Vicente (3 page)

~~~

“So I left that night and never…I tried to never look back.” Vinnie turned to Yve when she didn’t say anything. She still sat on his cell phone, but she was wiping away tears on her face. He watched as she collected the small gems that were a result of her tears, and saw that she put them in the small bowl on his desk. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you before. But it’s been like an open wound to me, and gets deeper every time I think about it.”

“You have not explained to her what happened?” Vinnie shook his head. “You should tell her what her brother did to you. She should know that you still love her, and that she means a great deal to us both.”

“I can’t.” Vinnie moved back to his desk and moved his mouse to wake up his computer. “I’m really sort of busy now. Do you think you can go and find something else to do?”

He wasn’t sure she was going to leave him, but she finally did. He watched her fly out the window that he always left open for her and the others to come and go as they pleased. But his heart hurt just a little more because she was gone. He really and truly did love the little faerie; she’d been his savior in more ways than just the one she knew about.

The day that she’d found him, he’d been ready to end it all. He’d been sitting on the edge of the bridge trying to reason with his dragon that his heart was broken and there was no reason for him to go on living. The dragon was nearly convinced when the little faerie had landed on his knee.

“You are going to suicide yourself?” He just stared at her, not having a clue as to what the hell she was at the time. “You know that the dragon burning in you will not allow it.”

“It’s committing suicide by killing myself. And he has agreed that my heart is no longer beating for anyone but him. I’m going to jump.” She flew to look into his face, and he could see the fire in her eyes. “You’re a dragon?”

“Nay. I am not. But you have brought one out of me.” He didn’t understand her. “I am a faerie, but until this moment I thought me to be a flower one. I am your faerie. Your dragon has called to me.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t have time for this.” He edged himself closer to the plunge off. “I’d very much like it if you were to go away. I don’t need a witness.”

“If you suicide yourself, then I must as well.” He stopped just as he stood up to go when she continued. “I am your dragon faerie. If you die, then so must I. If I cannot protect him or you, then I must die with you.”

“You lie.” She shook her head and flew just to his right. She stared down at the water as he had only moments ago. “Go away.”

“I cannot. And you know this.” He felt his dragon stir at her words. “Ask him. He will know me for what I am to you both. Ask him. Then if I am not what I say I am to you, then we will suicide together.”

Vinnie was staring at the black screen of his computer when Hawk came into the room interrupting his thoughts. The man could move like the wind in the air, but moved around on his feet like he weighted nine hundred pounds. When he flopped down in the chair across from him, Vinnie leaned back in his chair. It wasn’t like he was doing anything anyway, and he couldn’t listen to his own thoughts any longer, as they were sour to begin with.

“Did you know that there is an antique shop on Linden Avenue?” Vinnie said that he didn’t. “Well, there is, and you know what they’re doing? Ruining wooden furniture by painting it with these god-awful flowers on them. They said it was art. It is not art; it’s the ruination of lovely antiques. I don’t even know how they can call themselves an antique shop when all they do is ruin their merchandise.”

“What did it say to you? The furniture? What did it say to you when you asked it how it liked what was happening to it?” Hawk glared and Vinnie laughed. “It told you to back off, didn’t it?”

“She said she was fine with the new look, that no one had sat in her for years. She said that whatever they were doing to her, it had humans looking at her again. She told me in no uncertain terms I was to leave her be.” Vinnie laughed. “It’s not the least bit funny. It was ugly.”

“Not to her.” He laughed again. “I didn’t know that furniture actually spoke to you. How the hell did that happen?”

“That damned Clar. She did it to me. Touched me, and now all kinds of shit isn’t the same. Did you know that she and Stephen can talk to ghosts? Have entire conversations with them while anyone is standing around? Just the other day she brought me into this heated discussion about the way a computer works and why. How the hell am I supposed to tell a ghost how to use an Internet search when they can’t even get the concept that it’s wireless?” He got up to pace and Vinnie had to cover his mouth. When Hawk was on a roll like this, there was no stopping him until he got it all out. “Then she tells me she’d amped me up. Amped me up like I’m a light bulb she’s switched out for a bigger wattage. What’s the first thing I notice? I can fucking talk to furniture.”

“You mean there’s more? Never mind. Don’t answer that. I’m sure I don’t want to know. Is that something you don’t want to do? Talk to furniture?” Hawk glared and Vinnie laughed harder. “I’m not sure what to tell you, buddy. But I do have a question for you. Is my desk pissed off at me for bumping it with the chair all the time?”

Hawk lunged at him and knocked several things off the desk as he grabbed him around the throat. Vinnie might not have broken his chair, his favorite chair, had he not been laughing so hard. When they both hit the floor, Hawk on top of him, it was all Vinnie could do not to beg him to let him go so he could breathe. It wasn’t his weight that was taking it away, but his inability to catch his breath from laughing. When Hawk was suddenly torn from his chest, it took Vinnie a few seconds to realize he’d not gotten up on his own.

“Don’t!” Yve was drawing back to no doubt hit his friend with her ball of magic when he yelled. She held him pinned to the wall, but she didn’t hurt him. Vinnie had to hand it to his friend. He never fought against her magic. They both knew that fighting a faerie’s magic was akin to signing your death warrant. “It’s my fault. I was the one who pissed him off.”

“He should not harm you.” Vinnie started to laugh but held off as best he could. “You think this humorous, my lord? He could have hurt you seriously. His anger was very feelable.”

“It’s palatable, and no, he wouldn’t have. And as I said, it was my fault.” Vinnie got up and looked at his chair. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Hawk if it was crying, but one look at the other man had him thinking they’d both live longer if he didn’t. “Let him go, please. We have things to discuss. He’s upset that Clar gave him more of her magic and that furniture now talks to him.”

“Everyone should be so lucky to talk to furniture. If more could, there would be less waste in the world. He will say he is sorry.” Yve drew back her magic. “I was disturbed greatly and my heart will not be the same.”

“I’m sorry for disturbing you. But not for knocking him on his ass.” Hawk flushed when Yve cleared her throat. “He is my friend and I wouldn’t have killed him. I want to hurt him, but I won’t kill him. No matter how pissed I get.”

“I suppose that is all I should expect from you. You have always had a bad temper. I will be most happy when you have found your mate so that she will chill your heels.” She left them in a flurry of wings and temper, and Hawk looked at him.

“Chill my heels? Where the hell does she come up with this crap?” Vinnie shrugged and sat on the couch where Hawk sat. “I’m sorry to have upset her. But you pissed me off.”

“I think you knew I would when you came here.” Hawk nodded, then leaned back. “Why are you here? It’s not because of the furniture, is it? I’m sure that they can be reasoned with about it.”

“No. I bought the place.” Vinnie was stunned. Hawk held onto his money tighter than Vinnie did. “I know what you’re thinking. The stuff is going to be screaming at me all the time. But when I walked into the place I felt…well, I felt calmed by it. I’m going to make it my home. I’m going to keep most of the larger pieces and turn the house back into a residence. I’d like for you to help me renovate it. But I should warn you, it’s huge, bigger than this place. And there are parts of it that haven’t been opened for years and years.”

“I’d love to.” And he meant it. If Vinnie was honest with himself, he was bored; out of his ever loving mind bored. And this project would keep his mind off of Abbie. When Hawk pulled out his phone and showed him the pictures, Vinnie was writing down his ideas. This was going to be just what he needed.

When his phone rang, he almost let it go to voicemail but answered it at the last minute.

“It’s her boss.” It took Vinnie a couple of seconds to think what Clar was talking about. “And she’s remembered, too. Get your ass here now.”

Vinnie put down the phone and sat there for several seconds. He looked at Hawk when he asked him what was going on. “Abbie is in trouble. I have to go.”

“I’m coming with you.” Vinnie nodded and they both left together. He was almost afraid to ask Yve to come as well, but when he put on his seatbelt, she flew into his pocket. Vinnie gave her a gentle pat and smiled. He knew this was going to be bad and was glad for her coming with him.

Chapter 3

Abbie watched the woman pace. She had no idea what she was so upset about. Everything that had happened was about Abbie, not this woman. When she stopped and looked at her, Abbie felt like a butterfly pinned to a board.

“You and Vinnie, what are you going to do about this history between the two of you?” Abbie felt her body heat up, but before she could snap at her to shut the fuck up, a bird flew into the room. Abbie was in the process of swatting at the thing when Clar grabbed her arm and held her. “Don’t touch her,” Clar said, and Abbie watched in horror as the bird landed on her leg. Only it wasn’t a bird at all, but a person. A little tiny person.

“Hello. It is a good thing to have friends, is it not? You would have harmed my wings had you hit me. It takes a lot of time for them to heal. I thank you for not having very good aim.” Abbie stared at the…person?

“Are you…are you a…what the hell are you?” She looked at Clar. “I’m seeing things, right? Please tell me I am and I’ll do whatever you want.”

“She’s real. Her name is Yve. She lives with Vinnie.” Abbie looked at the little person and tried to think how the hell that worked. “Not that kind of living with him. She’s his…I’m not sure what you’d call what she is to him. But they have a mutual interest in his magic.”

“Magic?” Abbie couldn’t help herself. She reached out and poked at the little being and laughed when she fell on her ass. “I’m sorry. Whatever the drugs are that they’ve been giving me are amazing. I could make a fortune on them if I could get ahold of a lot of it, don’t you think?”

“You are very odd, are you not?” Abbie laughed again and nodded at Yve. “My lord has told me that you and he were to marry a time ago. I am sorry that it did not come to pass. He is a good man. You would do well to keep him close to us. We can help each other.”

“He’s an asshole.” She put her hand over her mouth and looked at the little being. “I’m sorry. I know you must like him and all, but he just…he…. Let’s just say I don’t like him overly much.”

“I would say that’s an understatement.” She looked up at Vicente when he spoke. She hadn’t even heard him come in. He looked at Clar, who was smiling at her. She was very odd too, Abbie thought. “I came as soon as you contacted me. What’s going on?”

“She knows who the men are that took her.” Abbie looked at Clar and frowned. How the hell had she figured that out? “I can read your mind. As well as a great many things. And you should also know that you’re dead wrong in thinking that you’ll be able to get on with your life by avoiding them. They have done this before. You’re the only one that got away.”

“I’m not concerned about what they’ve done before. And if you can really read my mind, you can also see that while I’m not okay with what they did, I don’t have what it takes to bring them to justice. I’m nothing, comparatively speaking, and I’d just as soon stay out of it.” She looked at Yve, then at Vinnie. “Take your girlfriend and get out. I told you before that I don’t want you around me.”

“No.” She watched, shocked, when he sat down in the room’s only chair and crossed his arms over his chest. Yve got up off her bed and landed on his shoulder. For some reason that made the little person seem more real to her, and she felt a burble of hysterical laughter erupt from her mouth. “Are you losing it?”

She nodded. She was most assuredly losing it, all right. When he stood up she wanted to reach for him, but he stayed just far enough away that she couldn’t. Abbie wondered again, even after all this time, what she’d done to make him no longer want her.

“I should go.” Clar picked up her bag and put it over her shoulder. She looked at her before she moved to the door. “Things are not what you think they are. You should tell him how you feel. And Vinnie, you should most definitely tell her how you feel.”

Vicente sat staring at her after Clar left them. There was no way she was going to spill her heart out to the one person in the world that could hurt her again. She looked away when he stepped closer to the bed. And damn it, he looked better than he had all those years ago.

“Do you have any questions?” She looked at him, thinking he was off his rocker. “I mean about Yve and Clar. It’s a lot to take in, and they can be a little pushy when they want.” The little person pinched his earlobe and Abbie felt the laughter bubble up again. She was going to need a strait jacket before she left here, she was sure.

“She is a pixie, right?” Vicente shook his head, and Yve moved from his shoulder to her lap again. This time Abbie put out her finger and she flew up and landed on it.

“I am a faerie. A dragon faerie. We are very happy you are not dead. It was frightening for a while. I did not think you to be so strong, but his lordship said you were too stubborn to let someone harm you in that way.” Abbie nodded, then shook her head. “I am not like a dragon fly, though it is thought that we are of the same breed. I am a faerie that cares for dragons.”

“And you care for a lot of them, do you?” Yve shook her head and told her only one. “And where do you keep your dragon? In your pocket? Let me guess, you have her in your magical bag of tricks.”

“I have no such bag. It would be nice at times to have one of my own. A bag, I mean. I have seen women pull out all sorts of things from them. My tricks? I do not understand that term. Do you mean magic?” Abbie felt her hysteria rise a few more notches when Yve walked up her finger to the cast on her arm. “I would not be able to live without him, or him without me. We are matched.”

“He? And what do you mean, matched? You think you’re a dragon too?” Abbie laughed, and even to her own ears it sounded manic. “Where is your dragon?”

“It’s me. She’s talking about me. I’m her dragon.” She looked at Vicente when he spoke. There was such seriousness in his voice that she wanted to call a doctor to have him sedated. “And I’m not your traditional dragon either. I’m a fae dragon. That means I can shape-shift into a small one or a larger one, depending on—”

“Why are you doing this?” He sat down and she felt her eyes fill with tears. “I’m not believing this, and why should I? There is no such thing as dragons or faeries. And that woman cannot read my mind.”

Vicente nodded and leaned back in his chair. “All right then, let me tell you what Clar told me as I came here. She said that your boss and two other men kidnapped you from the parking garage. They drugged you, or so you thought. And when you’d decided to go home for the day, feeling like shit, they met you in the garage and threw you in a van.” He asked her if that was true so far.

“It is. But how did you know this? The cameras in the garage don’t work. I’ve asked them to replace them, but they said it was too costly.” She shook her head and looked at the faerie on her arm. “I’m not talking to a dragon, and I’m not looking at a little person. I’m still in that hell hole and I’m nearly dead. Tell me that’s what is going on.” She looked at him when he didn’t agree with her.

He only stared at her, and she felt her mind start to feel like it was shutting down. Her heart started pounding, and she felt sort of sick to her stomach. When he suddenly stood up and pulled her to him, all the pain in the world could not have made her let him go. Abbie started sobbing the moment he pulled her head to his chest.

“They said it was standard policy. He said that all the women in his employment had to go through with their initiation. But that’s not true. They hunted me like I was an animal. He said that a man like him needed extra to get by in the world and that I, along with the others, was there to give it to him. He stripped me down and told me to run.” Vicente shifted on the bed but didn’t let her go. She’d never been so grateful for his strong arms in her life. “There were others with me when I was taken there. They wouldn’t talk to me at first, but I kept at it until one of them told me that they’d kill me if I didn’t shut up. And I didn’t, of course.”

His small laugh had her looking up at him. “You never were one to follow the leader, were you? I’ve never met a woman who could quote rules and regulations like you do, yet have a natural ability to get yourself in trouble when you go off on your own. Do you remember if any of the other women told you their names?”

“They didn’t; they wouldn’t tell me because they were afraid. But the men…. Vicente, they shot me. They beat me, then shot me. He told me they were going to kill me because they thought it was fun.” Yve landed on her hand that was wrapped around Vicente’s arm. She started to pull away but was afraid of hurting her. “You’re real, aren’t you?”

“I am, my lady.” Abbie felt her entire world close around her. As she started to let the darkness take her from this, she thought she heard Vicente shout her name. It was all right, she wanted to tell him. She was better off out of it than the state she was currently in.

~~~

Woodrow Henson waited for the punch line. He’d asked for it, twice now, wanting what he’d just heard to be a joke, but Leonard Dillard just stared at him. There had to be something he wasn’t telling him, because there was no fucking way that what he had just told them was true. Looking over at his best friend Nolan Black, he thought he was under the same impression he was. This was a joke.

“I’m not kidding. She’s in the hospital right now. When I called the hospital to see if she’d turned up there, they told me she was awake now.” Leonard continued as if this wasn’t the worst news in the fucking world. “Her memory is shot to hell and she—”

“Thank fucking God for that.” Woodrow looked at both men as they sat there. “Don’t you think so too? I mean, she knows us. All of us, and will tell them what the hell happened to her. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d just as soon not end up in prison for attempted murder. Or for that matter, murder at all. They frown on that in this state.”

“Don’t be such a pussy, Woodrow. And let him finish what he was saying. Her memory is all screwed up, right? I told you when you hit her in the head it was too hard. Now you can see that I was right.” Leonard smiled at Nolan as if he was proud. Woodrow thought maybe he was. This entire thing was getting out of control. He stood up to get out while the getting was good.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Woodrow looked at Leonard when he snapped. “Sit the hell down. We have to figure out a way to make it so she fucking never remembers what happened, ever again. Not that I think it will go any further than the cop she calls. So long as it’s one of ours. We’ll just have to make sure that they’re on their toes about this. It pays to have people in the right places. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“You think that a few bucks is going to make her shut up? Or that one of the cops we have in our pocket isn’t going to see the bigger picture in this shit and turn us in anyway?” Leonard started to nod, and Woodrow cut him off. “Mother fuck, this is out of control. I knew it was going to come back and bite us in the ass. The reason we took her in the first place was because of the trouble she was causing. She just couldn’t keep her fucking mouth shut on things she felt were wrong. Last month alone she cost us well over ten million in fines because of our unfair hiring practices. And then we were told we couldn’t fire her. This is going to fucking bite us in the ass.”

“No, it won’t. Just sit down and take a breath. I have a plan, one that is going to save our asses and make sure that our little bitch is out of the picture permanently.”

Woodrow was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear Leonard’s plan. It was bad enough that he’d gone hunting with them the first time, but now he was stuck. Of course it was fun, a great deal of fun. Especially when the women were athletic like Abbie was. But she’d gotten away, something that had never happened before since they’d started doing this four years ago.

“We have to finish her.” Woodrow wanted to point out that they no longer had her, but Nolan continued. “I know a few people that work at the hospital that might be able to get close enough to her to take her out. We’ll just have them slip her something in her IV and she’ll have this tragic death. It’ll be over in no time.”

“She might have already talked.” Woodrow would count on that. “For all we know, at any minute the police could come in here and arrest us. And if they find out where we have the others, then we’re fucked. The women that are still there alone will give us the death penalty, but if they find the bodies, there will not be anywhere for us to be holed up where they won’t try and kill us.”

“None of the women know who we are. As far as they know, we are some perverts that are having a bit of fun at their expense. We’ve made plans in the event this happened. I told you when this started that using that property that the bank seized will keep others from figuring out it’s us. As far as anyone is concerned, it’s just an empty lot with a few hundred trees around it.” Leonard laughed. “We have nothing to worry about on that score. We never leave anything behind and there is nothing there that will trace it back to us. Hell, that’s why we never have sex with them. No prints or DNA.”

Woodrow thought of the fantastic sex he had when they were done with a hunt. His wife called him an animal, of course, so he’d taken to going to whores. They didn’t care what you did to them so long as the money was good. He thought maybe he’d go find himself one tonight after this meeting. He was thinking of Abbie a little too much lately, and he was aching to unload his anger on some bitch that liked it to hurt as much as he liked to hurt them.

“What kind of drugs does she have an allergy to?” Leonard waited while he pulled up Abigale’s record. “And if she doesn’t have one yet, we’ll give her one. Maybe one of the nurses you know there can see what we need and we can get it to her.”