Charming Blue

by Kristine Grayson

  If indeed what the stalker was doing was work. She wasn’t so sure. It seemed to her it was someone magical getting his rocks off by scaring mortal women.

  She gave up, clicked on KTLA, and watched their coverage, feeling slightly dirty as she did so. She couldn’t quite get it out of her mind that she had talked with a man just that morning who was as sick (sicker) than the Fairy Tale Stalker.

  And she knew, had she met him under other circumstances without any idea about his past, that she would have liked him—if, of course, he had looked her in the eye when he was talking to her. Otherwise, she would have thought him attractive but strange. (And maybe not even human; she’d known some feline shape-shifters who couldn’t handle direct eye contact on first meeting because in the feline world direct eye contact was considered threatening.)

  She shuddered at the thought. She finished her vanilla shake, packed up her mess, and patted her too-full stomach. She didn’t usually overeat like that. But she did feel better.

  She had a long night ahead of her. In addition to the work she had brought home, she also had to make about a dozen wards. Despite what she had seen in Bluebeard’s magic, despite Tank’s belief that the man had nothing to do with the current stalking cases, Jodi would be remiss if she didn’t protect herself from Bluebeard and from people like him.

  Someone had warded the rehab center against fairies, which meant that someone either wanted to keep Bluebeard’s only friend away from him or that someone had another agenda, one that had nothing to do with Bluebeard or with Tank or with anyone that Jodi knew.

  She would have to ask Tank if she had any dealings with the staff at the center. But she had a hunch Tank would say no. Tank didn’t like to deal with mortals any more than she had to. Jodi doubted anyone at the center wanted to keep Tank out.

  Still, those wards at the rehab center had given Jodi the idea. She needed to make sure her house was protected, at least for the short term. Especially if Bluebeard had told her the truth—if he had no control over what he did to a woman who came to his attention. And he was right: Jodi had come to his attention.

  Tank had put her in an impossible position, and Jodi needed to deal with it in all ways—not just intellectually, but practically and magically.

  She needed to make sure she was safe.

  Chapter 10

  Blue sat alone in the reading room, a single light on the table focused on the printouts before him. Jodi had given him nearly five hundred pages of material, organized by date, with notes on the top. She clearly hadn’t compiled this. He found on the top of the first sheet a Post-it signed by someone named Ramon (who had very flowery handwriting, and who used a scented purple pen). Ramon’s handwriting covered the notes, and the deeper Blue dug, the more grateful he became to this mystery Ramon.

  Ramon was quite the organizer, and he made wading through this material very easy. Not that Blue was wading. He was reading with increasing horror.

  The reading room was on the far end of the main building. He liked to think that no one else came here because it was named “the reading room,” as opposed to the library. But the reading room was the only place in the center that had books.

  They covered the walls, with newer battered paperbacks scattered on various racks throughout the room. Every time he came to the center he saw new books, so he figured that patients left them when they checked out.

  Sometimes he just spent the entire night in here reading fiction. He had trouble sleeping because of all the nightmares, so he tried to do as little of it as possible.

  On this night in particular, he had a hunch he would have trouble sleeping, even if he hadn’t had the excuse of the documents to keep him up.

  He had told Jodi more about himself than he had told anyone except Tank. And Tank had pried some of this out of him when he was drunk. He didn’t remember telling her, but she knew.

  Shortly after he sat down, one of the staff brought him some bottled water and some fresh fruit.

  “Another late night?” he’d asked Blue sympathetically.

  Blue had shrugged. “Is there anything else?”

  The people here were kind to him, and they did do the best they could to accommodate him, given their mission to “heal” him. He always supposed that they did so because of his charm and because they had no idea who he was.

  He rubbed a hand over his eyes. The Fairy Tale Stalker was a misnomer. This guy, whoever he was, terrorized these women. The entire mess had started several months ago and got a short column in the local papers, primarily because the whole thing sounded so LA and ridiculous.

  A man appeared in a woman’s bedroom claiming to be Bluebeard. He told her, in a “watery” voice (her term), that he would visit her again, and the next time he would make her “his.” Then his voice changed, sounding panicked. He spoke rapidly, as if he was trying to get the words out before they failed him. (Again, this was her description, in a longer piece written later.)

  He said, “After you’re mine, I will cut off your head and keep it forever.”

  And then he disappeared. Again, that was her word. He appeared, and then he disappeared.

  She called 911, and the police did respond rather quickly (she was in an upscale neighborhood), but they couldn’t find anything. No sign of forced entry, and her alarms were still activated—she had to deactivate them to let the police in. No footprints outside the house, and she had never given her key to anyone, not even a neighbor.

  The cops initially wrote it up as a “bad dream” call and laughed about it, but it was so bizarre that one of them told the beat reporter who handled local crime. That was how the story initially broke.

  The man “appeared” two more times to the woman, freaking her out but never touching her, and not talking to her. The cops would have thought (maybe did think) the woman was a nut, until another woman reported the same thing.

  Then another, and another, and finally, the cops got a clue that this stalker was a problem. There were dozens of theories, all of them about “special effects” and “Hollywood magic,” as if the guy was some kind of projection sent from another building. But the cops couldn’t figure out where that projection came from.

  Blue knew. It wasn’t Hollywood magic. It was real magic, and the projection came from a man’s mind.

  If he wasn’t caught, this guy would do the same thing Blue did—he would kill dozens of women all in the name of love.

  Blue stood, walking to the window and clasping his hands behind his back. He hadn’t been able to stop himself. How could he help anyone stop some other guy? He didn’t even know what caused all of this. It certainly wasn’t intent. He had never meant to hurt anyone. His mother used to say in bewilderment that he was the most kindhearted child she had ever known.

  And that hadn’t turned out well.

  He ran a hand over his face. He was tired, deep down bone-tired. He wished the rehab center allowed energy drinks, but the folks here thought of them as a drug. Even though they did allow coffee. He could go to the kitchen and get some. It would make him jittery and tired instead of just tired, but that might be good enough.

  The last thing he wanted to do was fall asleep, particularly with the Fairy Tale Stalker on his brain. And Jodi.

  Jodi. She was beautiful and determined, and properly disgusted by him. He appreciated that. She seemed sensible.

  He wasn’t quite sure why Tank had roped her into all of this. He had known Tank long enough to know she often had motives that no one understood.

  He always wished Tank would stop helping him, because he thought it would get her in trouble. And now she was helping this other guy—or the women this other guy was victimizing.

  He clenched a fist. Maybe it was someone he’d been drinking with, someone who had heard of Bluebeard. Maybe the media was right and there was some kind of way to do a Hollywood magic projection. Maybe there was a simple explanation for all of this.

  But he doubted it.

  And he didn’t know what he coul
d do about any of this. He wasn’t the heroic type.

  The only thing he could do—besides stay awake—was share his insight into what was happening. And he had insight, although probably not the type Tank wanted.

  He knew what this guy was doing. He knew how it would escalate. And he knew if someone couldn’t figure out a way to stop it, a lot of women would die.

  Chapter 11

  Jodi woke out of a sound sleep, her heart pounding. Someone was in the room.

  She didn’t move except to open her eyes. An odd amber light came through the sliding glass doors. The light over the pool went out at midnight, although she did have lamps scattered through her garden—little one-foot-high things that some dumb marketing executive called “fairy lights.” If he’d ever seen a true fairy light, he would have called them something else.

  If the pool light was off, all she should have seen was the edges of the patio around the pool. If the light was on, she would have seen the pool itself.

  Then she woke up enough to realize that she shouldn’t have seen any of it. She had pulled the blackout curtains. She ordered new blackout curtains every few years from the same organization that made them for Vegas casinos. When she was in her bedroom, she wanted to sleep, not worry about light creeping in at dawn.

  Carefully she looked around the room, trying not to move so that she wouldn’t make any noise.

  Her bedroom was square and large, dwarfing her California king-size bed. A door opened in from the hallway, and she had converted a smaller second bedroom into a completely luxurious bathroom. That door was open, as it always was, just like the door to the hallway. She lived alone, so she didn’t have to close doors. She didn’t need the privacy.

  A large wood-burning fireplace dominated the remaining wall. She only used the fireplace on the cool rainy nights of deep winter—nights that people elsewhere in the country would believe temperate or even mild. She had lived here long enough that such nights seemed frigid to her.

  And even when a fire burned in that fireplace, the light in this room was never amber.

  She eased herself up and finally looked toward that light. It took all of her strength not to gasp at what she saw.

  Bluebeard stood in the center of the light. His gaze met hers, his spectacular blue eyes unmistakable. They twinkled. Then he smiled at her, slow and easy.

  The smile was sensual, and it transformed him from an incredibly good-looking man into a seductive one. She almost—almost—smiled back.

  Then she realized what she had done. She shuddered, threaded her hands through her sheets, and whispered a small phrase that activated a protective spell embedded in it, shielding herself.

  He looked powerful, the king’s son, the man he had been born to be, not the broken, half-frightened man he had become. She understood even more the lure of his charm—he could crook a finger and a more susceptible woman would be heading straight for his arms or inviting him into her bed.

  He warned her about this: he had said that he would get her into his brain, and then he would come after her.

  And here he was in her room. Just smiling at her.

  “Get out,” she said, wondering why her wards had failed. They should have protected her against him and anything he sent directly. “Get the hell out.”

  His smile grew, and now it was less charming and more sinister. She didn’t get frightened very often, but she was frightened now. This man had killed fifteen women that she knew of. Fifteen women in the Kingdoms. He could have killed dozens in the Greater World and never gotten caught. Once serial killers crossed state lines, Americans had no real way to track them.

  He could have killed women in every single decade he was here, so long as he did so in different towns, different places.

  “Get out,” she said again, wondering what she could use against him. Comfort magic was not offensive magic. It didn’t kill by definition. It didn’t harm. It didn’t maim. It eased. It soothed.

  She wondered if that would work—some kind of soothe spell. But she didn’t want to raise her hands, didn’t want to let go of the sheets just in case he launched himself at her.

  He wasn’t holding a weapon, so she didn’t know how he could hurt her.

  Except, at the rehab center, he had looked down at those hands of his as if they had done very bad things. Had he killed those women without the aid of a knife? Had he done it with brute strength alone?

  He wasn’t moving toward her. He was just watching her.

  She had one other power: she could get rid of something that disrupted. And he was clearly disrupting.

  She sent a bolt of energy toward him, banning him from the house.

  His smile faded, and he looked oddly disappointed. Then he turned around and headed through the door. The amber light faded as if it had never been.

  But she didn’t hear the front door open. Nor had her alarm gone off.

  Her heart was still pounding, and she wasn’t sure if he was still in the house.

  So she grabbed the backup cell phone that she kept in a recharging cradle beside the bed, grabbed her robe, and slipped it on. Then she put her feet over the side of the bed, careful not to step into her slippers, which had heels and would make a sound on the hardwood floor.

  She was heading out to the pool. If the warded house couldn’t protect her, then she saw no point in staying here, particularly if he was still inside.

  She wished she knew how to reach Tank, but she didn’t. And she didn’t want to call the police. They couldn’t do anything.

  Instead, she dialed 411 as she quietly let herself out the sliding glass doors. She needed to call the rehab center.

  She needed to know what Bluebeard was doing right now.

  Chapter 12

  “Ma’am,” said the annoyed voice on the other end of the phone. “We do a bed check. All our residents are accounted for.”

  Jodi paced around the pool. The tile was cool under her feet. The fairy lights illuminated her plants, making everything beautiful, and not creating shadows. So far, she saw no amber light, and no Bluebeard. But she spoke softly just in case.

  “Is he asleep?” she asked.

  “Ma’am, he’s not required to be asleep. He’s just required to be inside when we lock the facility at night.”

  “Please,” she said. “Check for me.”

  The person on the other end of the phone sighed. “Ma’am, look. He can’t come to the phone. Our rules say no outside contact for weeks, and he’s not on the contact list.”

  “I know that,” she snapped. “I just got a call from someone claiming to be him, and I’m hoping to hell it was a prank.”

  Working in Hollywood all these years made it easy for her to tell a plausible lie.

  “Oh,” the voice on the other end of the phone said, as if he (she? Jodi couldn’t quite tell) finally understood why Jodi was calling. “Let me check.”

  She paced, swallowing hard, keeping an eye on the house and all the entrances to the pool area. She had gated this off when Hancock Park got more popular. Her land abutted the Wilshire Country Club, but she had at least two lots between her and the nearest fairway. Two overgrown lots where someone could hide.

  She had put a gate in the trees years ago, but she had disabled the alarm system she placed on it when she realized that the stupid duffer golfers would shank the ball into the gate and set off the alarm. Then she deemed it more trouble than it was worth.

  Now she wished it was on.

  She felt surrounded by danger on all sides—and she was scared to go back into her house, which pissed her off.

  Then she heard the phone on the other end rattle.

  “He’s here, ma’am,” the voice said. “He’s been awake the entire time, in our reading room, studying some computer printouts.”

  “You’re sure he’s been awake?” she asked.

  “I looked at our security footage, ma’am. Making a phone call during your no-contact period here is a major violation of our policies.”

>   “Did you talk to him?” Jodi asked a bit breathlessly. He was a Charming. He could convince anyone of anything.

  “No, ma’am. But I did check with our other staffers. He’s been awake the entire time, ma’am.”

  So the voice—whoever this was—had also thought that he had tampered with the security feed and had checked with the other employees to make sure he hadn’t.

  “And no phones nearby?” Jodi asked.

  “We keep our phones under lock and key,” the voice said without irony. “It would take a miracle for him to find an unattended phone. And it would be even more of a miracle if he made a call to you and the call didn’t get caught on our security feed.”

  Jodi let out a small breath. She wasn’t quite sure how to process this information, but she did know one thing: It made her brain hurt. How could he send a projection of himself without being unconscious or unaware of it?

  And if he was on the security feed, then he hadn’t left the facility, which meant he hadn’t been in her house. Besides, he couldn’t have messed with the security feed. The Kingdom magical couldn’t manipulate electronics. They could use the electronics—thank God, she wouldn’t survive in this modern age without her computer—but they couldn’t tamper with them. The electronics got frizzed out. If a magical being could be filmed (and not all of them could), then their image on film was actually their image—and what they were doing at the time.

  Someone else had done this. Somehow. But she didn’t know who could have.

  She thanked the nameless voice on the other end of the line, hung up, and then speed-dialed the Archetype Place. She knew no one would be monitoring the phone at this hour, but she also knew she could leave a message.

  When she heard the voice of Griselda, the woman who had run the Archetype Place successfully for more than sixty years, Jodi let out a small sigh of relief, even though she knew Selda wasn’t there. Jodi was relieved by the sound of Selda’s voice mail message.

  “Hey, Selda,” Jodi said, “I need to talk to Tank ASAP. Can you find her for me? And I also need to talk with you when you get in. Thanks.”