A Taste of You

by Jennifer Stevenson

  Sageman’s at my apartment.

  That scares me back into focus.

  I fidget. I need money, I need my car, and I need firepower. All at my apartment.

  Dammit. My cat will wonder if she’ll ever see kibbles again. I can’t kill myself until I save the world and find someone to take my cat.

  This reminds me of Fist Kist, who has sometimes fed the cat for me.

  I call her. “Fist, this is Hélan Vittle. I’m in a jam and I can’t feed my cat today.”

  Fist says, Sure she can feed the cat. Then she gets personal. “What kind of jam?” Her tone turns fierce. “Did that old guy dump you?”

  “Not exactly,” I say. “But I can’t go back to my apartment right now—”

  “What?” She sounds outraged. “What’s he doing? I’ll kick his ass!”

  “No, no,” I say. “I can do that. It’s just a little inconvenient for me to be seen there.”

  “So he’s figured you out! Oh shit, did he set the cops on you? The bastard!”

  “What do you mean, figured me out?” I go cold.

  “Oh, come on, Hélan. We all know you’re an illegal.”

  Brain freeze. “Baah — you whaa?”

  “Like that matters.” She adds, “Do you need crash space? I have room.”

  I try to regroup. “Uh, actually—”

  “Where are you? I’ll come get you and then we can swing by your place and feed the cat.”

  “I can’t go by my apartment—” I begin. I had no idea Fist was such a whirlwind of girl solidarity.

  While she is saying, “Oh, of course, sorry,” I start to think this through. I’m going to need my skates. Which are in the trunk of my Tahoe, which is parked around the corner from my apartment. The car is probably bugged to a fare-thee-well at this point. Certainly Nick put a GPS on it, because he followed me to the blue zone that day. But if Fist drives me down there, I can scope the neighborhood and figure out if Sageman is in the apartment, and if he’s not actually in it, then I can score my skates while Fist feeds my cat. He’ll be watching her go into my apartment, so he won’t have his eye on my car at the same time! Thank God parking sucks so bad in my neighborhood that I have to park so far away from my place.

  “Hélan?” Fist says.

  “Still here. Making a plan. I’m at Rush Presbyterian, down on Diversey and Sheridan.”

  “I’m on my way,” she says. I hear a motor revving at her end.

  I hang up and slump against the bus stop.

  I’m absorbing the shocks of the past half-hour in reverse order. Nick is getting worked over by Jilly. Nick is hiding stuff from Sageman. Jilly knows about me.

  Jilly has always known about me.

  I don’t have time to wrap a cold wet towel around my head and try to remember every single close call, every little revealing moment that might have blown my secret.

  How could she know?

  Of course I’ve overlooked a basic fact. This is Jilly we’re dealing with. When Jilly wants to know something, she finds out.

  Despair settles over me.

  I can give up now.

  My mother knows, she’s always known, but she never told me because “it wasn’t convenient.”

  This enrages me afresh. I’ve spent forty-three years crawling on my belly like a reptile, covering up something she already knew, feeling bad for lying to her when she knew the truth, terrified to lose her good opinion when I already had it.

  If she knew what I was and forgave me for it, why didn’t she tell me? I was dying for absolution. Am dying. Will die. I hit an all-new low of self-hate.

  Of course it was convenient — to her — that I didn’t know she knew. So much easier for her to control me.

  Unless she didn’t really know. Was she fucking with Nick’s head just now? She’s pretty good at hiding surprise.

  Does that mean she never knew, and never would have forgiven me?

  My brain whirls. I’m sick to my stomach. I want to know for sure. I don’t want to know, because it makes me so angry.

  When I think of what I’ve given up so that I can take care of her, how hard I’ve worked to protect her from myself, I — I want to hate her.

  I can’t hate her. I need her.

  That’s worse than everything else.

  I want to jump off a tall building onto my face.

  And Nick. I’d felt so much hope. And he’s revolted by me, appalled at himself, sickened by his own foolishness in thinking that he loved me when it was just his special kink, his hard-on for magic.

  One thought keeps me standing.

  If I die today, I’ll never have to face them.

  My cell rings.

  I check the number. It’s Nick. Does he have a tracer or a bug on my phone, too? But no, he hasn’t had access to it. Like everyone else’s phone, my phone is basically a part of my body.

  I could just ignore it.

  My heart thumps like mad. “What.”

  “Why don’t you come inside, instead of skulking around the bus stop? I can see you from your mom’s window.”

  I spin around and look up at the hospital building. In a window on the fifth floor, someone is waving. I narrow my vampire super-eyes. Nick.

  I feel shock all over my skin, as if his eyetracks are super, too.

  I think fast. “Getting my nerve up,” I say.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he promises.

  “You don’t have to. You have my mom,” I say bitterly.

  “Oh, for — just get up here. We need to talk.” He sounds calm and reasonable, but not quite as big-man-in-charge as usual.

  I can’t feel his energy from here.

  Of course Nick, when he’s talking cop, can sound any way he wants.

  My heart flip-flops. Jilly has been working on him for, what, another twenty minutes now. I can’t imagine what she’s been saying to him.

  Of course, I never can.

  Give up, Hel. It’s over.

  He says, “Hel? Give me a chance.”

  My heart squeezes. I croak, “Don’t do this to me.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Fist’s boxy Scion, all over derby stickers, approach the traffic light at Diversey and Sheridan.

  I look up. He’s watching me. He doesn’t speak.

  I let my shoulders slump. “All right.” I look up at the window, where I can see him leaning, looking down at me. I raise my hand a little. He raises his hand. I walk slowly toward the front door, wishing weirdly that this could really happen.

  “Look. My battery’s going,” I say urgently. “But in case it quits, I want to tell you about—” and I kill the call.

  Once I’m close enough to the building that he can’t see me from Jilly’s window, I scoot along the wall, dodge into the street between honking taxis, and tap on Fist’s driver-side window. While she is popping the locks, I peek around her car at Jilly’s hospital-room window. Nobody is looking out, now. I scramble in the passenger door on her side.

  “Is he over there?” Fist says suspiciously as I buckle up.

  “In my mom’s hospital room. He’s waiting for me,” I say hollowly.

  God, he sounded so not-mad at me. He’s got to know I’d be crazy to go to Jilly, with Sageman on the loose. Doesn’t he? At the thought of trying to explain to Nick, I feel my lip tremble.

  Give up. Give up, Hel, it’s over, relax, you can stop trying now.

  Black despair washes over me. I’ve never felt this bad, not even when drunk, not even when I sucked my first sex partner dry back in high school, and he blew away in the wind.

  Fist Kist pats my hand, keeping her eyes on the road. “Don’t cry, Hélan.”

  “I’m not crying,” I say crossly, wiping my eyes. “I can’t believe you came for me.”

  “Well, fuck-yeah-duh! We’ve got your back.”

  I squeeze her hand, unable to speak.

  I’m so overwhelmed at the thought of somebody looking out for me that it takes me ten blocks to catch up with what she has said. �
��We?”

  She bounces the Scion into the 7-Eleven lot four blocks from my apartment. The lot is full of cars. People are leaning against their cars, standing in small groups, talking. I shrink down in my seat, thinking about gangs. She hops out.

  “Fist,” I begin, and then I recognize the cars.

  They’re all plastered with derby stickers.

  The whole team is here.

  I get out and they crowd around me, This weirds me out even more.

  Sacker Tart gives me a huge hug. “You’re okay?” she says, and looks in my face. “He didn’t hit you?”

  I scoff, but it turns into a sniff. “Oh, please. If he hit me, I’d break every bone in his body.” I look at them standing here, fierce and worried, and my lip trembles again. I may not have a real mom, but I have fourteen sixteenths of a mom. Which apparently adds up to way more than one. “You didn’t have to come.”

  “Fuck that,” Rapture Snatch says crisply. “What do you want us to do?”

  o0o

  Ten minutes later I’m in the back of Sacker’s car, slunk way down. She drives slowly past my place. I’ve told her that I’m calling my home phone. Really, I’m extending my bat-ears like crazy, listening for telltale sounds of Sageman in my apartment.

  All I can hear is the cat, cussing.

  Then I get a terrifying blast of Sageman’s Old-Spice-and-expensive-shoes smell. We just drove past him.

  He’s sitting outside the front of my apartment in a parked car.

  I reach up to tap Sacker’s shoulder. She drives on. We go halfway down the block to the next light. I peek back in time to see six cars pull up in front of my building. They double park. Two of them actually pull up on the muddy front lawn, flashers blinking.

  Ten girls jump out of the cars and converge on my building. I see Sageman’s silhouette. He’s trapped in his own car, unable to open his driver’s side door because my girls are parked too close to him, and he’s double-parked too close to get out his passenger side. He’s gawking at my derby commandos, who swarm in and out of my building, carrying my cat, the cat’s poop box, cat food, and other cat impedimenta to their various vehicles. They’re carrying my backpack. They’ve got my clothes.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Sacker takes us around the corner and down the block to my car. While I cower low, keeping watch in the rear-view at the street behind us, she gets out and moves my skate gear from my Tahoe into her back seat.

  I want to go back and look at my place.

  Fist nixes that. “The boyfriend will catch you.”

  I don’t correct her about Nick, but I realize she’s right. No point giving Sageman a chance to whiff me with whatever evil mind-powers he’s got.

  We end up at Fist Kist’s place. I’m overwhelmed again. We assemble in Fist’s living room with a huge bottle of tequila and Fist makes a pot of coffee while I hold my cat too tightly.

  My cat bitches nonstop, but she lets me hold her.

  I can’t stop sobbing. When the tears dry up, I start hiccupping.

  They’re too tactful to sit there silently and look at me. Three girls put together margaritas and shooters. Donna Draper and Bichon Frizzy go out for snacks and come back with piles of junk food. The rest are in the kitchen dicking with a microwave brownie mix, or setting up the cat box in the bathroom, or in the living room seated near me but not on top of me, talking about anything except Hélan’s screwed-up love life, which I’m sure they think is the problem here.

  What am I going to tell them? The memory of feeling Nick go sick and cold and scared as he walked up to me and the pile of Macy’s dust in that alley makes me sick to my stomach.

  If I tell them the truth, they’ll tear me to pieces.

  The state I’m in, I think I’ll let them.

  My cell rings. I check it. Katterfelto. “Yeah.”

  “Ms. Hel, you must meet me where the coin is hidden.”

  “What? Why?” Then I really get a bad feeling. “Doc, don’t you have a headache?”

  Slowly and deliberately, he says, “No. Come at once.”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  Sageman’s got him.

  “It’ll take me at least ninety minutes,” I say, to buy time.

  He hangs up. Yup, that’s how Sageman does it — short and sweet. If Katterfelto had been alone, he’d have kept me yakkity-yakking on the horn for five more minutes.

  “Problem?” says Bull Jumper tightly.

  I stare at her, my mouth open to tell — what?

  Sacker, sitting on the floor across from me, leans forward. “We know, Hélan.”

  My chest goes tight. “You know what?”

  “He’s a bastard,” Dom-De-Dom-Dom says from the kitchen door.

  I don’t care if they tear me to pieces. I’d rather die here with my team than let Sageman get me, and make me do God-knows-what. He’d leave Jilly alone if I was dead.

  I shake my head. “Nick’s a good guy. But he’s a Fed. He’s with this, like, anti-magic agency. I thought he was after Dr. Katterfelto, but really his boss is after me.”

  And the whole story tumbles out.

  The living room fills up. They listen. It seems like nobody is breathing. I would hear if they did.

  I tell them about being an energy vampire. I tell them how angry Nick was when he arrested me, and how my mom is sick, so now she’ll be their hostage and Sageman can force me to make him a vampire. I tell them I don’t know how to do that. I explain about the coin, and how it’s out there under the asphalt and I have to dig it out before Sageman does. I even tell them Katterfelto’s theory about the prana in the power grid, and about watching the prana pour out of all those stretcher cases and into the hospital TV.

  I can’t believe how good it feels to be spilling the beans. The relief is just stupendous.

  The only hard part is that they are united in hating Nick.

  “He’s a jerk,” Stun Bunny snarls.

  “Fucking cradle robber,” says Tuda Juster, who apparently missed the part about my true age.

  “We can take him, all of us together. Is he armed?” says Donna Draper.

  Stun snorts. “Not a problem, if we come at him wearing fishnets.”

  I wave my hands. “No—no—”

  “Let her talk,” Sacker said. “Then kill him.”

  “Please.” I’m hyperventilating at all this vigilante stuff. “You have to understand.” My throat is tight. “He — he hates magic. It destroyed his home back in Pittsburgh. It killed his family.”

  This earns some grudgingly sympathetic grumbles.

  I don’t want to tell them the next part, but I tell. “Something changed him back in Pittsburgh, behind the wall. He can feel when magic is going to happen. He gets horny around magic.”

  “Oh, now that’s gross,” Anaesthesia Steele says.

  “Eeww!” says Fistin’ Grey.

  “That’s why he’s always, uh, attracted to me. He told me he has the strongest feeling something magic is going to happen to me.” I choke, remembering how worried for me he was. “But it’s already happened. And now he knows what it is.”

  “He doesn’t know jack,” says Irrita Belle.

  I’m sobbing now, snot coming out of my nose and everything. “Yes, he does,” I say, nodding and sobbing. “I’m magic and I kill people and he doesn’t love me, it’s just this horrible thing that he hates about himself, and I make him sick, and he’ll never, ever forgive me.”

  “If that’s what he thinks, he doesn’t love you,” says Leaning Power of Lisa.

  I sniffle. “He might. I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. He’ll think it’s the lust for magic, not love, and he despises magic, so he despises what he felt for me.” I break down again. “I’m just like those dirty little p-poodles at the d-dump to him. S-something wrong trying to s-sneak into normal people’s lives.”

  I get a group hug for that.

  I’m such a hopeless baby that I let them hold me and soak me with their fierce affection.

&
nbsp; I also notice that Pound of Venus is not among us. There should be fourteen of us.

  “Where’s Venus?” I blurt, because diarrhea mouth has me in its grip. If Pound of Venus was here, I’d be on my way to Hinky Guantanamo right now. The up side of that is, at least Sageman wouldn’t be able to get at me there. Too many other anti-magic agencies would be competing for lab time with Hel.

  “Venus is in the Bahamas with the hunk. Extended administrative leave without pay,” says Sacker. “She has to pretend to be fired now and then, when the shit hits the fan.”

  “Yeah, and anyway we wouldn’t tell Venus,” says Rapture Snatch.

  “That’s right,” says Donna Draper. “She doesn’t need to know.”

  Irrita Belle says, “The city pays her to chase magic. This way, she won’t have to feel guilty for not boosting her teammates.”

  I frown. That feels icky.

  “Oh, come on, thweetie,” lisps the usually silent Steamy Roller. “You think you’re the only one here with thomething to hide?”

  “We all have secrets,” Rap says.

  I shake my head. “Not like mine.”

  “At the last bout?” Bichon Frizzy says. “When you couldn’t be there because your mom was super sick? That underage rookie broke her neck?”

  “Ahem,” Sacker Tart says. “We agreed not to endanger anybody else with that information.”

  Beesh frowns. “Oh, all right.”

  A shiver runs up my back. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?” I feel super icky, like they don’t trust me.

  Beesh says, “You were at the hospital with your mom that night? It was a big mess? Something hinky happened,” she says, sticking her tongue out at Sacker, “and Venus’s job was on the line, because she would get blamed? We stuck to The Hinky Policy, you know, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell, cope?’ Besides, what if the feds came after us for being hinky? What if a rumor started that our team was hinky, and nobody would ever play us?”

  Donna says apologetically, “Venus pledged us to secrecy. She still got suspended, but she didn’t get fired.”

  I guess my face shows my discomfort.

  Sacker rolls her eyes. “It was nothing to do with you. But Rap is right. We all have hinky secrets. Me? I can feel someone’s body heat approaching from three feet away. That’s why I drive everywhere. And why I had to stop acting in porn and switched to directing and producing. Also why I’m a good jammer. It’s like I have eyes in the back of my head.”