by Nova Nelson
But, of course, I was just freaking myself out for no reason, and when I opened my eyes on the other side, she was making her way down a circular hallway carved from thick marble. “These are our private rooms,” she explained, gesturing to the doorways we passed on the left and right. The doors to each were heavy and round, reminding me of a bank vault. Or what movies taught me a bank vault looked like, at least. “When you come in for your massage, we’ll be in one of these. Oh, and did I mention,” she said, pausing sharply and turning to me, “you should bring a bathing suit. Complimentary use of the hot springs with every appointment.”
“The hot springs?”
“Yes. The area just behind the desk is fed from a natural hot spring that flows right underneath us.” She pointed to the floor. “Very relaxing. Not enough of our clients take advantage of it.”
“It does sound nice.” I meant it. Of course, I wouldn’t be taking advantage of it until I was sure Frankie was locked away. No doubt Aeldoran would hold a slight grudge against me for getting his co-worker locked up for murder, but he struck me as someone who would care less about that and more about the money I offered for the spa’s services. Also, still a dumb name, so.
The end of the hallway teed, and we took a right which immediately opened into a well-lit room that clashed with the rest of the spa. This space looked more like a storehouse, almost like the dry storage area in the back of Medium Rare. With its casks of bulk materials lining the walls and shelves of strange glass bottles, it also reminded me of the apothecary.
“The trick to good facial cream isn’t how well it works,” she confided in me with a mischievous but pleasant grin, “it’s in how it feels going on and how it smells. It’s about the experience, not the outcome.”
She grabbed an empty tin and crossed the room, prying the top off a large wooden drum. She set it aside then dipped the tin into the drum. When she brought it back up, a thin white cream coated the sides. She wiped it off with a rag, leaving only the cream in the tin. “The base is simple. Mostly beeswax.” She brought the tub over to a counter near the shelves along the wall. “The rest is just flourish. Veronica loves pine and rosemary—a typical werewolf preference.” She plucked two small bottles off the shelf and brought them over to me where I stood, still near the door. “Here, smell.”
I hesitated. This could be a trick. If she knew what I was up to, there could be something in those bottles that knocked me flat on my butt.
But if she wasn’t onto me, refusing to sniff something as basic as pine and rosemary would surely trigger her suspicion.
I couldn’t believe it, but I wished Grim were with me. His acute sense of smell would be invaluable.
I had to rely on my intuition, and it was telling me that she didn’t yet suspect anything. Or more accurately, my intuition wasn’t smacking me around, alerting me that she definitely did suspect something, so I took the absence of that to mean what I wanted.
Sniffing the bottles, first the pine, then the rosemary, I discovered my big mental debate to be unnecessary.
It was pine and rosemary.
As with entering through that second waterfall to the hallway, my fears were completely unfounded. “Those are lovely,” I said.
“Here, come closer. It’s fine for you to be back here. Aeldoran has already left for the day, so no one needs to know I showed a client behind the curtain.”
I followed her back over to her work area, where she sprinkled in drops of the essential oils. “Now just a couple more things to add in.” She grabbed a small canvas sack and opened it, grabbing a handful and letting the tiny dark grains slip between her fingers. “Sand from the black beaches of Domari. One of the few fresh-water oceans in Avalon. Sand from other beaches can absorb the salt and dry the skin. But not Domari sand.” She grinned. “It’s the special ingredient. Helps with exfoliation.”
She sprinkled it over the mixture then kneaded it together with her fingertips. “One final thing,” she said, and I realized that her eyes were glued to my face. That sweet furtive smile had become something more sinister. A sneer.
One final thing?
Oh, surely she wasn’t about to show me that she added silver to the mix. That would just be too much. And it might be the last thing I ever saw, since it would essentially incriminate her for murder. If the next thing she grabbed off the shelf was at all metallic, I would run and not look back.
She grabbed a box off the shelf, opening it slowly, tilting it toward me.
It didn’t look like silver powder. It was green. “Crushed sparkleberry powder.” She sprinkled it over the rest of the cream. “It adds a little bit of a refreshing sting to it, so that it feels like it’s working. People like to feel like their precautions are working, that they’re winning the battle against death. But we all die in the end, Nora.”
Whoa, that got dark quick. If she kept up with that sort of talk, I might just forget about the murderer thing and try to be her friend.
No, not really. Probably.
Either way, a creeping self-doubt formed in my gut. The sparkleberry powder and sand accounted for the tingling that the facial cream caused. Was that all there was to it? Or had she used that to disguise the secondary burn of silver? Surely it wasn’t the same mixture she’d whipped up before. Because if it were, that meant she hadn’t been the one slowly poisoning the matriarch. It would mean my theory was totally wrong.
But, of course, she wouldn’t add silver to it right in front of me. More likely, she wasn’t that busy during work hours and had simply waited to make it until I’d arrived for the sole purpose of convincing me that she hadn’t tampered with it, implying that she wouldn’t tamper with it. That it was straightforward, non-threatening.
That was the thing about doubt, though. Even when rationality prevailed, doubt still lurked under the surface, gnawing at your insides.
She screwed on the lid and extended the tin. “Here you are. Veronica already sent me the money by owl, so you’re all set.”
“Oh. Perfect.” I took it from her and she strolled past me toward the door.
“I’d better be closing down.”
“Right. Of course.” We began down the hallway again, toward the front.
But she paused. “Would you like to see where we’ll be conducting your massage?” Her sweet smile was back, and I felt almost certain I’d been projecting my own fear onto her earlier. She didn’t suspect a thing. Why would she? I’d been careful.
“Sure, why not?”
She pushed open a heavy wooden door. Inside were more floating orbs of light and a table, not unlike those I’d seen at spas back in Texas. There was also a large tub on four ornate legs into which a steady stream of water cascaded out of a wide stone spigot in the wall. “Oh, this is nice,” I said, and Frankie giggled.
“Isn’t it? And the water is fed directly from the hot spring. You can see it through the floor.” She pointed downward toward a set of drains, long slits in the stone, no more than a half-inch wide each. “Go ahead.” She nodded toward the tub. “Feel the water. It’s nice and warm.”
I wasn’t crazy about turning my back to her, but I played along, approaching the claw-foot tub and dipping my hand in. Oh boy, this was luxurious.
There was something more to it, as well. Yes, warm water was relaxing, but something about this warm water made not just the muscles in my hand relax, but caused that sensation to flow through my entire body.
God bless magic. Once I’d wrapped up this Frankie problem, I would definitely be coming back here.
And you know who else could use this sort of pampering? I thought.
Tanner.
Notions of a spa day with Tanner fogged up the windows of my mind. Yes, we were going to co-own a business together and, yes, getting involved was a terrible idea. But maybe just once, after a long day at the spa, when our guards were down, and our better judgment blurred … Once wasn’t a pattern. Once could be an isolated incident. We could call it a mistake, if that’s what had to be do
ne to justify it …
The door to the room slammed, and a deep, cruel laugh yanked me from my inappropriate thoughts, and I whirled around, half expecting someone other than Frankie to be standing between me and the door, based on the strange tone of the cackle.
But it was her. Only, she looked different. Her olive skin now had a blue tinge to it, and her deep-rose lips were turning purpler by the second.
Despite having not a single clue what that meant, I knew it was a bad sign.
She laughed again, and this time her voice was garbled, like she was speaking to me from underwater.
“This is as satisfying as I thought it would be,” she said.
“I— I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Seeing you think you would get out of this alive, watching your tension melt away … just before I kill you.”
Water began bubbling up from the drains in the floor, as if siphoned from the hot springs below. When I looked from it to Frankie again, her arms were extended to the sides of her lithe body, and the skin that showed underneath her white uniform no longer held any of the olive hue of before. It was blue as the purest glacier lake.
The water bubbled up more rapidly.
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said, grasping at straws. “I just came by to pick up Veronica’s purchase. I—”
A cackle bubbled up from her lungs, deep and watery. “You think I can’t put together the pieces? Why would Heather, no less Veronica speak with someone like you? You have low-born written all over you. Or worse, nouveau riche, which is just scum that doesn’t know its place. Like that pathetic loser Lucent, leeching off of his wife like a baby suckling from its mother’s tainted breast.” She growled her disgust and raised her arms higher, and as she did, the puddles of water raised off the ground in a small wall, growing bigger on either side of me. Soon, the only clear direction would be straight ahead, straight into Frankie.
But it was just water. What could it do to me?
Drown me, that’s what. I’d never been a strong swimmer. Or an anything swimmer. Getting in water above my head had always triggered off a panic response, and the water surrounding me right then was no exception.
The main issue was Frankie blocking my path of escape.
“I knew the moment Veronica called to order more facial cream that something didn’t add up. If she’d used all that I’d given her in that short amount of time, she wouldn’t be alive to order more. And when she said she’d be sending you, it started to make sense. Maybe I didn’t have all the pieces, but I had enough to realize something was up.”
“I’m sorry. I still don’t follow. How about you just let me go and we forget this ever happened. No harm, no foul.”
The water covering the floor crept up to my ankles.
Frankie was going to drown me in here if I didn’t do something quick.
The water was almost to my knees.
“How did you figure it out?” she asked, cocking her head slightly. “I’m curious. The cops called it a suicide, and why not? Wouldn’t be the first rich werewolf bitch to kill herself after a series of terrible life choices.”
The water crept up my thighs, and the warmth threatened to pull me into a stupor. The effect it’d had on my body when I’d only stuck my hand into the tub was amplified now that so much of me was submerged.
I dropped the act. It wasn’t working anyway, and the whole trying-to-murder me thing she was pulling was not cool. “I’m not going to give you that satisfaction,” I said. “You kill me and it’s forever a mystery. You’ll have to wonder about it until the day you die.”
She laughed. “There it is. The honesty. Doesn’t matter. Once I’m done with you, I’ll finish the job with Veronica. Then the Lovelace estate is mine.”
“And Heath’s,” I said.
She waved that away with a flick of her wrist, and splashes from the water walls flecked my face. “He won’t be a problem. He’s gone so often, I can simply wait until he’s away on business then drain the funds and be lost among the crowd in Avalon before he knows what hit him. From there I can jump into another world and start over fresh, except with more riches than I’ll be able to spend in a single lifetime … which is quite long in my case. I have at least a thousand more years left in me.” She grinned as the water neared my hips, drawing my attention to it, but also to an item stashed in the small satchel that hung over my shoulder and rested against my hip.
Tanner came to mind again but in a much more applicable context.
I reached slowly for my satchel and slipped my hand inside, hoping not to draw too much attention to my movements, until my fingers found the shaker. I carefully unscrewed the cap while it remained obscured from her view.
When I began wading through the water toward her, she looked more amused than concerned. She didn’t think I could take her on, and if it were simple hand-to-hand combat, she’d probably be right. I suspected her power extended beyond manipulating water and could easily include super-human strength.
“You’re going to try something, aren’t you? How precious,” she said patronizingly. The water rose more rapidly, past my navel now.
I had to be sure I didn’t miss.
I steadied my hand, decided on my target, flipped open the top flap of the bag, and shook the salt out of the shaker, right into her face.
Houston, we have contact.
The effect was immediate. She recoiled, clutching her face, and the water levels began to lower, draining through the floor. Her shriek was earsplitting, and I hurried around her, flung open the door, and sprinted toward the exit.
The remaining water rushed out of the room behind me, nearly taking my legs out from under me. I stumbled but remained on my feet, rushing toward safety. Even if Stu Manchester hadn’t responded to my owl, the streets outside Atlantic would likely be busy this time of evening, especially with Lyre Lounge so near. Surely, she wouldn’t murder me in front of a bunch of onlookers.
My soaking pants and shoes hindered my speed, and just as I came into view of the waterfall leading to the sitting area, I heard her footfalls behind me, wet and heavy.
I hadn’t killed her, just temporarily injured her.
Now that I was out of the warm water, my heart raced in my chest, feeling on the verge of exploding. I leaped through the waterfall and into the front of the spa. The soft moss of the floor was enough grip to keep me from sliding and falling when I landed, and I absurdly wondered if that was the intention behind it, as a safety precaution for those trying to escape murder in the back of the building.
“You can’t run from me!” Frankie called. Her voice had returned to its usual timbre, and oh holy shifters, she was close!
Although, technically, she was wrong. I could run from her. It was what I was doing at that exact moment and what I intended to keep doing for as long as I had to.
I risked a glance behind me. She’d just passed through the waterfall into the lobby.
Stupid. I shouldn’t have paused. I’d lost myself precious time.
I ran full speed at the waterfall leading out of the spa, dove head-first, and tumbled out on the other side, having to tuck at the last moment to roll. My satchel, overstuffed with money, two facial cream tins, and an empty salt shaker, flew off me, but I didn’t care. I rushed to my feet, and that’s when I spotted him beneath the nearest street light, looking stunned, staring down at me through the dusk with wide eyes.
Deputy Manchester.
“She’s coming,” was all I could manage before the murderous nix appeared on our side of the waterfall, too lost in her rage to notice the officer of the law.
He noticed her, though, and his training kicked in instantly. He lunged forward, blindsiding her from the right and tackling her to the ground. He had cuffs on her before I could wrap my mind around what had just happened, and he used a knee to pin her to the cobblestone.
“Help!” she screamed. “He’s hurting me!”
I looked around. Yep. People
had stopped to stare. They probably thought this was a brazen act of police brutality. Most of the faces I recognized just in passing, but a few I didn’t, which made sense; there was generally a class divide between those who shopped in this area and those who were willing to frequent Medium Rare.
“She tried to kill me,” I explained. Under normal circumstances, they might not have bought it so easily, but with my appearance what it was—my clothes soaked, splashes from the water wall sticking strands of my hair to my face—I sold it. The spectators moved along hurriedly after that. Perhaps the situation was too complicated and unflattering for them to want to stick around, or perhaps they doubted Stu’s ability to restrain an accused killer for much longer.
There were many aspects of Deputy Manchester’s job that I doubted he could handle, but manhandling a murderer wasn’t one of them. He was two for two, in my book. Tanner had informed me that Stu Manchester was a were-elk. He definitely had the bulk for that to be believable, even though I’d never seen Stu in elk form.
“Might want to stop resisting,” he said to Frankie. “Or else those lesions on your face are just going to get worse.” He glanced up at me. “You okay, Ms. Ashcroft?”
I nodded, then remembered the other reason why I needed the deputy present, besides saving my hide. I searched around for my satchel and found it a few yards off. “Here,” I said as the wooden police cart floated down the road toward us, somehow summoned by the deputy. I held out the two tins, one from Heather’s house, and fresh one. “Veronica Lovelace has another sample to provide. It should match this one exactly”—I held up the one Frankie had just made—“except it’ll have silver in it, like this one.” I shook the one I’d brought from Heather’s home.
His pinched brows almost touched at the bridge of his nose as he climbed to his feet, pulling Frankie up with him. Staring at the two tins, he replied, “I can’t say I fully understand.”