The Lady in Pink - Deadly Ever After 2 (11 page)

C
hristine Quick was currently a resident of Shady Wings Nursing Home, which was bad enough given the name of the place, but she also suffered from severe dementia, at least according to Alice, whose information was usually right.

That spark of hope I’d had when Alice had declared Christine alive started to wither and then finally died altogether when I caught a flash of wing out of the corner of my eye. Damn. I’d planned to keep Izzy as far away from my past as possible. The less she knew about my early years, the better. I pictured the smoldering remains of the orphanage and swallowed hard. One thing was for sure: No matter what I said, Izzy would meddle. It was her nature, and I’d accepted it, for the most part.

But not this time.

I thanked Alice and stalked off to find my eavesdropping fairy. I located her about ten feet from her office. “Isabella,” I said in greeting.

“Oh, Blue,” she said with an innocent smile as she spun to face me, her eyes wide with affected virtuousness, “you scared me half to death.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her smile grew wider until it looked like her face might crack. “Was there something you needed?”

I snorted at the loaded question. “How about a partner who doesn’t listen in on private conversations?”

“What?’ With an indignant gasp she straightened to her full five-foot-three height. “I would never . . .”

“Right,” I said with a shake of my head, ignoring her obvious attempts to gain the upper hand. “Then you didn’t hear me ask Alice to do the humpty-dumpty right there on her desk?”

She rolled her eyes. “Do I look stupid enough to fall for that pathetic attempt to get me to admit I was eavesdropping? Frankly I’m embarrassed for you.”

I let out a loud bark of laughter. The bitchy receptionist glanced up from her manicure with disgust. I disregarded her, focusing instead on my partner. “So you admit nothing?”

She shrugged, her wings rising and falling with guiltlessness. “How about this? I’ll admit to listening in on your not-so-private conversation if you take me with you to talk to Christine Quick. It’s really a win-win for both of us.”

“No.”

“Come on, Blue. This is important to you.”

“Yes,” I said. “
To me
. Not to a nosy fairy with a business to run. Think of what would happen if you weren’t around to keep us afloat. Our employees count on you for direction. I count on you.”

She sighed. “True.”

“All right, then.” I smiled. “I’ll call you if anything comes up.”

She tucked her arms under her breasts in an attempt to either distract or influence me. I wasn’t sure which. Not that it mattered in the least. I enjoyed the view nonetheless. “Then you’re excited to go into Fairyland for the second time in two days, this time to talk to an old woman with dementia who lives in a nursing home? A nursing home filled with old people who smell like death and mothballs? Not to mention, an entire winged staff who most likely want to see you run down by a passing pumpkin coach?” She looked down at her manicure, running her finger over each nail in a slow, deliberate manner. “Sounds like fun. I guess I’ll leave you to it.”

And as easy as that, I lost the argument and gained a nosy travel companion. I blew out a loud, annoyed sigh. “We leave in ten minutes. If you’re not downstairs and ready to go, I’m leaving without you.”

She laughed. “Yeah, right.”

 

Twenty minutes later I glared at my watch for the fourth time. Izzy was late, as usual, and I was waiting, as usual. I considered the ramifications of lighting up a cigarette and then thought better of it. Izzy and I were on thin ice as it was. Add in my lying to her about quitting—again—and I would never hear the end of it.

No sooner had I decided against lighting up than Izzy pushed through the glass-and-chrome front doors. The doorman tried to open them for her, but she was much quicker with her wings than she looked. When she pulled to a stop in front of me I motioned to my watch, a watch she’d bought me on our company’s one-month anniversary, saying something snarky about my work habits. Too bad for her the watch rarely kept the right time, probably a result of the electrical field around me. Though I still wore the watch every day, a silly reminder of what we’d accomplished so far.

“You said twenty minutes, right?” she asked with complete sincerity.

I shook my head and waved to a passing taxi.

It failed to stop.

I tried again.

Same result.

Eight tries later, Izzy stepped in front of me, pulled down her camisole a half an inch, and then waved one slender arm in the air. A yellow cab steered across three lanes of traffic, screeching to a stop at the curb in front of us, nearly causing a four-car pileup. Car horns blared in response, deafening me and everyone else in a block radius.

I rolled my eyes and motioned Izzy inside, and together, much against my better judgment, we set off to Fairyland to find Christine Quick. And fast.

T
he Shady Wings Nursing Home wasn’t in a shady part of town; it was in
the
shady part. Hard to imagine, since all of Fairyland was less than respectable. The building itself was redbrick, the sidewalk lined with drooping flowers and wilted residents. Not the most welcoming of sights. I worried about what condition we’d find Christine Quick in. Would she be lucid or a vegetable like her bathrobe-wearing compatriots? Considering my luck, she’d probably died ten minutes ago. I shook off the dire thought.

I held the door open for Izzy, motioning for her to enter. Not that I was a gentleman or thought Izzy was incapable of opening the door for herself. I was just stalling, bolstering up the courage to face whatever lay beyond the grey intuitional painted hallway. The secrets of my birth and subsequently my curse might be within reach for the first time in my life. For a moment I froze, and then Izzy touched my sleeve, and the thrall that held me vanished.

I was ready to meet my electric destiny.

“Can I help you?” a polite fairy with her hair tied back in a tight bun and thick-framed glasses asked, glancing up from behind a worn reception desk. The way she asked the question made me think visitors, winged and nonwinged alike, weren’t a regular occurrence at Shady Wings.

Izzy gave her a warm smile. “Hi, I’m—”

“Your Highness,” the fairy said, jumping to her tiny feet wrapped in black Mary Janes. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t recognize you at first . . .”

I rolled my eyes, tired of the bowing and scraping every time Izzy walked into Fairyland. But Izzy, gracious to a fault, took the receptionist’s hand in both of hers. “Please, call me Izzy.”

“Really?” the fairy gushed. “I . . . I can’t believe it’s you . . .”

“Enough,” I barked, causing a bolt of electrical current to shoot from my finger into the peeling linoleum floor. It peeled back and started to smoke. I quickly stepped on the smoldering pieces, my gaze never leaving the receptionist’s shocked face. “Christine Quick. What room is she in?”

Izzy glared at me when the receptionist jumped and then turned to face the younger fairy. “I apologize for my . . . friend. Old people make him nervous.”

I snorted. Fairies, not the elderly, bugged me. But I didn’t correct Izzy. Not that my saying a word would have an effect anyway. She was too busy being fawned over by the growing gang of winged groupies now circling us. Some wore white coats while others wore scrubs, and even a few wore only drooping adult diapers. Not a pleasant sight. “Izzy,” I said in warning.

She nodded. “We’re in a bit of a hurry, so if you don’t mind . . .”

The fairy receptionist jumped to attention. “Of course, Your Toothiness. Right this way.” She motioned down the corridor to another hallway, where a large steel door with a glass window stood. A locked door. One meant to keep the residents inside.

But it also kept strangers out.

And Izzy and I, a half fairy and a thug, were a hell of a lot stranger than most.

“Mrs. Quick is one of our secure residents. We can’t be too careful with the patients’ safety,” the fairy receptionist said by way of apology when we were stopped outside the locked door by an orderly who was as wide as he was tall. Not so hard to do when one was only three feet tall.

“You’ll need to sign in,” the orderly said to me in a gruff tone as he nodded to a metal clipboard in Izzy’s hands. She was already signing her name in a flowery script. I half expected her to dot her
i
’s with tiny winged hearts. When she finished she started to hand the clipboard to me, then must’ve thought better of it, for she signed my name too. I frowned, saddened by the fact that I wouldn’t be electrocuting the orderly with his own clipboard anytime soon.

Izzy sighed. “I can’t take you anywhere.”

“At least I’m consistent.”

She rolled her eyes, following the orderly through the now open door and down the hall. I walked slowly behind. An old man with lizard-like skin steered himself in my path, the wheels of his chair squeaking with each rotation. I stopped abruptly before I ran him over. He mumbled something I didn’t quite understand, which apparently annoyed him, for he smacked me in the knees with the cane in his lap.

“Ow,” I complained, rubbing away the stinging in my bones. “What the hell?”

He smiled, showing off his empty white gums. “Can’t trust the lot of them.”

“Who?”

Rather than answer, he started to cackle in a loud manner. The laugh quickly turned into a horrifying cough. Green stuff flew from his lips, splattering my boots. I winced but didn’t move away. Mostly because I feared he’d retaliate with a cane to my balls. Why give the geezer a better shot?

When the old guy’s face turned the same shade of blue as the hair on said balls, I yelled for a nurse. No one came. I yelled louder, wondering where Izzy and the orderly had disappeared to. My second bellow received the attention the old man needed, though. A woman dressed in a white lab coat, her hair as white as three-day-old snow, ran to the wheelchair and slapped the wrinkled geezer on the back with a loud thwack, dislodging a gruesome ball of old-man goo. The goo landed an inch from my boot with a wet splat. I swear I saw the damn thing twitch.

The old guy turned to glare at me, wagged his finger, and then wheeled away, no worse for wear. I couldn’t say the same. My knee still ached and I was pretty sure I now had TB or some other geezer disease. I wondered if Izzy would put me in a home.

Hopefully not this one.

“Thanks,” I said to the nurse, who stood staring at me as if I’d electrocuted her best friend. Her eyes, sort of a milky blue in color, widened.

“It’s you,” she said. “You’ve come.”

I frowned. “Excuse me?”

“I knew you’d come back. You and your pretty lady.”

“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, damn sure I’d remember if we had. It wasn’t too often in my line of work you met a woman as old as dirt. Dirtbags rarely lived that long. “You’re not a nurse, are you?” I tilted my head, staring at her for a long minute.

A wrinkle appeared between her brows on her already craggy forehead. “Am I?”

“I don’t know.”

The wrinkle disappeared and she smiled. “Have you seen my bedroom?”

Since I doubted she was hitting on me, I slowly shook my head. “Do you want me to?”

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

Not that I was aware of, but who was I to argue with crazy? Hell, crazy often gave me my best clues. I motioned her forward. “After you, ma’am.”

“Call me Christine.”

I
couldn’t believe my luck. Christine Connors Quick was standing right in front of me and appeared fairly lucid to boot. “Fairly” being a relative term. Maybe I would get some of the answers about my past after all. That thought stayed with me until we reached her room. Then my hopes faded once again. Post-it notes filled every surface of the room, decorating it like a fluorescent memory rainbow. Each sticky note offered some tiny reminder or memory. I pulled off the one on the door, which said, “The knob turns to the right.”

Damn.

I felt instantly guilty for my annoyance. Yeah, I might’ve lost a useful clue to who I was, but Christine Connors had lost much, much more. I licked my dry lips. “Ms. Connors,” I said to gain her attention, which was currently fixed on a yellow sticky note. She glanced up, her eyes seeming to focus for the briefest of seconds.

“You know who I am?” she asked in a small voice.

I nodded. “You were a nurse at the New Never City Hospital thirty years ago.”

“Yes.”

“There was a fire . . .”

She shook her head.

I nodded. “Yes, there was. In the maternity ward.”

She shook her head harder.

“The same night a baby was born.” I paused, my eyes conveying just how much I needed for her to remember. “I need to know what happened.”

Her own eyes grew misty, turning them even milkier. I shifted uncomfortably, but she didn’t seem to notice, too lost in her memories. “Babies often make a relationship stronger,” she said after a few moments of silence.

I nodded. Not that I had a clue about anything baby related. Thankfully, in my reckless youth, my little blue swimmers had never reached their intended destination. That I knew of. If I did have any little blue-haired kids out there, it was a shock to me, and probably a hell of one for the poor woman who had to push out a lightning rod from her vagina. “Do you remember the baby born that night?” I asked with hope. “Or the name of the couple, by any chance?”

“They loved each other more than most. Like soul mates,” she said, a small smile on her face. “You could see it in their eyes.”

My own eyes filled with moisture, which I quickly blinked away. Mostly for fear I’d electrocute myself. I’d always thought my parents, whoever they were, had left me on the steps of the orphanage because they hadn’t been in love. That I’d been a mistake. A horrible, terrible monster made by two consenting adults. If what she said was true, my parents had abandoned me for a far different issue.

An electrical issue.

A part of me wanted to stop Christine from revealing anything more. To keep my illusions. It would be easier that way. Never knowing the truth. What was the point anyway? I would never be rid of whatever conductivity curse I possessed. This was my lot in life, I told myself. So I couldn’t ever truly touch or be touched. Other people had it worse. I glanced at Christine and her mass of Post-it notes. A lot worse.

“Smith,” she said.

I frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Their names—Mr. and Mrs. Smith. At least that’s what they put on the birth certificate.” She stopped, biting her bottom lip. “But we didn’t believe them. Not really.”

Damn. Another dead end. And worse, it wasn’t even an original alias. No imagination, which made sense since they couldn’t even leave me at a temple or, better yet, a distillery. Then again, maybe it wasn’t a total loss. “Do you remember the fire? How it started?” Or better yet, who had started it?

“They loved each other more than most,” she repeated. “She was so beautiful with her bright, shimmering golden hair and jade eyes. Mr. Smith was quite the looker too. All the nurses thought so. Those eyes ... the color of the deep sea.”

“The fire,” I prompted when I couldn’t stand to hear another word about the people who had tossed me away. “How did it start?”

She shook her head. “Fire? I don’t remember a fire. Did I leave the iron on again? Some days I can’t seem to remember anything . . .”

“No.” I took a step toward her, my body vibrating with the need for her to remember. I took a deep, calming breath before I accidently fried the one person who might know something about that night other than the two people who’d abandoned me. “The fire at the hospital. The Smiths had a baby and there was a fire.”

Her face lifted and the years slipped away, showing off the beauty she once was before disease had stolen her mind and age ruined her body. “The baby. A baby boy.”

I nodded, my throat tight. So tight I could barely push words past it. “Do you remember his name?”

“Who?”

Frustration turned my voice hoarse. “The baby’s. The blue-haired baby. What was his name?”

“His name ... It was ... something odd ... started with a . . .”

“What? What did it start with?” I’d never been this close to my past, to knowing who I was and where I’d come from. I was at once terrified and elated by the possibilities. “What was my name?”

“Blue,” Izzy said from the doorway.

My head swiveled her way.

“Yes. Yes, that’s it,” Christine said.