Mind Games (22 page)

“The conventional boyfriend.” Simon stirs his Scotch with a swizzle stick. “How’s about if we call him Cubby?”

I give him a hard look. “Don’t you ever bring Cubby’s name into disillusionist business.”

Shelby and Enrique come by with plates of kebab hors d’oeuvres. “Join us, Justine,” Shelby says.

I stand as Packard comes by with another plate; Simon stops him. “Packard,” he says. “Justine told our Silver Widow quite an ingenious story for my setup. You should hear it.”

“It’s not ingenious,” I say.

“It’s fantastic,” Simon says.

“I don’t want to go through the story again.” I point at Packard’s plate. “These look good. What are they?”

Packard looks at me oddly. “Zucchini kebabs.”

“She’s made me out to be the dangerous love interest,” Simon says. “I’m hot, intense, and charismatic—so charismatic that I make Justine do things she’d never do—”

Packard gives Simon a quizzical look.

Simon says, “I’m the source of a dark gravitational pull—”

“The Silver Widow needs distraction,” I say. “That’s why I made you sound like that. That’s a distracting way to be—”

But Simon continues. “I’m taking over her mind, her life. It’s wrong, but she secretly craves me; she feels my magic. But the best part is the description of our one stolen kiss.”

I can’t even look at Packard. “You need to get out more.”

“She told the Silver Widow that when I kissed her, every molecule in her body—”

“Simon—,” Packard interrupts.

“My touch was like electricity on her skin, the kiss—”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Don’t you find it intriguing?”

“It sounds like Justine talked you up to the target using effective details. Why are you repeating them like a titillated schoolboy?”

Simon smirks. “The entertainment value.” He leaves to join the group.

How the night can get any worse, I don’t know. I turn to Packard, who looks quite pleased indeed.

“Dream on,” I say.

He gets this glint in his eyes. And ever so gracefully, he turns and ferries the plate of zucchini kebabs to the table of disillusionists in the far corner.

I ask the bartender for a glass of water. Let Packard think whatever he wants, I tell myself as I guzzle it down. And the temple thing is just referred tension from my jaw. Why wouldn’t I have tension? It’s been two weeks since I had a zing. I’ll feel like a new person once I zing Aggie.

I watch Packard settle in with the gang, wishing, as I have so many times, that he hadn’t deceived me so
profoundly, so wantonly, wishing he hadn’t stolen my freedom. He killed so much of what could’ve been when he did what he did.

Feeling incredibly sad, I head over for a night of feasting with my people. Packard and I ignore each other except for the few accidental moments where we catch one another’s gaze, and the thrill rises until we look away and immerse ourselves back into the clinking glasses and tinking silverware and clever talk of our predatory Mongolian tribe, living it up in our hidden corner of the city, secrets in every pocket.

          Nineteen

T
HE
S
ILVER
W
IDOW’S HOME
sparkles with crystal and candlelight. The ring of polite talk and laughter rises from little groups of elegant people, and the soft, warm breeze coming through the French windows adds a magical wildness to the night.

A butler approaches us with a tray of champagne glasses.

“Got any Scotch?” Simon asks. The butler goes off. “Who the hell are all these people? I thought she was isolated.”

“Help, mostly.” I point to Elaine and Sasha. “The two women in the corner are stylists, and the men look like their dates. Carter and I are her pool cleaners. She mentioned she invited her lawyer. And her real estate agent.”

“Dumping her real estate holdings already?” Simon says. “I haven’t even started her gambling.”

“She’s been investing in condos. There she is.” I wave.

Aggie glides across the floor in a white dress with silver sparkles. What’s stunning about her garment is what’s
not
there—the entire left half of her body is nude aside from the parts the law likes covered. In this way, she’s effectively concealed her Osiris virus wound sites, which are concentrated on her right side, while still looking insanely sexy.

Aggie shakes her blonde curls as she nears. “Welcome!”

Simon’s bored stance doesn’t fool me for a second. And when I introduce them, she lowers her head and looks up at him out the top of her eyes, like a sexy little girl in trouble, and Simon holds her hand a beat too long. His suit coat’s unbuttoned, and you can see the heads and tails of his dragon tattoos through his net shirt.

Aggie pulls Carter flush to her naked side and gives the four of us a tour of her house. The dreamy pulse of electronica pounds through the sound system, and I’m feeling the vibrations in my head, which is exactly where I don’t want to be feeling them.

Now and then, Aggie stops to strike a pose of dissolute glamour while asking personal questions. She finds it particularly interesting that Simon likes turtles, and that Shelby washes her hair only once a week.

We get upstairs to the bedroom. I’ve described it to Shelby, but my description didn’t prepare her for the crystal-white madness of it. We regard each other with carefully neutral expressions.

Carter looks freaked, but Simon just laughs. “Nice,” Simon says to her. “Very nice.”

Aggie takes this as a compliment.

After we peruse her giant closet and the guest chambers, she guides my comrades to the stairs and announces she has to borrow me. As soon as they start down, she pulls me into the office, pushes the door shut with her back, and heaves a sigh of relief. She then dissolves into a fit of scratching underneath her dress. “Do you know how hard it is to not do this down there?” she says.

“You’re coping amazingly well,” I say.

“I’ll say. Because I can feel the filaments working their way out every second!” She directs my attention to several
rows of small glass containers. “That’s how many Osiris virus filaments came out of my skin yesterday.” She has her dress nearly all the way off, revealing red, irritated skin and beige bandages that the intact half of the dress had covered.

I’m far more interested in her creamy pale left arm. I’m interested in coiling my fingers around it and channeling a river of fear into her. I want it. I crave it. It horrifies me, how much I crave it. What have I become?

“Don’t watch me. I want you to watch this.” She hops over to her computer and starts up a movie of a tweezers removing something invisible from a normal-looking patch of skin; it’s taken with some sort of magnification apparatus, but still you can’t see the filament.

When the clip ends she hands me a glass jar and a magnifying glass. “That’s the filament you just saw.”

I remove the top and search the bottom and sides with the magnifying glass. “I don’t see it.”

“God, you are so dense. Let me.” She searches the jar herself, angling it for different light. “It’s gone!” She draws away and looks at me accusingly. “It’s gone!”

“I didn’t take it.”

“No, you didn’t take it, but you did something—you probably breathed really hard and it flew out.” She carries on in her usual insulting way while I stare at the place on her arm I want to zing, remembering how amazing it felt that first time in her bedroom. My hunger builds.

“What am I going to do?” Suddenly she just comes up to me and takes my hand. “Thank God you’re here, Justine!”

This snaps me out of it. I can’t do it. She’s too pathetic. “You should get down there.” I grab the doorknob. “You’re missing your whole party.”

We arrive downstairs, where her transformation back to normalcy is astounding. She’s a personification of her
own dress—an unblemished public side and a hidden crazy side.

Elaine the hairdresser comes up to say hello, and I introduce her to my friends.

“Can you believe it about Mayor Templeton?” she says. “Even the mayor, with all his bodyguards …”

“What about him?” I ask.

“The Brick Slinger got him. He’s dead. Dead on arrival.”

“That’s horrible!” I say.

“And I suppose they still didn’t manage to catch the guy,” Carter says.

“No,” Elaine says. “Can you believe it?” It really is a shock, and we commiserate about it. Sasha and two men—her and Elaine’s boyfriends from what I can gather—drift over to join us, adding updates they’ve heard, and then Sasha and Elaine and one of the boyfriends begin to argue about whether the Brick Slinger is telekinetic.

Aggie listens with her arms crossed, stewing. “I don’t think this is appropriate party conversation,” she says finally. “And you know what? Templeton sucked anyway.” She sends the stylists and their boyfriends to get ice and restock chips; then she drags Carter and Shelby off to meet a potential pool client, leaving Simon and me alone.

“You call that destabilized?” he asks.

“She’s destabilized. You just don’t see it.”

He smiles over my shoulder. At her.

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Let’s see.” Simon places a hand on a white pillar. “I’m going to zing her; then I’m going to give her the ride of her life in that purity bedroom of hers, and then we’ll head out for a whirlwind casino weekend where we’ll lose obscene amounts of her money.”

“You’re going to have sex with her right after you zing her?”

He widens his blue eyes in fake surprise. “Oh, no! Would that be breaking one of Packard’s rules? Endangering myself by giving in to the very pleasurable experience of sex with a target during glory hour? Like watching a bug on the windshield while driving too fast?” He looks me hard in the eye and laughs. “I highly recommend it.”

I just stare at him, throat dry. “You could lose control.”

“And perspective, too.” He grins. “See, that’s the difference between you and me. You won’t ever give up control or move beyond your comfort zone. That’s why you couldn’t touch my energy dimension. Or the Alchemist’s.” He flips his chunky black bangs out of his eyes. “Nobody knew where your limits would be, but now we know. We might have to drop the Alchemist because of you.”

I’m speechless, and flooded with shame.

“Yeah, ’cause it looks like you won’t be able to hack it, and you were the key.” He straightens up. “Don’t feel bad. You all have targets you can’t work with. Because all of you have limits. Except for me. I got rid of my limits.”

“How?”

“Why should I tell you?”

Carter and Shelby are back, arm in arm.

“I do not like Silver Widow,” Shelby announces.

“Tell her what?” Carter asks Simon.

“How to zing repellent targets,” Simon says.

“Don’t listen to him, Justine,” Carter tells me. “If a target’s repellent, he’s repellent.”

Simon smirks. “Only if you’re too lazy and stupid to figure it out.”

Shelby steps back.

Carter turns to him. “What was that?”

“Lazy,” Simon enunciates. “And
stupid.”

Carter moves fast—ice cubes fly into the air, a glass breaks, and the next thing I know Carter has Simon pinned to the pillar, right forearm across his neck, left hand trapping his arms.

“What was that?” Carter demands.

Simon chokes out the words: “Lazy …”

Carter jerks him.

“Stupid …” Simon finishes with a raspy sound that’s either laughter or coughing.

All the party is watching us now, and Simon’s grunts sound less laughterlike.

Shelby smiles.

“Guys!” I say.

Carter releases him. “You’re lucky Packard wants you working tonight.”

Simon coughs, smiling and straightening his clothes. “Thank you.”

Carter takes a chair, and Shelby settles onto his lap.

Simon leers across the room. “She’s still watching us.”

“There’s a surprise,” I say.

“Let’s give her a little more to watch.” Simon hangs his arm over my shoulder, thuglike. “You guys bored? Want to get out of here?”

Mysteriously, Shelby smiles, like she’s just gotten great news.

“I do,” Carter says.

“I do, too,” I say. I’m feeling upset about the mayor, and about Midcity in general; it feels like we’ve crossed a new line of chaos.

“I will guarantee you,” Simon says, “that if Justine would be so good as to let me kiss her, I’ll have the Silver Widow shutting down this party in thirty minutes, and you can all leave.”

“No thanks,” I say.

Carter stands, ejecting Shelby from his lap. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. A kiss with Justine, eye contact, and the Silver Widow shuts down the party.”

Carter crosses his arms. “The room cleared in thirty minutes? Or she starts to clear it?”

“Cleared. Timed from the start of the kiss.” Simon removes his hand from my shoulder and extends it to Carter. “Five hundred bucks.”

Carter takes his hand. “You’re on.”

“Except it’s not going to happen,” I say. I’m looking at the pillar. I have a feeling Simon’s vision for the kiss involves parts of me pressed against it. Something alpha like that.

“Come on,” Simon says. “You can have the same terms.”