by Molly Harper
“And the objects Ophelia has had you inspecting? Have you seen anything when you’ve held them?”
Nik cleared his throat and glanced at Aaron and Jordan, who were studiously ignoring us. “I get a couple of flashes but nothing that would tell me anything about their origin.”
I picked up the fairy statue and examined it closely. “I think I recognize this,” I told him. “It’s from Jane’s shop. She’s been trying to get rid of them since she opened. She actually gave one to Ophelia last year for her birthday.”
“This belonged to Ophelia?” he asked.
“I think so.”
I turned around to check if Jordan and Aaron were watching. They swiveled their chairs around, acting as if they weren’t.
Nik held the fairy in his hands, and his eyes went all smoky. “Nothing. I am getting nothing.”
“Why would Ophelia give you a regift as evidence?”
“This whole investigation has been wrong,” he said. “I am making no progress at all. I do not remember making half of these notes. And Ophelia is not riding my ass about my lack of progress. You work for her, you know how she feels about progress.”
“Nik, have you ever seen a goose out in the wild?” I asked. “You ever chased it around?”
“You are saying that Ophelia is sending me on a wild-goose chase?”
“No, I just enjoy asking people random questions about their fowl habits,” I said, as my stomach suddenly rumbled, loudly enough to get Nik’s attention.
“Did you forget to eat again?” he said, nudging me.
“Maybe,” I said, wincing. “It’s been a busy night.”
“Gigi, you have got to take better care of yourself,” he chided me gently.
“I know.” I sighed.
“Which is why I brought you this,” he said, gesturing at the objects he’d pulled from his cooler bag: a small black enamel bento box with cherry blossoms on the top and black enamel chopsticks. “Cal said this was your favorite, before he realized I was interested in you and stopped the flow of all information.”
“Aw, you brought me lunch? That’s so sweet, but . . .” I cast a longing glance at my computer.
“You are going to take a break,” he said, wheeling my chair away from my desk.
“She skips lunch a lot; more often than I would say is healthy,” Jordan told Nik. “I think that’s why everybody keeps bringing her food. Sammy worries.”
“Traitor!” I shouted, but Jordan was positively unashamed. “Slander and lies!”
“Gigi,” Nik whispered in mock horror.
“She keeps her own soy sauce in the fridge, in case you forgot it,” Jordan added.
“I did forget it, thank you.” Nik rose and retrieved my soy sauce from the office fridge. He pulled my rolling chair down to the end of my desk and nudged the food in front of me.
“But . . . information!” I exclaimed, straining toward my computer.
“Not so funny when it’s your boyfriend dragging you away, huh?” Jordan crowed.
“Gigi,” Nik said, placing his hands on either side of my arms, effectively trapping me in my desk chair.
I smirked. The position had possibilities. I replaced the smirk with the poutiest, saddest puppy face I could manage.
He groaned. “Not that face.”
I ratcheted the bottom lip out just a little bit more.
He rolled his eyes and picked up the chopsticks. “You work, and I will feed you.”
“That’s so weird and adorable,” I told him. He gave a much-put-upon sigh and slid aside the box lid, revealing a Philadelphia roll and a green dragon roll. My mouth dropped open, and I blurted out, “I really love you.”
His smile could have lit up the world. “Really?”
I nodded, and he rolled my chair toward him with a sharp jerk that launched me against him. He crushed my mouth against his, swallowing my moans as I slid my fingers over his close-cropped hair. “That is all it takes to get you to confess your feelings? All I had to do was bring you sushi?”
“If you’d remembered the pickled ginger, I’d be giving you a lap dance right now.”
He growled and dropped his head. “I was this close!”
“I love you,” I told him, kissing his frown away. “I really, really do. Never forget that.”
“I would not,” he swore. “Never forget that I love you back.”
“This is so awkward,” Aaron whispered to Jordan.
“Shut up, it’s sweet!” Jordan hissed back. “They make such a cute couple.”
I kissed him one last time and rolled toward my desk, poising my hands above the keyboard. “Now, feed me.”
“Is this what our future will look like?” he asked, dipping a fat pink piece of salmon into some soy sauce. “I will spend my eternity taking a backseat to raw fish and random numbers?”
“Not all the time,” I promised him, delicately wrapping the fish between my lips and pulling it into my mouth with my tongue. “Only when I’m on a deadline.”
He cleared his throat, watching my mouth. “I think I can live with that.”
• • •
Two nights passed at work without a tabletop sexual incident. I marked it on my calendar with a smug little emoticon.
Of course, Marty called in sick for those two days, claiming to have the flu, which put off that awkward avoidance of eye contact. But on the bright side, no one came to escort me out of the office for pantsless interrogation-room shenanigans.
With Marty out of the office, Jordan, Aaron, and I held an emergency secret meeting over Sammy’s super mocha frappuccinos to determine our progress and try to figure out whether we could do a whole summer’s worth of work if he was sick for the rest of the week. (No.) But the good news was that we’d hit all of our checkpoint deadlines for the summer and were on track for the large-scale test in a few weeks.
It was sad that we had to resort to this sort of meeting behind Marty’s back, but he was still operating under the bulletproof umbrella of Ophelia’s protection. I thought maybe Aaron and Jordan felt guilty about it, because they kept giving each other pointed looks and nudging, as if they had something to tell me and neither wanted to be the one to break the bad news.
Finally, I put my pen down and said, “OK, what’s going on?”
Jordan tipped her rainbow hair toward me, only to have Aaron shake his head.
“Kids, use your words!” I cried.
“Knock-knock!”
Aaron’s big moment was interrupted by Jamie walking through our office door, holding a grease-stained bag from the Coffee Spot, an old-school diner downtown that served insanely awesome cheese fries.
“Hey!” I hopped up from my seat and threw my arms around him. “How did you get past security?”
“You know that’s not how most people greet their friends, right?” Jamie said, as I snatched the bag from his hands and handed it to Jordan. “I come bearing cheese fries.”
“How many vampire friends does she have?” Aaron asked Jordan quietly. Jordan shrugged. “And why are they always bringing her food?”
“We need vampire friends to bring us food,” Jordan said, chowing down on cheese fries.
“It is at the Council office,” I told Jamie. “But seriously, what are you doing here? Are you visiting Ophelia?”
“Yeah, I came to check up on her. She hasn’t been feeling well the last few days,” he said.
“That’s weird,” I noted, as Aaron and Jordan spread out Jamie’s offering to accompany our sandwiches.
“Well, our office mate Marty is out with the flu,” Aaron said. “Maybe it’s going around.”
“It doesn’t really work like that,” Jamie explained in a kind bro-to-bro tone. “Vampires don’t get sick.”
“Also, Marty doesn’t actually have the flu,” Jordan added under her brea
th. I stared at her for a long moment, wondering what, exactly, she knew about what had happened earlier that week. She stared right back, but her poker face was much better than mine, and I couldn’t get anything out of her.
“At least you know she’s not pregnant.” I laughed, trying to break the tension. I paused. “She can’t possibly be pregnant, right?”
“I am ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure,” Jamie scoffed. “But I’m worried about her. She hasn’t been herself for weeks.”
The small, petty, cynical side of me wondered how closely Ophelia’s “illness” was tied to Jamie’s looming departure for college. But before I could express this in a way that wouldn’t upset Jamie, the vampire herself appeared in our office doorway, mascara running down her cheeks and her hair in disarray. She was wearing baggy acid-washed jeans and a plain black T-shirt with sneakers. She looked as if she’d just done the walk of shame from A. C. Slater’s frat party.
Aaron’s and Jordan’s eyes went wide at Ophelia’s disheveled appearance. They immediately turned around and practically leaped into their desk chairs, turning their backs to our bedraggled boss. Apparently, they were taking the “see nothing, hear nothing” approach again.
“I need to talk to you,” Ophelia whispered. “Now. Please call Nola and have her meet us here.”
With that, she shuffled back down the hallway and out of sight. My mouth gaped as Jamie stared after her.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded.
“Ophelia said ‘please,’ ” I said, pulling my phone from my pocket and dialing Nola’s number. “Ophelia never says ‘please’ to me. This is bad. This is very bad.”
“I’m going to go—I don’t know what I’m going to do, but that needs to be taken care of.” With that, Jamie dashed down the hallway after his broken-down lady love.
Nola made the four-block trip to the office from her clinic in record time. Jamie was actually concerned for Ophelia’s health and forced her to curl up on the pink-checked couch in her office with a warmed bottle of donor Type A. Ophelia refused to say anything more, claiming that she only wanted to make her “confession” once.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to make the connection between Ophelia’s symptoms and the rumor we’d spread about Nola’s curse on the caster who’d put Nik in his fugue states. In my defense, I’d long since removed Ophelia from my suspect list after Nola cleared her. Well, except for the part where she could kill me with her bare hands. She could still do that.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked, as Nola bustled into the office. I expected Nola to give Ophelia some sort of examination, but she’d simply perched on the arm of my chair, waiting. It said a lot about either the way she felt about me or how she felt about Ophelia.
Ophelia removed the ice bag that Jamie had so helpfully provided from her head and forced herself into a sitting position. “I hired a witch to put the spell on Nik,” she said, her voice trembling pitifully. “You were taking Jamie away from me. He was going to college, with you, away from me. I was just so angry, and there you were, smiling and happy all the damn time, because you were going to have him all to yourself at that stupid school. And I snapped. As a courtesy, Nik notified me when he came into town over Christmas to visit Cal. I trumped up the robbery cases to have an excuse for him to come back to town. I hired the witch, and she cast the spell. I didn’t mean it. It all happened so fast.”
“I imagine that sort of deal took at least a few e-mails to iron out details,” Nola deadpanned. “It couldn’t have happened that fast. What exactly did the witch do?”
Ophelia sighed. “After Iris was hospitalized, you developed a habit of donating blood to the blood bank near your college campus every three months.”
A horrible sinking sensation took hold of my stomach. “Oh, no.”
“I arranged for one of your donations to be ‘misdirected’ and sent here. If it makes you feel any better, it took quite a bit of bribery and coercion to persuade the phlebotomist to hand over your pint of blood. The witch used it to put Nik on your trail, so to speak. Without knowing why or remembering how, he would attack you and continue to attack you until you were dead. But unbeknownst to us, he was already on your trail. He knew you, had feelings for you, and that complicated the spell. The witch had to improvise, and little by little, we’ve lost control of the situation. Magic is a living, breathing thing, and it has mutated beyond what we expected. The original intent of the spell is there; Nik will keep on attacking you. But he’s fighting it. The more he remembers about your first encounters, his first blush of feelings toward you, the more the spell tries to reestablish itself, and the more violent the attacks become.”
Jamie’s face had gone bone-white as Ophelia described putting a magical hit on me without any remorse or regret. My stomach churned but not for myself—for Nik and what they must have done to him to put him in this state. The edges of my vision went red and hazy, and it was all I could do not to lunge at Ophelia.
“Was it a Renart?” I asked.
Ophelia shot me an incredulous look and then nodded.
I glared at her. “I traced the family to this area. With the genealogical information that you knew I would be handling this summer. Honestly, it’s like you wanted to be caught.”
“It was a Renart,” she said, eyeing me carefully. “We’ve tracked the family for years, in case they decided to return to their old tricks. We have to protect our interests.”
Suddenly, Jamie sprang up from his seat and threw his chair against the wall, shattering the chair and making a considerable dent in the wall, not to mention making Ophelia flinch. His fangs were fully extended, and for the first time since he was turned, he looked ready to rip out throats.
He placed his hand on my arm and squeezed gently. “I’m so sorry, Gigi,” he whispered. “I don’t know what to say. I’ll find a way to help you make this right, I promise.”
Ophelia’s voice wavered. “Jamie.”
“Don’t,” Jamie growled. “Don’t talk to me.”
He swept from the room in the most vampirelike state I’d ever seen him in. Ophelia seemed to shrink in her chair, looking very young and sad and vulnerable. And I just couldn’t find it within me to give a damn.
“Why Nik?” I asked, through gritted teeth.
Ophelia practically whispered, “I knew that his gift involves him going into a sort of hypnotic state to receive information from the objects he touches, which made him more open to suggestion without completely scrambling his brain. He didn’t enter into the curse willingly, if it makes you feel any better. The witch stepped in while he was reading an object with a particularly complicated history and cast while he was out of it.”
“What did you give him?” Nola asked.
“The Hope Diamond.”
“I thought that was in the Smithsonian?”
“That’s a copy,” Ophelia said. “Council officials took possession of the actual stone more than fifty years ago to protect humans from it.”
Nola frowned. “Because anyone who owns it dies?”
“Common misconception. The diamond just makes the owner more susceptible to magical energy. And with its multiple owners and tragic history, Nik was under long enough for the witch to cast.”
“OK, so what do we do to break the curse? True love’s kiss? Magic fleece? Killing the witch who cast the spell? Killing the vampire who hired the witch who cast the spell?” I asked, giving Ophelia the death glare.
“Killing the target fulfills the requirements of the curse,” Ophelia said. “And if that doesn’t work, there’s a sort of back-door solution for this kind of spell. An act of loving sacrifice from either party usually nullifies the magical agreement.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s open for interpretation. I told you, I made a hasty decision to start this process. It’s not like it
came with an owner’s manual!” she cried.
“So who is the Renart witch who cursed him? I’d like to talk to her. Or at least have Nola talk to her. Is it Margaret?” I asked. “It’s Margaret, isn’t it? She’s awfully witchy.”
“The witch isn’t important,” Ophelia said.
“The hell she isn’t!” I yelled.
“She isn’t! I can’t tell you about her anyway. I signed a nondisclosure agreement.”
“There are magical nondisclosure agreements?” I asked.
“The spell is cast.” Nola shrugged. “There’s no magical undo key, Gigi. We’ve talked about this. Our best option is to try to break it or fulfill it. Or you and Nik could separate. If he went to another continent, put enough distance between you, it might reduce the pull.”
“Blood magic is powerful.” Ophelia shook her head. “It will only get worse. If Nik doesn’t complete his task, fulfill the curse, he will slowly go insane. He will lose bits of his memory, until he no longer remembers you or his past or even his own name.”
I refused to cry in front of Ophelia. That was the only thing that kept me from breaking down right there. This was a fairy tale from hell, complete with cursed princes and witches and insanity. What was I going to do? What would Cal do in this situation? What would Iris do?
I closed my eyes and listened to Ophelia chatter about Nik’s slow descent into madness. Iris would find a solution. Iris would stop wallowing and figure it out. So that’s what I would do. She would also find a way to get back at Ophelia, even if it cost her a limb.
“Why are you telling us all of this now, Ophelia?” Nola asked. “You’ve sat back and watched for months as Nik and Gigi struggled with this. Why come forward now?”
“It’s the curse you put on whoever did Gigi harm. I’ve never felt so ill before.” Ophelia groaned. “Even when I was human, I’ve never felt such pain in my belly or tightness in my chest. My head is pounding, and everything aches. Even though I know it’s not possible, I feel like I could die. Please remove whatever spell you’ve placed on me. I’ve told you everything you need to know. Or at least, everything I can tell you. That should count for something.”