Liquid Lies (49 page)

“Ah. Mr. Jones,” Traeger chuckled, his slight British accent coming through. “My thanks. Reaction times aren’t quite what they used to be.”

Xavier nodded, pleased Traeger remembered his name. “You should’ve taken the day off,” he said. “The first day is always the craziest.”

Traeger waved him off with a brilliant smile full of false teeth. “Never sit idle, I always say.”

Well, if that wasn’t the truth.

“Excuse him,” Xavier said sharply to the girls still loitering on the steps. He’d perfected the art of talking to people without looking at them. The girls moved aside with a huff, but at least they moved, and the second they disappeared into the crowd Xavier felt his body calm. Traeger entered the shop and removed his cap.

Xavier slipped back into the crowd and started to press toward Shed again, but the going was painfully slow. What the hell was the hold up? He craned his neck above the sea of bobbing heads made taller by colorful hats. Ah, there. Two massive pockets of people, gaping at two different things, had converged and no one could get through.

Shed’s entrance was tucked into the back of a cobblestone alley that ran alongside the historic Gold Rush theater, used as the festival’s main venue. Some young, grizzled guy stood under the triangular theater marquee, getting interviewed and photographed by no fewer than five camera teams. The gaggle of fans surrounding him elbowed for space with the people who’d formed a giant circle around a street performer who was, literally, performing in the street.

Waterleaf had been barricaded on both ends, and no cars were allowed around the main square for the whole festival. Now a middle-aged man wearing a beige North Face jacket and a cheap, felt jester’s hat danced along the street’s yellow road divider. Normally Xavier didn’t pay a second of attention to anything related to the festival, but what Jester was doing made him stop and watch.

Jester juggled a mass of colored balls—hands blurring, balls flying. Some disappeared then reappeared. The audience gasped. Xavier did, too.

Was this guy like him—a Tedran, a Secondary—capable of true magic, true illusion?

No. That would be impossible. Xavier was the last.

He looked closer, following the intricacies of Jester’s hands. When Xavier caught the deft slip of Jester’s fingers into the folds of his coat, Xavier exhaled. He watched a charlatan, nothing more. He started to turn away, to head back into the thick of the crowd, then stopped. He wanted to be normal, right?

Primaries
, he told himself,
like to be entertained
.

Xavier rooted his feet. Closed his eyes. Shoved away the feel of strangers around him and pretended he was weightless and invisible. He drew in a deep breath through his nose and pushed it out. Opened his eyes.

Jester was storing the balls in a suitcase to the sound of applause. He pulled out a deck of cards from his coat pocket and shuffled them in an impressively high arc. He started to go around the circle, asking random people to pick a card, look at it, then put it back in the deck. His marks all happened to be women.

Jester offered the deck to Xavier with a flourish, then pretended he’d made a mistake. “Whoa. Not you, big guy.” He tried to play it off for laughs, but Xavier noted Jester’s reaction. He’d seen it plenty of times before.

Some people edged away from Xavier because of his size. Since escaping the Plant and finding therapy in throwing his fists into a bag, he’d probably put on a good thirty pounds of muscle. Add that to his six-foot-plus frame, and he understood why he got wary looks.

Other people saw his eyes and just stared.

Pam, his boss, said it was because his eyes were the color of guns—shiny, gray, and full of don’t-fuck-with-me. The loathed color reminded Xavier of death. That’s why he never looked in the mirror.

Jester offered the card deck to the person standing immediately to Xavier’s left. “Well hello, beautiful. Care to pick a card?”

Three seconds.

The woman on his left watched Jester with genuine excitement. Pure joy lit her eyes, which were the color of the caramel Xavier had made at two o’clock in the morning last week. Laughter cast her in a spotlight. She clapped like a kid about to get a cookie—so unlike the attention hounds he’d encountered on the steps.

Somewhere in another world Jester was doing magic tricks, but Xavier only saw her. He forgot how long a second lasted.

Her deep brown hair, streaked with gold and wavy like a stormy ocean, streamed out from beneath a knitted red hat topped with a pompon. She was tanned, like so many Hollywood people traipsing through White Clover Creek, and also freckled. A price tag stuck to the sleeve of her green, fur-trimmed coat.

Vaguely, he felt his skin start to tighten, a heat rising from deep inside. His heart rate started to kick up, but it felt goddamn amazing. Too fucking long to deny himself this day after day.

She must have felt the weight of his stare because suddenly she got this funny look on her face. Glanced over her shoulder at him. Did a double take. Their eyes met and hers widened. Not with wonder or apprehension, like he’d seen on the faces of so many other strangers, but with surprise. Like she’d been expecting to see him and, suddenly, there he was.

She turned toward him and his body went haywire. “Hi,” she said.

He didn’t say anything out loud. Inside, he screamed,
Walk away, Xavier. Walk away
now.

No. Stay. You’re getting hard,
slithered a voice from the past, one he hadn’t heard in a very, very long time.
I brought her for you,
said the Burned Man, the sadistic Ofarian guard once in charge of Xavier’s cellblock.
She’s yours. Take her.

Five years free from the hallucinations. Five years gone.

Xavier’s mind flipped back in time. He was in his cell in the Plant’s breeding block again. The Burned Man had always brought him the Tedran females. This time, in the waking nightmare, he brought Xavier the freckled woman. She crossed the cold, white floor willingly, but without enthusiasm or even emotion. Xavier took the red hat off her head and tossed it to the side; then he went for the zipper of her coat. Pulled it down. Like all the Tedran women he’d been made to lie with, this woman just stood there, her face agonizingly blank. She was naked underneath the coat and he peeled the thick garment off her body. Anticipation made his skin come alive. The rest of her was as tan as her face, but he’d been trained to only care about the heaven between her legs.

The Xavier that still stood on Waterleaf knew the images in his mind were a twisted combination of past and present. Those three seconds stole a beautiful, laughing face and thrust her into his hell.

In his head, he pulled the woman to the lone mattress in his brightly lit cell. His clothes dissolved. He pushed inside her without any sort of preparation. He shouted at the feel of her and took what he’d been made for. Hated himself because of it. Years without release built and built and built inside him, propelling his thrusts. Beneath him she was limp, but she didn’t protest. Her eyes stared far away.

Xavier—the man he had become since escaping this torture, the man that knew this was wrong—ordered the hallucinations away. But in the horror-filled world of his past, his body still worked inside hers. Long-denied fulfillment—because it would never, ever be called pleasure—and self-loathing colliding at a violent crossroads.

He threw his head back, pleading for mercy.
She doesn’t want this. I don’t want to want this.

The square window he knew should belong to the White Clover Creek Tea Shoppe morphed into the wire-crossed observation holes in the breeding block cells. The Burned Man appeared on the other side of the glass. The scarred cheek and chin, the distorted ear, the webbed hands…

Don’t stop,
said the Burned Man, the puckered skin on his neck working.
If you do, I’ll just bring you another.

In the waking nightmares, as in life, Xavier always came. This is what he’d been bred for, to create new generations of Tedrans. New slaves for the Ofarians.

It’s okay, what you’re doing,
the Burned Man soothed, his tone syrupy false. Xavier had always suspected he’d enjoyed watching.
Her life will be better if she gets pregnant anyway.

A red-mittened hand touched Xavier’s arm, snapping him back to Colorado.

He gasped as though he’d been held underwater for minutes, and gulped down the sweet, cold air. The buzz of the festival filled his ears in a painful rush. Dance music now thumped from speakers set up around the square and it drove into his brain. The sun bounced off the snow, blinding him. Xavier knuckled his eyes, hard enough to hurt. When he opened them, she was still there in front of him, gorgeously and hideously innocent.

“Are you okay?”

Her voice was smoky, sexy, and it tugged him between reality and evil memories. She wasn’t naked beneath him, taking it because she had to. But the possibility of it terrified him.

He ripped away from her touch. “Fine. I’m fine.”

Apparently an even bigger celebrity had sauntered under the theater marquee because the crowd had gone from unbearable to insane. He couldn’t move unless he put his shoulder into someone’s back and barreled through. The old Xavier would have done that. Maybe now would be a perfect time for that asshole to return.

“I’m sorry, but”—her freckled nose crinkled and a curious smile lit her candy-colored eyes—“I know this’ll sound weird, but do I know you? You seem…familiar.”

Since he’d given up women, whenever temptation or panic gnawed at him, he’d picture himself in the kitchen. A pristine cutting board. The handle of a scary-sharp chef’s knife cradled loosely in his palm. Rows upon rows of meats and vegetables lined up, waiting. He’d poise the knife over a green pepper, make the first cut, then let his hand fly through the strokes, blocking out everything else.

He did this now, and calm rippled through him.

“No, you don’t,” he said, finally able to look at her without picturing her suffering underneath him. But that didn’t mean he was about to stay and chat.

He wheeled away, found the tiniest crack between bodies, and shoved himself into it. He hated to use his size, but he was desperate. The tourists parted for him because they had no choice, and he apologized as he angled for freedom.

“Are you sure?” the freckled woman called after him, but he barely heard her over the thud thud thud of blood in his ears.

The alley mouth was thirty yards and thirty thousand miles away. At last he broke the edge of the crowd, the yellow-and-white striped awning over Shed’s entrance in his sight. He hurried toward it.

“Hey, wait.” That smoky voice. Following him. “Can you hold up a sec?”

Giant pots, holding mature yews and decorated with bows in Shed’s signature yellow and white, dotted the wide alley, and he wove among them. Stupid to think he could actually lose her, given that the alley came to a dead end, but he was grasping for any way out. When he ducked under the awning and still heard her footsteps crossing the cobblestones, he knew there was only one option left.

The day he’d arrived in White Clover Creek, he’d given up not just sex but magic, cold turkey. But there, standing in the shadowed cold, shaking with fear, he reached deep inside and pulled out the rusty words of the Tedran language.

No reason to speak it anymore, since there was only one person left on Earth who could understand him, and he hadn’t spoken to Gwen since she’d freed his people and started a new life. A better life. No reason to use the words of his birth if he’d abandoned using illusions. Yet the language sprang up inside him like the quick gush of blood after a pinprick. Filled him.

He chose his illusion, imagining the face and body he wanted, and whispered the Tedran words to bring it about. Glamour enveloped him in a light, airy caress. Head to foot, the new image fell around him in a shimmering cloak made of the thinnest material. Touch it and it would dissolve.

He couldn’t deny that for some part of him, using his birthright after all this time comforted him.

He grabbed hold of the thick, iron bar on the restaurant’s original granary shed wood door, and slid it wide on oiled rails. Rushing through the little foyer that blocked the winter wind, he pushed open the restaurant’s main door and waddled inside, shouldering a huge purse that wasn’t really there.

Pam, Shed’s owner and executive chef, sat hunched over table eighteen studying receipts and supply orders in neat little piles. By the way her fingers toyed with her short, platinum hair, he knew that something wasn’t adding up in the ledgers.

The only reason Xavier could work for Pam, a woman, was because she sent out zero sexual vibes toward him. Probably had to do with the fact he had a penis.

Xavier shuffled through the dining room, making a point to be noticed. Pam glanced up. “Hey, Rosa,” she said, distracted.

“Hola,” he replied in the lilting voice of Shed’s cleaning lady. Magic tingled on his skin.

Veiled in the disguise of a tiny Hispanic woman, he slipped into the back room where Pam stored her linens and cutlery. He shut the door behind him and sagged against the shelves.

Shed’s front door opened.

Pam’s shoes clicked across the dining room floor. “We’re not open for lunch for another two hours.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”
Her.

Xavier groaned, her voice slicing through him like a newly sharpened blade. Desire flowed into the open wound, and despite his mind’s direct orders to stay away, his arm reached out and cracked the door open.

She stood by the hostess podium, her eyes darting around the dim dining room. The cold touched her cheeks with a gentle pink. “I was looking for someone. Really tall, wavy blond hair to his shoulders? Navy blue down coat?”

Pam nodded and half smiled in the way that looked like she was laughing at some private joke. “You mean Xavier? Hasn’t come in yet.”

The woman tilted her head, the red pompon flopping to one side. What was it about that silly hat that forced Xavier to conjure images of tomatoes being diced to hell?