by Audrey Faye
Then I walked over to where he stood on the side of the green and offered what the world would see as a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.
He glared at me, his eyes two poison-coated daggers.
I gave him the closest thing I could find to a ditzy smile. And held up my phone.
Fortunately for me, his face didn’t have any more colors to turn.
I knew what he was looking at. Fourteen-year-old James Turking, in one of those awful pictures that captures a misfit teenager at his worst—the kind we all hope stay buried at the bottom of our parents’ deep, dark closets. The kind that remind us what it was to feel completely alone and helpless and excluded in the world. He’d find out soon enough exactly how many copies of it were running around the Internet.
I squared my shoulders and remembered Vivian’s face when we’d finally set her free. I could feel sorry for the teenager Turking had been—and still hate the bastard he was now.
Carly was headed over to join us, assassin streaming from every pore. And then she remembered and stopped two steps away, as confused by this script as I was.
It was okay. I remembered my last lines.
I leaned in and patted the cheek of the man still staring at my phone. “Having a bad day, sweetie?”
Carly’s eyes were shuttered, but the rest of her was totally casual. Dismissive, even. “The first of many, I assume.”
The flash of fear in Turking’s eyes as he looked up made my heart sing. “You can’t do this.” His words hissed out—the rattlesnake was far from dead.
It wasn’t my job to step on his tail. Not today, anyhow, and quite possibly not ever again. “We’re just the messengers.” I smiled at him, and for the first time, let my eyes get hard. “There will always be people watching you, James. And sometimes they’ll mess with you just for fun.”
Carly smiled sweetly. “Or because you deserve it.”
That too.
I took one last look at evil standing on the edge of a pit of sand staring at a little white ball—and then I turned my back and walked away. It wasn’t the most satisfying victory ever. It didn’t really belong to us, and keeping Turking in the land of relatively good behavior was going to require a lot more maintenance than most of the scumbags on our list.
But today we had looked in the eyes of the baddest monster we knew—and we hadn’t lost.
I could let that be enough.
-o0o-
It was entirely strange to be sitting at a table and watching a celebration in progress that my heart couldn’t join.
Lelo, finally let out of captivity, couldn’t stop glowing. Or bouncing. Someone had clearly stuffed the kid full of way too much coffee.
Rowena, who had ridden in on the back of Riker’s bike, lifted her glass in toast. “To friends who know how to get the job done.”
They’d certainly accomplished that. There were a whole lot of eyes on Turking right now, and they were reporting all channels clear. Several pissy hours online trying to make fourteen-year-old James disappear, followed by fast food for dinner, a little online porn for dessert, and a call to the manager of the golf course protesting the quality of the balls sold in the pro shop. Then our asshole had gone to bed early.
“They’ll keep watching,” said Rowena, as if she’d followed my thoughts.
That was part of what was weighing on me. So much time and effort by so many people—just to neutralize one man.
A job far harder than it needed to be.
I took a deep breath. Time to begin tracing the path to the last dot. I looked at my partner, hoping like hell my poker face would pass muster in the dim light. “So. About that bet.”
Carly looked at me like I’d sprouted a forest of glitter mushrooms out my nose. “What?”
This was worse than wearing a dress to a golf course. “I’m going to sing.”
Lelo caught on first, and nearly bounced herself into Riker’s lap. “Seriously? When?”
I pretended this was a movie clip in someone else’s life. “Saturday night.” I’d called in every chip I still had owing to make it happen fast, because I was terribly afraid that if I had time to waver it wasn’t going to happen at all.
Carly’s eyes got warm and wet and goopy. “A song you wrote? For real?”
Possibly. “That was the deal.”
Rosie smiled slowly. “Does this mean the naked dancing is off?”
Not until I actually managed to squeak some notes out. “You can take Rowena to Times Square with you instead. If you use enough flowers for cover, you might not even get arrested.”
The older florist grinned. “I haven’t been arrested in ages.”
Rosie laughed. “I hear it’s kind of like riding a bike.”
I hoped it wasn’t the only thing that was.
Riker had perked up noticeably. “Wait, you guys are dancing naked somewhere?”
I rolled my eyes as three enormous pepperoni pizzas arrived and four overly excited people tried to explain the dumbest bet in history. And tuned them all out. I needed a moment in my hermit shell.
And then I needed to go finish the last nail for Turking’s coffin.
All four verses of it.
17
I’d expected to be a train wreck.
The red dress swirling around my legs simply refused to let that happen.
I stepped up to the mike, rooted my fire-engine red sandals in the beat-up wood floor of a dive that had seen musicians come and go for more years than I’d been alive, and felt something rise up in me that had been dead for three years.
I swallowed hard.
I was here. At one of those moments in a life where a turn, once taken, can’t ever be taken back.
Oddly enough, most of mine have happened in a bar.
The mike felt cool in my hands. I rubbed it between my palms a little, and hummed a few notes under my breath so the guy on the sound system could do his thing.
Because I wanted, if I was really, truly going to do this thing—to do it right.
Writing the song had been by far and away the easiest part of getting this night ready. My muse had spit out most of it in about twenty minutes.
I touched the enormous red flower in my hair. Rowena’s contribution, along with matching ones for my drummer, my guitar player, and the tiny woman playing a bass twice her size.
My band. I hadn’t had a whole lot to do with it—one tentative phone call, a grapevine I hadn’t been able to keep up with at all, and they’d found me. If the sound we’d been able to pull together in forty-eight hours was any indication, there was a whole lot of talent lying moldering in the ditches of the indie music scene.
I looked out at the wildly overcrowded bar, filled with an odd mix that included bikers, florists, and the Lennotsville garden club. Witnesses to my attempt to grab the brass ring I’d convinced myself didn’t exist.
The bar quieted, and Micheline strummed a few chords.
The music and the words to Gasoline Heart rose up in me as if they’d been flame lit. I offered up a fervent wish that the words would find room in the soul they’d been written for, breathed in, and kicked the wild discomfort of the hermit crab to the curb.
The band didn’t miss a beat, falling in step with the meandering, lyrical first verse like we’d been rehearsing for weeks. I grinned as Micheline ran a riff right up underneath my melody. That was new.
She laughed and kicked us hard into the chorus.
I held back a little for the first line, checking to make sure we’d all made it in. And then I let go—and poured all of who I was into every damn note.
She’s flame and fire and love-lit power
Righteousness is her fuel
Love is her spark
Don’t push her heat away
Don’t put her flames out
Just make some room, room, room
For her wild and her wonderful
Gasoline heart
Three more verses, every one of them a wish and a prayer and a promise. And und
erneath them all, my muse wrapping her fingers into my DNA and making entirely clear she was never leaving again.
We fired into the last rendition of the chorus, half the bar on their feet and the other half on chairs and tables, singing at the top of their off-key lungs. Bass, drums, guitar, and one washed-up singer—lifting the roof.
My anthem, for a heart that mattered. And my declaration.
That’s as big as a song gets.
I felt the last note whispering away into the darkness. I let the raucous, hooting applause of the audience soak in, greasing the raw places and filling the hurt ones. I remembered why I’d always done this and why I’d quit. And then I looked into the eyes of each member of my brand-spanking-new band one last time to make sure hell hadn’t frozen over, and held up my mike again.
The crowd hushed—and I realized they were expecting me to sing.
My muse started volunteering sacrificial lines as fast as she could string them together. I nearly laughed out loud—she was going to be hell to live with for the next little while. “Sorry, folks. Just the one song for tonight.”
Cass offered up a pouty drumroll and a cymbal crash.
The audience laughed, all too ready to eat out of the palms of our hands.
“Don’t worry.” Micheline leaned forward and spoke into her mike, her light French accent seducing folks long before she said anything important. “We have some covers we’ve been playing with for the last few days. Someone bring Jane a beer and we’ll see if we can get her to sing one or two.”
I glared. Those had been icebreakers—four people trying to get to know each other in a hell of a musical hurry.
She grinned and blew me a kiss. “Spank me later, sweetie.”
My cheeks turned the color of my dress. Rowena hooted from the front row. She and the band had formed a pact of mutual adoration in the time it had taken her to deliver the flowers for our hair.
I searched for the one pair of eyes in the bar I most wanted to see, and then gave in as Micheline played a hot chord progression that no singer still breathing would be able to resist.
One more song. And then I needed to find the woman with the gasoline heart.
-o0o-
I slid into the booth at the back of the bar. The one that held the three people I cared about most in the world. Red satin sloshed around my legs, reminding me that I wasn’t the woman in flannel anymore.
The three of them looked at me. Silent. Measuring.
Carly, awkward and pleased and suspicious.
Lelo, trying to hide her excitement—and her worry.
Rosie, still the best poker face in the bunch.
It was the sexy gypsy who finally got brave. She looked over at the tiny stage where Micheline was still joking with the audience. “That’s quite the band you put together.”
I gulped. And dove in. “It’s what you need if you’re going on tour.” I looked at my partner, knowing I needed to get the words out now and I needed to do it fast. “I’m retiring.”
It was a quiet, shaky, two-word bomb.
Carly’s face tied into a knot of anguish. “Why?”
My heart did awful stuttering things. “Turking won’t quit as long as we’re still doing this, C. We took his wife—he’s never going to let that go.”
“That’s what the army is for,” said Lelo quietly, face the color of three-day-old puke.
“Right.” I nodded, feeling the lances inside my ribs. “And I absolutely believe you guys can get the job done. But we make what you need to do way harder if we keep doing what we do.” I eyed the kid and told the truth. Connected the last dot. “He didn’t really want a piece of you. He only wanted you because it would mess with us. If we’re out of the picture, he’s not going to go after Benji or Mrs. Beauchamp or whoever.”
She bit her lip. “Because we’re not important enough.”
I wrapped my hands around her forearms. Turking didn’t get to throw any more punches. “Because he doesn’t think you’re important enough.”
She managed a shaky grin. “And he’s just an asshole.”
Close enough.
I looked back at Carly. “I have other reasons. It’s time. Rosie was right—we made ourselves a target as soon as we started helping people. Turking’s just the first guy who collected a lot of leverage.”
Flannel might survive jail. Gasoline hearts, not a chance.
My partner could have been a statue. “Turking will think he’s won.”
I was far more worried a certain assassin would think that. “He’ll be wrong.” I knew how clear I needed to make this—for her and her gasoline heart, and for me. “He’s had a target all of his adult life. It’s what he lives for. First Viv, then us. Our posse won’t let him find a new one.”
And deep down, that sick bastard’s real need was exactly the same as hers and mine. “He’ll have a life with no purpose—a life that doesn’t matter.” I looked deep into my partner’s eyes and willed her to remember a night, three years ago, when everything had changed. “And he won’t have you to step in and save him.”
There was no worse hell we could leave him in. Even if it took him a while to figure that out.
Desperation moved across her face. “What about all the people we’d be abandoning? I can’t do this alone.”
I was counting on that. “I think that maybe you don’t need to do this at all.”
I’d never seen my partner look so fragile. Rosie sat plastered against her shoulder, something akin to panic in her eyes—and the faint, flickering embers of hope.
I wanted, so very badly, to fan those flames. “We built a machine for Turking. One that can step into our shoes and probably do a better job than we ever did.” A quiet underground, fighting the good fight.
Legally. Getting to have a life while they did it.
“They’ll all say yes,” said Rosie quietly.
Carly let out a shuddering breath. “What will keep it from being vigilante hell?”
I looked over at Rosie and Lelo, and then back at the woman who had saved me first. “Friends.” Lives worth protecting and keeping your butt out of jail for. Carly and I had put ourselves in a cage where we didn’t think we deserved one. I was trying my damnedest, with the words of a song and the choices of my heart, to set us free.
I looked into my partner’s eyes and said the words I’d needed to say to her for three years. “You saved my life. And now there’s this thing I need to go do.” I took a deep breath and said the rest of it. “And you figured that out before I did.”
Mine weren’t the only hands on this cage door. We were saving each other one more time. I just wasn’t sure she knew it yet.
Her lips trembled. “I always knew you’d sing again.”
She’d had far more faith than me. “You shoved me right up to the edge of the damn trough.”
She looked blank.
I tried not to laugh. You’d think that after three years, I’d know better than to use barnyard metaphors with the chick from Manhattan. I offered up the last words I had. “People have always told us that Lesbian Assassins is a good name for a band.”
I got a smile. But it didn’t make it into her eyes.
Something inside me started the long, slow path to breaking.
A big, warm hand reached for mine under the table.
I looked over at Rosie—and saw that she knew my last, best reason. The one I would never say. I’d done this for lots of reasons, and most of them were even pretty decent ones. But I’d also done it because one of us had to quit first—and Carly deserved a chance at the life that was beckoning her.
I squeezed the sexy gypsy’s fingers under the table and got up to go. I’d sung the first verse. Now it was my partner’s turn, and I had no idea if she was going to sing or run. It wasn’t her courage I doubted.
I had no idea if Carly was ready to hope.
-o0o-
“Cold?”
I looked away from the stars and down at my partner, standing by the van wit
h two sleeping bags under her arms.
I shivered and reached down for the goods. “Freezing. What took you so long?”
She clambered up beside me and we wrapped ourselves up in well-used warmth and leaned back against the windshield. For a while, all we heard was the occasional crinkle as the sleeping bags gave in to gravity, little by little.
“It’s a great song.”
I smiled into the dark. “Yeah.”
We stared up at the night sky, watching more stars pop out into the darkness.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Carly, her voice little-girl lost.
She was breaking my heart—and shaking the hell out of my certainty that this was the right thing to do. I had finally found enough courage to pick up my best weapon in this thing that was called my life. That didn’t mean it was time for her to put her weapons down. “Because I need to sing. And if I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it again.” That much felt like absolute truth. My muse might be a little creaky, but she was raring to go. A few more years in the dungeon and something irretrievable would have withered and died.
All I heard from beside me was the quiet, wavery whisper of a breath not quite steady.
The stars I was watching suddenly got blurry. “I thought we’d do this forever.” Right up until a few days ago.
“Yeah.” Now Carly’s breathing was a lot wavery. “What changed?”
A lot of things. “Stuff’s been changing for a while now. I just finally noticed.”
“You notice everything.”
I should have known she wasn’t going to let me off the hook. “I think it started back when we let the garden club and a bunch of kids take down Chadwick Berrington.” The long, slow process of letting other people do our job for us.
Of letting it not be our job anymore.
Of believing it might be okay to have a life.
Carly looked up at the stars, silent for a long time. “And when you sang with that old guy.”
“Yeah.” Tectonic shifts that hadn’t registered until long after they’d happened. I took a deep breath and took my life into my hands. “And when we sat on the back porch of a woman who grows monkshood in her garden and bakes cheesecake.”