkway. Instead of turning toward the front door, I went right, drawn by the voices, thanking God for the plush bone-white carpet in the living room, so soft that even in my half-drugged state I walked soundlessly, like walking ankle-deep through snow.
“. . . much does she know exactly?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Enough. She knows about Hollywood Dreams. She got hired there, Mother. You really need to fire Brigitte.”
A sigh. I snuck closer to the kitchen doorway. “Prism. I knew I’d seen her before. Okay, but that’s it? We can handle that.”
“I don’t know. She’s relentless. Always at Peyton’s bedside. Sleeping with Dru. She needs to be stopped, Mother.”
I took a chance and craned my neck around the corner. Luna stood with Vanessa Hollis in a shadowy corner of the state-of-the-art kitchen, the morning sunlight doused by blackout shades, the stainless steel appliances dully gleaming, the marble countertop looking like wool to my foggy eyes, my still-confused colors smearing across everything I looked at. Luna’s back was to me. Her mother, wearing a skintight pink satin minidress and leopard-print heels, leaned backward against the wooden cabinet behind her.
“Luna, we have to be careful about these things. We can’t just—”
“Shush, did you hear something?” Luna interrupted.
Quickly, I ducked my head back around the corner as the two of them listened for me.
“You didn’t leave her there, did you?” Vanessa asked. “For God’s sake, Luna, of course she’s going to run.”
“She can’t run; she’s too out of it,” Luna said, her voice moving closer to me.
I dropped low and crab-walked behind an easy chair, which dwarfed a corner. I watched between the arm of the chair and a ficus tree branch as the two bolted through the living room toward the hallway. It was now or never.
But there was no way I would make it to the front door without them spotting me from the hallway.
As I clawed my way out from behind the ficus, I was struck with a realization. I was in Peyton’s house. She’d lived here until just a few weeks ago. Dru had said she’d barely taken anything when she moved out. She might have left behind a clue. If Luna had her way, I would never step foot into this house again. Now was my chance.
The spiral staircase waved and dipped beneath my feet, making me sick to my stomach as I tried to quickly navigate it. I stopped, gagged, covered my mouth, and kept going, churning my leaden feet as fast as I could until I was on the landing up top. I dropped to my knees and peered through the wooden railing, listening as Luna and Vanessa yelled at each other about where I might be and whose fault it was I was now missing.
I closed my eyes and took two deep breaths to clear my head and my stomach, and then opened them and looked down the hallway ahead of me. It was dotted with doors on either side. I got up and headed toward them, holding my breath and praying for an empty room each time I opened a door. Bathroom, another office, boutique, some room with a giant pink couch, generic bedroom, generic bedroom. And then a bedroom that looked like a tornado had hit it.
I knew right away I’d hit pay dirt when I saw the Forgotten Rebels poster stapled to the far wall. It had been half ripped down and seemed to dance in front of my eyes, but it was still unmistakably punk. Unmistakably Peyton. There were also boxes strewn across her bed and floor and stacked in the closet. These must have been the things Bill Hollis had cleaned out of the apartment.
I stepped into her room and closed the door behind me. I wanted so badly to take my time, to pick through her things methodically, discover her one piece of memorabilia at a time. But I could still hear doors being slammed downstairs, and I felt like I was moving through quicksand. I pushed myself to move faster.
I pulled open boxes and checked the bottoms of each and every dresser drawer. I felt behind the half-affixed poster. I rummaged through books on her bookshelf. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Dru had said Peyton had barely taken anything when she moved out, but that wasn’t quite the truth. She’d taken everything important. She only left behind the pieces of her life she didn’t want anymore.
I was just about to give up and make my way back downstairs, when I saw a rainbow-colored box tossed haphazardly into the bottom of one of the moving boxes in her closet. Somehow I’d missed it when I’d searched the apartment.
Rainbow. Live in Color.
I opened it, and there inside were mementos—the kind of things kids keep from elementary school. Field day ribbons, burnt birthday candles, photos of classmates. Nothing that made any sense to me. I sat on the closet floor and dug through, using every ounce of concentration I had to understand what these things meant. I had been hoping the rainbow was significant, the box a clue, but I guessed I was wrong. It was just a conglomeration of childish crap.
And then my hands landed on something solid on the very bottom, beneath an old, folded Girl Scout vest. I pulled it out.
It was a cell phone.
My heart leaped into my throat. This wasn’t a childhood memento—I was sure of it. This was what Peyton had wanted me to find. This was the cell phone everyone had been talking about—the old one she ditched right before moving out. This was why she’d left the rainbow box in her apartment. I pushed the power button, but nothing happened. Dead. I would just have to take it home and—
“There you are,” I heard. “I should have known you’d be too stupid to listen to my warning.”
My head whipped up to find Luna standing outside the closet door, her legs spread wide, her arms outstretched to come after me. From my vantage point, and to my drugged head, she looked like a giant standing there. A big, bulging, terrifying giant.
I didn’t wait for her to make a move. I already felt slow and stupid. I only hoped my training would kick in automatically. Take her down and get out, Gunn
er’s voice said in my head. Use what you have on hand.
I only briefly glanced down at Peyton’s cell phone—Luna’s eyes following mine—and then I wrapped it tight in my fist, reared my arm back, and drove it into the side of her knee with everything I had. She let out a surprised squawk, her leg buckling, and I used the moment to then drive the edge of the phone down onto the arch of her other foot.
She squealed, so loud I felt my eardrums vibrate, and I knew then I had to move. I jumped up, the top of my head catching her chin, and used my arms to push her back like a football player hitting a dummy. She went flying, and I raced out of the room, running for the stairs.
I could hear Vanessa calling out Luna’s name from somewhere downstairs, getting closer with every step. I missed one of the stairs and hit my knees, sliding down several steps, but got up again and ran, my shins and ankles crying out with dull pain.
“Luna?” Vanessa’s voice was coming from the entryway as I hit the living room floor.
“She’s upstairs!” I heard Luna shriek, and I turned just in time to see Vanessa storm into the living room. There was no way I was going to get to the front door, and the last thing I wanted was to have to fight Vanessa. My muscles were already screaming. My hand that had hit Luna’s leg and foot throbbed. And my knees ached from falling down the stairs. The rainbow that had swirled my confusion before was now mostly the green of a bruise.
Instead, I turned through the kitchen. Surely, there had to be a door somewhere.
I found it, behind a long blackout shade. A set of French doors that led out to the patio. A pool, and pool house, straight ahead. The door squeaked as I pulled it open. I wasted no time slipping through the tiniest opening I could manage and ran like hell out of there.
I didn’t stop until I was two blocks over, which was precisely when I had to bend forward and vomit again.
MY HEAD WAS much clearer by the time I got to Dru’s, though my stomach still cramped in on itself over and over again. I burst through the door the moment he opened it.
“She’s crazy,” I said, panting.
“Whoa, what?” he yelped, shutting the door and trying to catch up with me. I was already pacing his living room, back and forth, back and forth. In the light, his apartment was all bachelor opulence—browns and grays, tribal artwork, a kayak standing on end in one corner.
“Luna. She’s insane,” I said.
He came to me, a worried crease in his forehead. “What happened this time?”
I stopped pacing. I was hot. So hot the sweat felt like it was pouring off me. And my mouth was drier than ever. “She drugged me.”
He stepped back, looking incredulous. “Drugged you? Are you sure?”
“I’m positive,” I said. “I passed out, and when I came to, I was in the mansion. She said it was a warning. She’s going to kill me if I don’t stay out of your family’s business. What is this business, Dru? What is going on that I haven’t figured out yet?”
He shrugged, shaking his head, palms up, as if he were as in the dark as I was, but I could sense that familiar wall going up between us, just as I had before. He was shutting down, closing out the parts of himself he didn’t want me to see.
“Come on, Dru,” I said, throwing my hands up. “You’ll sleep with me, but you won’t tell me why your crazy sister wants me dead?”
“I don’t know why,” he said. “Did she say anything else?” He licked his lips, and if it had been anyone else, I would see chipped slate that meant nerves. But Dru wasn’t anyone else. Dru was a mystery. Instead I saw slate marbled with turquoise. Cheater blue, my mind singsonged. Cheater blue, cheater blue.
My stomach cramped in on itself again and I doubled over. He wrapped his arms around me from behind. “You okay?”
I gasped, gulped. “I need to use the bathroom,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll get you some water.”
I headed toward the bathroom, passing Dru’s office on the way. Because his apartment was so open, everything was in view. Had it been in a shut room, I might not have even seen a color jump out at me as I walked by. On his desk, tucked half under a paper, maroon and black shiny letters—the color pattern I associated with electronics. I looked back over my shoulder. Dru was still in the kitchen area, an open cabinet door shielding his face. I crept toward the desk, my stomach forgotten.
The desk was littered with papers, books, electronics, and cords. It all looked like the usual household paperwork—travel website printouts, a couple of résumés, some bills. But when I moved an application for a modeling school that had a Post-it stuck to it (You have an interview Monday. GO TO IT.—V) the maroon and black blazed out at me.
I picked it up and turned it in my fingers. SanDisk. Just what I thought.
A camera memory card.
Suddenly the ailments from the poisoning were such a distant memory I didn’t even feel them anymore. Dru had a camera memory card here. Peyton had a camera memory card missing from her car. Was it the same one?
I was just about to pocket it, take it home, when Dru came up behind me, silent as a cat.
“I thought you were going to the bathroom.”
I jumped, gasped, nearly dropped the card. “Oh. Yeah. It passed.”
His eyes landed on the card. He handed me a glass of water and took the card from my hand. “What’s going on?” he asked, his voice slick and cold. Again, I had a sense of Bill Hollis lurking under there somewhere. Cheater blue, Nikki. Slate with cheater blue—you can’t ignore it.
“I just didn’t realize you like photography,” I said, trying to keep the water in the glass steady.
He turned the card over. “I don’t. This is just from a trip to Vail. Did some hiking there last summer. It was really beautiful, so I took some pictures.”
His face gave away nothing. My legs started to shake, since I wasn’t allowing my hands to do so. “I’d love to see them,” I said, offering a small smile.
“Sure,” he said, offering one back.
“Now?”
He frowned. “Maybe not. You’re pretty pale. You look sick.”
I looked sick, or he was hiding whatever was on that disk from me? I put the water on his desk. “You’re right. I should go. I don’t feel very good.”
“You sure? Sounds like you’ve been through a lot today. You can stay. You can tell me more about what Luna said. Sounds traumatizing.” He brushed his palm down the back of my head, threading his fingers through my hair on the way down. Sparks flew up the back of my neck as his fingertips touched it.
I disengaged myself and headed toward the front door. As tempting as it was to spend some time with him, my head was way too foggy to even consider it. I had to do some thinking about who Dru Hollis really might be. Slate and cheater blue! Slate and cheater blue! “Maybe next time,” I said, stepping out into the hallway and pushing the elevator button.
“Okay, if you’re sure,” he said. The elevator opened and I stepped inside. “And, hey, let me deal with Luna. I’ll take care of it.” He slipped the camera card into his front pocket as the elevator door slid closed.
23
I HAD TO see Peyton again. I wasn’t sure why I felt so compelled—only that sitting next to her bed was now familiar to me. I understood why I was doing this, following these clues to nowhere, a little bit better when I was staring at her rainbow tattoo. Not to say that I understood fully just yet.
Funny how attached I’d grown to someone who’d literally never spoken to me, except through photographs. But somehow I felt connected to Peyton, and it wasn’t just the Dru connection.
It was Saturday, so I didn’t have to deal with Luna at school, which was a good thing. But not being in school meant I had no idea where Luna was at any given moment, which was a bad thing. It was hard to protect yourself against someone when you didn’t know where in the city they were. I felt like I was on high alert every second.
I had the whole day, so I decided to stop at the dojang first thing. Gunner was standing at the front des
k.
So was Chris Martinez.
Gunner took one look at my bruised face—the cut on the cheek from Stefan’s hit a week ago scabbed over and fading, and a fresh blackish splotch above one eyebrow from falling in my kitchen, along with a faint yellowing along my jawline where Luna had repeatedly hit me—and dropped the pencil he was holding.
“What the heck happened to you?” he asked, hurrying around the desk. He was in his dobok but was wearing flip-flops. A junior instructor was assisting the kids on the floor.
“I’m fine,” I said, but even I didn’t believe me. Detective Martinez didn’t react, but I could see him studying my face from where he was standing, too.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked, though at this point I wasn’t really all that surprised to see him pretty much anywhere in my life. That seemed to be his specialty—always being right in my way.
“Open gym today,” Gunner said. “He wants to work out. Why? Is there a problem?” He looked from my bruises to Detective Martinez, and back again.
It was only then that I noticed Detective Martinez was wearing a pair of navy sweatpants and a white tee so tight it showed off the shadow of a tattoo across the left side of his chest. I shook my head, resigned. “Of course not. It’s open gym. I didn’t know you were into martial arts, Detective,” I said.
“I’m into protecting myself,” he answered. “But yes, I do okay in the dojo, too.”
“Good,” I said, grinning. “I won’t have to worry about you getting in my way too much, then. But just in case, the junior instructors are over there.” I pointed to where the kids were practicing their moves.
I thought I heard a low chuckle come from Detective Martinez. He looked down at his shoes, and then back up at me, nodding. “I’ll keep that in mind. But just out of curiosity, where is the sparring mat?”
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