Authors: Kristine Grayson
“Mr. Shea, it’s Jodi Walters from Enchantment Management. May I come in and talk with you?”
She heard a rustling from behind the door and knew that Shea had looked through the peephole. She felt her heart lift for a moment, and then he said, “Why the hell didn’t you just call me?” and she knew things weren’t going to be easy.
“I was at a business meeting at LAX, then I called your agent, and he said you were here. I just figured it was easier to stop than to drive all the way back to my office to call you and have you come see me.”
“Look, I appreciate it,” Shea said, “but I’m not really interested in work right now. I have a few personal issues to deal with.”
Blue shifted from foot to foot. He clearly hadn’t expected this. Jodi hadn’t either, but she probably should have. Blue would have retreated in this instance, probably had retreated way back when. Part of her had assumed that Shea hadn’t known he was the stalker. Apparently, he did. He called the stalker stuff personal issues. And he was scared. He probably didn’t want to see women. She should have planned for that.
“Mr. Shea, it’s an opportunity of a lifetime, and the moment I heard about the job, I thought of you.” Jodi was rather amazed at how easily the lie came. Of course, she said things like this all the time to her clients, and generally only meant half of the sentence—and not always the same half. So the ease with which she lied about the whole sentence shouldn’t have surprised her.
Shea didn’t respond, which made Blue shift again but actually gave Jodi hope. If Shea had told them to go away immediately, they would have had to improvise something else. But this silence meant that he was actually considering what she had to say.
Then something thumped in the room, and Blue gave her an alarmed look. But Jodi smiled at him reassuringly. She recognized that kind of thump. It was the thump of a man cleaning up the front room of his apartment.
“I’m not sure if I should accept work right now,” Shea said, his voice sounding farther away.
“Believe me,” Jodi said, “you’ll regret it if you don’t take this opportunity.”
That, at least, was true enough. There was another moment of silence, followed by the slap of the security bar going back. Then the click of the lock.
He opened the door partway so that Jodi could only see part of his face. A waft of warm, stale air hit her, and she wondered how long he had been cooped up in there.
“Okay, talk,” Shea said.
“I really don’t want to discuss this in the hall,” she said. She’d done this before too. “We don’t know who is listening, and this is one of those deals…”
He sighed, closed his eye, and pressed his head against the door. Then he stepped back, pulling the door open wide.
Jodi walked in, followed by Blue.
“What the hell?” Shea said. “Who are you?”
“My new assistant,” Jodi said. “Sadly, I’ve learned the hard way about the stupidity of going places alone.”
Blue pushed the door closed.
The little two-room suite was nicely laid out, with a sofa, two comfortable chairs, even a small dining table near the kitchenette. The door to the bedroom was mostly closed, but a few stray socks prevented it from closing all the way.
Apparently, Shea had tossed everything in there to deal with later.
“Sorry,” Shea mumbled. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
Clearly. He had stubble on his face, his eyes had bags as if he hadn’t been getting much sleep, and his hair was newly combed but too long. He wore jeans that looked one size too big, his feet were bare, and he had a dress shirt over it that still had lines from the way it had been folded in its little plastic wrapper at the store.
“That’s all right,” Jodi said. “I knew I would be surprising you, so I didn’t expect anything special. Just let me take a quick look at you if you don’t mind.”
He stood very still. “What do you want me to do?”
Poor man, he had no acting or modeling instincts. If she had told one of her more experienced clients to let her look, they would have preened, then asked if she wanted a runway walk or a pirouette or some kind of pose.
“What you’re doing is just great,” she said.
Blue had flanked her. He saw what she did—that this indeed was their man. Shea looked just like the police sketches. No wonder he hadn’t left the suite. It was amazing he had let her in.
Jodi focused on him, concentrating on his aura. If he was a minor Charming—and she had noted that in his file—then she should have seen some blue in his aura. Maybe not as much as Blue’s aura, but enough to make the aura bluish, like that light powder blue tuxedos had been made out of in the 1970s (thank heavens that era was over). But she didn’t see anything except some faint amber, and lots and lots of sparks.
Whatever that spell was, it was dominating his magic. She wanted to say that the spell was eating his magic alive, but she doubted that was how it worked. Because if that happened, the spell would kill him, and it hadn’t killed Blue.
Instead, she would guess, that the spell used up all the magic, then went dormant while the magic replenished itself. One of the ways that Blue had dominated the spell was to drink the charm away so that the magic really didn’t replenish itself.
Charm was one of those interacting magicks that needed someone on the other side of it to function properly. A charming loner, in magical terms, was an impossibility.
Shea’s aura looked broken and out of order, pieces of it jabbing out like badly shattered windshield glass. This was what she had hoped to see—although not in this bad a condition. But the damage to Shea’s aura was similar to what was happening with Blue’s, and Shea didn’t have the magic that Blue did.
So she might be able to fix it.
“All right, Mr. Shea,” she said, deliberately changing her tone. “I need to be up-front with you.”
He froze in place. She blinked twice to make his aura recede.
She said, “We’re here, not because of a job, but because we know who you are.”
His eyes got wide and he actually bit his lower lip.
“I know you’re the Fairy Tale Stalker,” she said.
He let out a cry and backed up, hitting the table. If Blue hadn’t been standing in the entry, Shea probably would have run to the door.
“And,” she said louder, holding up her hand, hoping to keep him from panicking too badly, “I know it’s not your fault.”
Shea had caught the table with his hands. Now he was just braced against it, like a man who didn’t know where to go.
“What?” he asked in a half whisper.
“It’s a spell,” she said. “A particularly nasty one. At first, I thought it was a curse, but it’s more vicious than that.”
“How can you possibly know that?” he asked.
She glanced at Blue. He gave her a small, almost invisible shrug. They were about to take a big risk, letting Shea know who Blue was. She tilted her head just a little—a question:
Should
I
tell
him?
“She knows it,” Blue said, “because she’s been working with me.”
Shea gathered himself, letting go of the table. It looked like he was trying to pull the remaining bits of his dignity together.
“And am I supposed to know who you are?” he asked, as if he were a bouncer trying to prevent Blue from coming into a club.
Blue gave him a crooked smile. “Yeah, you’re supposed to know who I am since you use my name often enough. I’m Bluebeard.”
Chapter 42
Shea screamed.
It was a loud, piercing scream, filled with panic and dread. He backed up again, slammed the table against the wall, then ducked and tried to half run, half crawl to the bedroom.
Neither Jodi nor Blue moved. They watched him, Jodi with surprise. Then she glanced at Blue. He didn’t look surprised at all. Just sad, and resigned.
How many people had reacted to him that way before? And he had always felt he deserved it.
She wondered if he felt like he deserved it now.
Shea reached the door of the bedroom, shoved it open, and launched himself inside. Only he couldn’t get past the mounds of clothing. The clothing tumbled around him, and he fell, landing so hard that the floor shook.
“I’m not going to harm you,” Blue said calmly. “In fact, if you believe my history, which is now in some doubt, but if you do, then you’d see that I only go after women. And attractive women at that. Jodi here should be afraid of me, not you.”
She looked sideways at Blue. He still looked resigned, but she thought she might have seen something else. A bit of impatience? Anger?
If looked at in terms of the fairy tale, Shea was being ridiculous. But in terms of what had been happening to Shea, Jodi didn’t entirely blame him. He’d been slowly turning into Bluebeard—warning all the women away from him before he hurt them, using Bluebeard’s name—and now Bluebeard was confronting him in his own safe space.
“It’s all right, really,” Jodi said in her most soothing voice. This was where her magic came in. Soothe and comfort, guide and ease. “If it weren’t for you, Gregory, we wouldn’t know what was going on with Blue here.”
“Me?” Shea said, his voice a raspy squeak. Apparently that scream had scraped his vocal chords. “What did I do?”
“Well, nothing, actually,” Jodi said. “I know that’s hard for you to believe, because you have fragments of memory in which you’re stalking women—”
“I’m not stalking anyone. I haven’t left this room in weeks. At least, that I know of.” Shea looked up at both of them, a pleading expression on his face. “And that’s me on the television, and if I fall asleep…”
“You know those women, right?” Blue said.
“In passing,” Shea said. “I don’t know where they live. I didn’t even know the name of one of them until the TV mentioned it.”
Blue nodded. “That’s very familiar. It’ll get worse unless we can slow the spell down.”
“Reverse it,” Jodi said firmly. She didn’t want Shea to think that what she was about to do would fail. She had learned that the thought of failure, especially with magic, often guaranteed it.
“As we were investigating this,” Blue said, “we initially thought it was a curse. But it’s not. It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s a spell,” Jodi said. “You’re a Charming, right?”
Shea lowered his head, shaking it. “Not like the real Charmings. My family is hereditary royalty without the wealth. My father used to say everything was diluted from the money to the royal heritage to the magic. I might be able to make you smile, but I don’t have that wowza ability that the real Charmings have.”
Wowza
ability
. Jodi liked that phrase. It was accurate. It was how she had felt when she first saw Blue, and she had blamed it on the charm. And then she saw him turn the charm on, and she realized what she had felt had been minor compared with what he could actually do. Still,
wowza
. Wowza.
She didn’t look at him at this moment. She didn’t want Shea to see her personal reaction to Blue.
So she nodded instead. “But your magic, it’s charm magic, right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Shea said. “Not much more. I thought I’d come here and actually have a better life in the Greater World. No worries about the fact that I’m seventy-second in line to the throne, which bugs the hell out of my dad, no refusing jobs because they were too demeaning for a Charming. I could be my own man here. You were really kind when I first got here. That’s why I let you in. Because you were kind.”
And Jodi didn’t even remember him.
At least she had been kind. She always tried to be kind, but in Hollywood that was hard. This place called itself the Dream Factory, but it never explained what kind of factory it was. Some factories make things. Some crush things and make them into something else.
Hollywood was the second type. It crushed dreams and made them into something that seemed dreamlike, the cheesy kind, the kind that peeled around the edges. And for some people on the periphery of the Dream Factory, well, those people realized along the way that dreams weren’t just fluffy and golden and beautiful. There was an entire other subset of dreams, and those were called nightmares.
That was what had captured Shea. Jodi had lost other clients to it, mostly in mundane, mortal ways. Never before had she had a client whose life was destroyed by a spell.
“I’ll be honest with you,” she said, still using her comfort magic. “I heard about what was happening to you, and I had to find you. I wanted to see if your aura had the same problems that Blue’s does.”
“Does it?” Shea asked, looking at her with complete fear.
“Yes.” She decided not to tell him that his spell was weaker than Blue’s because she had no idea if what she was going to do would hurt him or not. Again, she wanted to manage Shea’s expectations.
“Did you fix his?” Shea asked.
Blue started to answer, but Jodi jumped in. Again, she had to handle this delicately, and she wasn’t sure Blue could be delicate.
“Not yet,” Jodi said. “His has a secondary issue. He has been under that spell for centuries.”