CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Waking up in the hospital had not been what Ruby had hoped for in that last minute she’d been aware of things on her veranda. But when she awoke and saw her reality, she wasn’t exactly surprised. She felt like hell. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt so awful in her entire life.
There were dozens, hundreds of things she needed to be doing, but all she’d been able to do in those first few days was sleep. Those first few days, every time she was awake, she’d insisted on having an assistant on call. She’d been keen on managing things as best she could, even from her hospital bed, but every assistant Bridget or Arsho sent her seemed to be willing to do little more than read the cards on the ever-increasing flower arrangements that filled every available space in the room.
Jaccob had apparently been there the first day or two. The best she’d been able to piece together from what the nurses were telling her was he’d stuck around until everyone was sure she was going to pull through. After that, he’d gone back to Bermuda to see after his kids and his yacht; this was according to the card attached to the flowers he’d had sent over. It was a lovely arrangement, but it wasn’t a bundle of Gold of Kinabalu orchids, either. The difference between the seduction and the breakup, she figured.
There was more to that message, enough to tell her that the breakup she feared when she’d first seen the flowers was already well underway. The questions were vague, and gentle for the most part. But she was sure based on what she read that their relationship was most likely over for good.
That had sent Ruby down a spiral of curiosity. Had a member of her staff read Jaccob’s card when they were collecting those from fans and employees? Had they thought she felt dumped, sad, and lonely? Had they thought she’d only sent for them so she’d have company?
She could not have cared less about having company. What she cared about was running a company. Relationship questions could wait until she had the bandwidth.
Damage control had been her first priority. Enough of the fallout from the White House concert had been either handled or delegated in the days before she’d attempted the Ritual of the Scrolls that she hadn’t been immediately worried about the status of those bits of business. It was her own status she was most concerned about.
Word on the street had it she’d fallen from her helipad onto her veranda. Apparently Arsho had bought the story so completely that they were already in the process of having an OSHA-approved safety railing installed. It was a cover story that made her sound clumsy and a little bit pathetic, but Ruby supposed things could be worse. There was no mention of magic nor of Loki in any of the news media, so at least she could be thankful for that. There were a lot of questions about what had happened she wasn’t prepared to answer.
The visits from assistants had lasted less than a week. Ruby couldn’t abide forced cheerfulness, and the staff she’d been sent by her office all seemed to have been hand-picked to deliver just that. She’d been able to take care of business from her Starphone ever since.
It was three days into the second week of her hospital stay when she’d gotten an honest-to-goodness visitor.
She’d told the desk no one was to be allowed in, but somehow she guessed they figured her directive didn’t apply to him. Ruby had only just opened her eyes when she realized the person leaning on her door jamb wasn’t one of the hospital denizens she was used to seeing.
The moment she made eye contact with Jaccob, she ardently wished she hadn’t. There was a hard conversation in their future, and she had neither the energy for it nor for ignoring the proverbial elephant in this sterile, uncomfortable room between them.
Ruby closed her eyes again and counted to ten. There was every chance he hadn’t come to talk. Maybe he’d just stopped by to ask after her condition--just to look in on her for a second. Maybe he wouldn’t have come to her room at all if he’d known there was a chance she’d be awake. Closing her eyes again gave him the opportunity to retreat. If he was dreading their next conversation the way she was ...
When she opened her eyes again, he’d stepped into the room farther. Apparently he wasn’t going away. Ruby turned her head toward him and smiled as best she was able.
"I wasn’t expecting to see you," she said softly as she fiddled with the bed’s controls to make her more upright. If she was going to have it out with Jaccob, she wasn’t going to do it lying flat on her back.
Jaccob shrugged. "I wasn’t expecting to come," he admitted.
Ruby smiled sadly as she nodded.
"But hey," he said, his tone artificially light as he struggled to fake a smile. "I’m finally getting to see you without makeup on."
Ruby’s gut knotted up. She knew he was trying to be cute, but all he’d done just then was to activate her most primordial defenses. She tried to play it off. She wasn’t sure what he was doing here, but he was being pleasant for the moment, which was more than she had let herself hope for. She’d try to go along with the banter. "I told you I was hideous," she snarked, quirking her lip in the way she always did when she was only half kidding.
"I don’t know," he countered, "I think you’re looking pretty good right now, considering--"
"Considering," she repeated the qualifier. Truly she was sure she looked at least as bad as she felt. The hospital had let her assistants bring her clothes from home, so at least she was greeting him in her own aqua-colored silk peignoir set and not one of those ghastly cotton gowns. She’d also been able to wash her face and apply her usual anti-aging creams for the past several days now, but she was still sure her pallor was frightful. If she’d known she would have a gentleman caller, she’d have at least bitten her lips and pinched her cheeks a little to get some color. As it was, she just shrugged, happy enough he hadn’t immediately agreed with her assessment of "ghastly."
"How are you doing?" he asked her then.
Ruby shut her eyes and took a deep breath. It was a more serious question, and his tone had changed. This was a clear departure of the small talk from a minute ago. "I’m not dead," she declared flatly. "But you didn’t come here for small talk."
"That’s not funny," he chastised. "You very well could have died up there. You almost died up there. "
"How did you even get there?" she asked. It was a question that had been on her mind since she’d first spotted him hovering above her balcony. "You were in Bermuda. That’s what, a thousand miles away?"
"Closer to twelve hundred," Jaccob replied. "But I wasn’t all the way there. I’ve been making some improvements to the suit. And I’d been out testing it. Chuck was on Skype with her mom, and Mike was doing stuff with his guitar, so I took the suit out to test some of the upgrades. Turns out it’ll do every bit of Mach-point-five."
"Still, that’s several hours away, isn’t it?"
"Like I said," he answered. "I’d been headed north out over the ocean for a couple of hours already. I’d let the Coast Guard know where I was going to be flying, just in case. If the suit malfunctioned, I didn’t want it to be over land, but I wanted to be within easy rescue. So I’d vectored in toward the coast and then I’d flown north, keeping just a few miles offshore. I was more than halfway to Cobalt City already when the alarm rang from your bracelet."
The bracelet!
"I set the bracelet alarm off." Ruby had dithered back and forth over whether or not to wear her gift from Stardust during the rite. Interesting things tended to happen to precious metals worn by a magic user through a ritual. But the Ritual of the Scrolls wasn’t well known, and there was always a risk when adding anything to the prescribed regimen. There was also no indication of how technology at that level would behave in the midst of magic that powerful. At the very last minute, she’d decided against keeping the bracelet on her arm and had taken it off (rather roughly now that she thought about it) on her way out the door to go up to the helipad.
It occurred to her to be interested in the time that had elapsed between the bracelet sending its signal and the time Jaccob arrived
on scene. Two hours wasn’t nearly the amount of time she’d experienced on the other side of the Coil; there was a lot she wanted to analyze about the differences in time. But that was a question for another day.
Jaccob had already gone on. "You did," he affirmed. "But only for a blip. I wondered if it as a real emergency or just some kind of accident, so I called you. I called your personal phone and then I called your business phone. I called through the alarm system and then I tried the house phone at Regency Heights. And when I couldn’t reach you, I tapped into the cameras on my building and tried to turn them enough to see if I could get a look at your place. What little I saw was your doors standing open and your helipad apparently on fire. I couldn’t get there fast enough. Even at top speed, that was two hours of personal hell."
"I’m sorry I scared you," she said, finding it odd just how much she meant it.
"You scared the hell out of me. And then to get there and see you like that--" He shook his head and took a deep breath. He ran his hands over his beard as he let it out, a gesture Ruby recognized as Jaccob trying to keep his composure. "I thought I’d lost you," he said, casting his eyes down at the floor.
Ruby folded her hands in her lap and pursed her lips. Of all the outcomes of this whole adventure with the Eye of Africa, this was one she hadn’t been able to foresee.
Jaccob looked back up at her after a moment and tried for a smile. "But you look like you’re doing okay now. So tell me, please," he implored. "Answer my question. How are you?"
"The way it’s been explained to me is that my body looks like it’s been subject to sudden deceleration from high speed," she answered. "Or like I was caught in the blast radius of a giant bomb, a fact I find amusing in the most ironic way possible. I survive an actual bombing only to be nearly killed by my own plans gone sideways a short week later. They tell me there was some damage to pretty much every organ in my body. Lots of internal bleeding, I guess. But I’ll live. Life won’t be a whole lot of fun for a while, but I’ll live."
"Good. I mean, not the part where things won’t be any fun. But the rest of it, that’s good."
"Better than the alternative," she allowed. "But, like I said, that’s not what you came here to talk about."
Jaccob nodded his head and sighed. He pursed his lips and crossed his arms over his chest. "Magic?" he asked then, stepping farther into the room and lowering his voice as he did.
Ruby swallowed hard, finding suddenly she couldn’t look at him anymore. She figured she might as well come clean, or at least somewhat clean. There wasn’t a whole lot she could imagine confessing now that would make him think worse of her than he probably already did. There was no harm she could see in sharing. "I was born with powers," she explained. "Mental manipulation mostly, ability to persuade, some elemental manipulation, too--little stuff. But last year, when I went through what I went through with the alien, it left me with more powers--different. But then last winter, they just disappeared." She wasn’t about to volunteer the how and why of when that had happened, and she hoped Jaccob wouldn’t ask. "It was like having my arm cut off," she shared, suddenly able to look him in the eye again. "And I wanted them back. All of this, that’s what all of this was about--getting my powers back."
"And Loki?" he asked dubiously.
Ruby sniffled, stifling a laugh at the ridiculousness of the truth she was about to reveal. "An old business associate," she answered. "Would you believe we have the same taste in composers?"
Jaccob laughed a little himself. "You are a fan of Wagner," he observed.
Ruby nodded, glad the mood was a bit lighter--even if only for a moment. Awkward silence fell between them, and then Jaccob spoke again. "Why couldn’t you tell me any of this?" he asked, taking another step toward her.
"Jaccob," she countered dubiously. "Were we even ten minutes into drinks at Durian before you told me how much you detest magic?"
Jaccob’s mouth fell open, but he did not speak.
Ruby went on. "Now why in the world would I come out and tell you something about myself that I already knew you hated, especially when it was a moot point? It didn’t exist anymore, so there was no need to tell you the thing about myself I knew you were going to hate. I wanted you to like me."
"I did like you," he answered quietly, reaching for her hand where it lay on the blanket.
"Past tense," she observed, hearing herself sniffle but letting him keep hold of her hand.
Jaccob shook his head. "I don’t know," he admitted, squeezing her hand before letting it go and beginning to pace alongside the bed. "Was this--" He looked back at her and shook his head. "Was any of this even real? Persuasion, manipulation. How much of this was that?"
Ruby could feel her lower lip beginning to tremble, and she took a moment to compose herself before answering. "Didn’t you hear me?" she asked him. "I lost all my powers. You and I? This was just a run of the mill rebound."
Jaccob squeezed his eyes shut.
She had him there. But that’s not what he’d meant for it to be and Ruby knew that.
"Ruby," he said, crossing back to stand beside the bed and taking her hand in his again. "You know I didn’t--"
"I know," she interrupted him. "Your intentions were honorable. I think they still are. But you’re confused and upset, and you don’t know exactly what you’re feeling or what you should do next."
Jaccob nodded his head. "Something like that."
"I understand. I know this is a lot to process."
"Yeah," Jaccob exhorted. He took a seat on the edge of her bed and looked her in the eye. "Was it worth it? All of this--what you went through--was it worth it? Did you get your power back?"
"I don’t know," she answered. "Magic is a serious thing; it’s not to be trifled with. I wouldn’t dare try to use it with all the drugs they have me on."
Jaccob nodded, but he seemed slightly amazed. "That makes sense," he said.
"But it surprises you."
"Making sense isn’t something I’m used to with magic," he answered sincerely, the first hint of a genuine smile coming to his face. "I’m having trouble reconciling the two."
Ruby smiled. "I like that I can still surprise you."
Jaccob smiled fully then, but after a moment his face fell. "Ruby, I--"
"Don’t," she interrupted. "You don’t have to say it. I know."
"It’s just--" he began again.
"No, really," she insisted, cutting him off a second time. "I know." She took a deep breath and squeezed his hand in both of hers. "Look, I have a feeling your wife’s going to be getting in touch with you very soon, if she hasn’t reached out already." Her voice was shaky, and her hands were, too. The part she wasn’t telling him was how much she knew about that. The fact that Discontent had departed along with the other Blights almost surely meant Elizabeth Stevens would come to her senses and return home any day now.
Ruby had meant to have her full power restored and therefore the ability to keep Jaccob from wanting anything to do with Elizabeth before that happened. But with the way things had ended up, Ruby had no doubt Mrs. Stevens would be back home in short order.
"I don’t know about that," he said, averting his eyes.
Ruby’s eyebrows rose. It had been her perception before Discontent had shown up that Jaccob and Elizabeth Stevens had had a perfectly happy marriage. If that wasn’t the case--if there was a chance they might stay split even after Discontent was out of the picture--then Ruby wanted to make sure she wasn’t closing any doors.
"If that doesn’t happen," she posed, "give me a call some time."
Jaccob stood up and then leaned down to kiss her lightly on the forehead. "I’ll do that," he replied.
Ruby wasn’t sure whether he was being polite or sincere.
"And Jaccob," she said, as he let go of her hand and took a step toward the door. "I promise. Even if my power has returned, I promise I’ll never use magic on you." Even as she said it, she knew it was a lie. She knew because she was using her power to
make him believe that. And she could tell by the genuine warmth of his expression that he did.
She felt bad using magic on him this way. But only a little. It had been his asking after the state of her powers that had caused her to consider a small test, and when she’d seen the opening, she’d taken it.
All was fair in love and war, after all.
EPILOGUE
She had no idea what time it was.
She was alone in her penthouse with the fabulous view. It was a breathtaking early fall night on the Massachusetts coast. The sunset had been a dazzling show of orange-red refracted through steel frames and glass facades. Now, in the darkness, the lights of the city twinkled and danced in exquisite color below and beneath her fiftieth story terrace. Ruby Killingsworth didn’t see any of it; her eyes were pointed exclusively at the penthouse across the way.
Sometime after dark, after she’d shut off the television and turned out the lamp. Just as she’d resigned herself to pop a couple of Zolpidem and be done with this day, she’d noticed the lights on the Stevens residence. This was the thirteenth night since Elizabeth Stevens had come through the door, designer luggage in-hand, and been welcomed home by her husband. And it was the first night since then that Ruby Killingsworth had dared to open her shades. She didn’t want to look at that. She had no interest in bearing witness to the newly rekindled Stevens marriage.
And yet she knew she’d have to. She’d doubtless run into them at some important function or another. After all, their son Mike was in her artist stable now. And she and the Stevenses ran in the same social circles, so she knew she would have to face them sooner or later.
Oh, what the hell? she’d thought. I might as well get it out of my system. And so slowly, under the cover of darkness, she’d slid open the glass doors leading from her sitting room onto the terrace. She’d tiptoed across the polished marble flagstones and settled herself on one of her cushioned chaises--the same one, she remembered, that she’d been reclining on when Jaccob had paid her that first visit on his StarBoard.
Rites & Desires Page 29