A.K.A. Goddess (22 page)

He moved one shoulder, as if to say, same thing.

It wasn’t. “You didn’t think bugging my home was cheating?”

“That depends on which game we’re playing, Magdalene.”

“I guess I never wanted to play games as much as you did.” I turned to walk out. Pain waited outside the suite’s door. I knew that. A life more without Lex than I’d ever imagined, because it was a life in which the Lex I’d loved had been erased. He’d become an illusion.

He followed me to the door. “Mag, if I could explain I would. Don’t you think I’ve wanted to? I’ve lost count of how many times I wished I could tell you, tell my best friend what’s going on. I’ve hated having this between us.”

Part of me wanted to wheel on him and scream, Having what between us? You’re the only one who knows for sure, because you’re the one who put it there. YOU DID THIS TO US!

The fact that I wouldn’t accept it didn’t make it my fault.

I didn’t dare open my mouth, or I would probably have started screaming and not stopped—and it would be completely my own scream, not Melusine’s. My own anguish. My own loss.

I gripped the porcelain doorknob, turned it and walked into my future without him.

“You know me,” he insisted, following. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

Now I spun on him and shouted, “So what’s this?”

“I’m sorry,” Lex whispered. Honestly, I think. Despite everything, I felt the old connection. I sensed the depth of his regret—and it didn’t do anything for either one of us.

I jabbed the button for the elevator. “So am I.”

Then, as long as it was taking its time, I turned back to him to set some ground rules. “Do not follow me. Do not call me. Do not have anyone spy on me. Understood?”

“I’ve been watching out for you,” Lex countered. “You’re the one who won’t be careful. If you just stayed home, minded your own business—or cut me in on it—I wouldn’t have had to spy on you.”

I stared at him for so long that I heard the elevator arrive behind me, heard it slide open.

“I guess I just like to invite trouble,” I hissed, and turned and stepped in.

I made it as far as the street, vaguely aware of the concièrge bidding me a polite good evening, before the pain hit me. I’d known it would, from other breakups. I felt sick. I felt dizzy. I felt suffocated. As if with every step, pieces of me were dying miserable deaths in light of this new truth.

Every time I’d ever hoped Lex and I would someday end up together—dead. Every memory of our happiness, our rightness, our bond—decimated. Almost every time I’d made love—ruined.

I somehow managed to point myself toward the nearest Metro station, somehow managed to keep my feet moving despite the dress heels. The Hotel Valmont, not far from the Basilica Sacré Coeur, was several blocks away from the nearest stop, probably because residents of the Hotel Valmont rarely took public transit. But I didn’t want a cab. Cabbies keep records.

After timeless walking I reached the Metropolitain station entrance. This deep in Montmartre, it was marked by an art-nouveau arch bearing its full name in a curving, Toulouse-Lautrec font. No simple, circled M for us tourists.

Normally I love the Metro’s street performers, long escalator rides down to the platforms, tubular architecture and clean, European lines. Almost everything inside the tunnels was tiled white, with bright-red benches and ten-foot-square advertising posters hugging the curve of the walls. Tonight I could barely see, could barely hear. I just wanted to get somewhere private.

Other things mattered more than Lex Stuart. The Melusine Chalice, safe in the backpack on my shoulder. Aunt Bridge’s arrangements for its surprise exhibition.

If only I could glue enough shattered pieces of my world together to care. I looked down the tunnel, impatient to be home—and damned if my throat didn’t start to hurt. Again.

If this was another scream coming on, I didn’t want it. If I started screaming now, I might batter everything around me into little, ugly pieces. The grail. Myself.

Everything.

“Your timing,” I now muttered, either to my sore throat or maybe to my stupid, broken heart, “sucks.”

But my throat thickened and tightened anyway, beyond even the misery of my aching heart. Like last night, as the Comitatus arrived. Like this afternoon in the bathtub, as I found out that Lex had bugged my apartment. Timing.

Finally, stupidly, I thought to look around me. To really look around me. I’d told Lex not to follow me, but would that matter to him? This being summer, the subway platform held an eclectic crowd. Families. College students. School groups. Senior citizens. Couples out on dates, just as I’d hoped to be.

And businessmen, with a few suit-clad women among them. Some read copies of Metropole Paris or Le Monde. Some glanced at their watches. One frowned at his Palm Pilot.

Several grinned flirtatious hellos at me.

And one, standing by the bottom of the escalator, was watching me. He was a big man, with surprisingly blond hair and a mustache. His nose had been taped, and both eyes were swollen purple, and he could have been an extra in any war movie. I knew him from the Tour Melusine in Vouvant—and his driver’s license.

Had I thought I hated the Comitatus before?

This was not a night for retreats. I headed back down the platform, toward him. He stood still for my approach. He even seemed to be checking me out.

I stopped far enough back from him to be out of immediate reach, increasingly conscious of the chalice’s weight slung over my shoulder. “René de Montfort, I presume?”

“Dr. Sanger,” said the man who’d killed his partner, the one I’d knocked unconscious and had gotten arrested. He’d been released pretty damned quick. Just how powerful was this group?

I smiled and asked, “How’s your head?”

He asked, “How’s your friend?”

Crap. Rhys. I still hadn’t checked on Rhys.

I almost wished this son of a bitch would try something that would justify the infliction of major, spike-heeled pain.

Either that, or I needed a more elastic moral code.

“What do you want?” I asked, since he was the one following me. I could feel a faint breeze on the back of my neck, the first sign of a train approaching through the tunnels.

“Just to watch,” he said, his smile widening.

Hands caught me from behind, too many. Before I could react, they hurled me off the edge of the platform and onto the tracks. I landed, hard, on my shoulder. Then I rolled to my feet, backpack in hand, amid cries of concern—

Just in time to see the train hurtling at me.

Once Lex and I take our relationship to a sexual level, it’s an addiction. He’s attending Yale, and I have a scholarship to Bryn Mawr. Different states. But we still get together at least twice a month.

Usually we stay in the city, at his father’s Fifth Avenue town house. It’s a four-story mansion with an elevator, a garden, and an honest-to-God rotunda. We put in appearances at museums, restaurants and art galleries. We jog in the park. But mostly we get naked with each other to exercise in a far more intimate manner.

“Do you ever feel like you’re leading two lives?” I ask him one morning, my limbs useless, my head pillowed on his chest to ride his breath.

I’m surprised to feel him tense at my question. I’d thought he was as washed-out as me. “What do you mean?”

“There’s my life with you,” I say, “which is incredible.”

“Mutual,” he assures me happily, fingering my hair.

“And then there’s my life at school. Studying, and grades, and…plans. Do you ever wish we went to the same school?”

It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to asking if he wants me to transfer or, even less likely, if he’ll transfer himself. Do I want to hear the answer? I’m not sure I can respect him if he leaves Yale for me…and I love Bryn Mawr.

Just not as much as I love him.

I would hate to have to choose between them.

I’m still surprised when he says, “No.”

“Not at all?”

He has relaxed, again. “If we went to the same school, I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything but you. Ever.”

Now that’s better. Except…

“So what is it that requires so much focus, Mr. Stuart?”

“Someday, I hope to tell you.”

I like this uncharacteristic playfulness. “Can I assume you’re going to accomplish big things?”

Lex’s gaze holds mine. “Huge things,” he promises. “Epic.”

“With an executive MBA?” I laugh.

“Once the church held all the power, Maggi. Then the royalty. Then the intellectuals. Now it’s the businessmen.”

“What a scary thought.”

But he sits up in bed, which rolls me partly off him, and leans closer with his intensity. “How about it, Maggi? Would you be willing to help me do something epic?”

I momentarily wonder if it’s all play, after all. “As long as you use your powers for good…I could be convinced.”

Instead of making any promises, he kisses me…one of his better kisses. Full of promise. Excitement. And yeah—power.

His lovemaking almost wipes the conversation from my mind.

Almost.

T he train’s one huge, halogen eye expanded to encompass my whole world. I sure screamed this time. And with the scream came focus. Power.

I hurled myself over the third rail, the electric one, and onto the opposite track.

The rush and roar of the train hurtled past me, a blur of lights and cars—but I didn’t have time to feel relief. Instead, on the second set of tracks, I felt vibration beneath my feet and a familiar rush of wind from the opposite direction. Crap.

The screams of onlookers mixed with the screech of a train whistle as a second headlight caught my dilemma.

Opposite platform? Too high. Too slow.

Between the tracks? Mere inches in clearance.

No alcoves. No wall to press against. No more time.

I spun for the platform that I would never manage to climb, even with a few brave people reaching desperate hands toward me. Instead, I dove, rolled myself beneath it and slung the chalice over my head, safely against the concrete wall—

Dust and cinders hit my eyes, my face. Then the heavy wind, more debris. Heat. I squinted my eyes, but couldn’t close them. With death so close, every second became precious for no more than being alive.

I didn’t mean to die with my eyes closed.

Metal wheels on metal tracks shot sparks at me, a blur of movement inches in front of my face. I tried to flatten myself farther backward, to be absorbed by solid concrete, sure that at any moment I would be caught, dragged, crushed…

But the wheels continued, slowing.

Amidst all the screaming—the crowd’s, and the train’s, and maybe my own—the wheels slowed. The train stopped. And I was still lying there, stretched as long and thin as possible, squeezed between platform base and subway car.

I’ve never been so glad to be a B-cup.

Above me, muffled, I heard chaos—people shouting out what had happened and calling for help, the warning beeps of the other train readying to leave the platform, someone sobbing to have witnessed such a thing. And before me—

I could see under my train—so much weight and metal and size, I’d never imagined—to the other track, where the first train was slowly pulling out.

Still on instinct, I crawled on my knees and elbows, pushing the backpack ahead of me. I tried not to imagine more beeps, not to imagine this train moving out while I was beneath it. I slithered out the other side and dove over the third rail, to surprised cheers from the first platform.

Rolling to my feet, I ran in that direction, to the crowd where I’d started. A surprising number of bystanders, more concerned with a stranger’s safety than their schedules, waited and reached for me. I reached back, and a group of skinny soccer players, still in their jerseys, lifted me to safety.

Suddenly I was being hugged and kissed by all of them. They were, after all, European.

“The men who attacked me,” I called in French, too grateful to be alive to push anyone away. “Where did they go?”

Several people pointed at the escalator. From down the track, a police officer with a powerful flashlight circled the back of the second train. In a moment, he would see—or hear—that I wasn’t caught under the wheels.

I didn’t want the attention.

So I bolted for the escalators. One of my heels had broken—go figure—so as soon as I was gliding upward, I stood on one foot, then the other, in order to slip off my sandals. I tossed them toward the soccer players, who were still savoring their moment of heroism. “Merci!”

They caught and held up the shoes like trophies.

Then I ran up the moving stairs, as fast as I could.

Of course de Montfort and his friends were long gone when I reached the street level. Long gone…or secreted away and watching me. I stood there under the arched Metropolitain sign, looking through the crowds of Montmartre, and came to several quick conclusions.

One—either they didn’t know I had the grail, or they wanted it demolished in a subway tragedy.

Two—Lex had played some part in this. Maybe he’d not only rescinded his “protection” but pointed me out. Or maybe de Montfort and his hench-jerks had just been watching his hotel.

And three—I had to find out what had happened to Rhys. Now.

Well, as soon as I reached some less conspicuous place.

Call me crazy, but my love of the Metro had diminished. I still didn’t want to go on record with a cab. Most of the buses driving by were for tours, not something I could just hop onto. And I was barefoot.

So I ran for the closest intersection where, amidst a tangle of traffic, a vaguely Asian girl with orange hair and multiple piercings straddled a Vespa, waiting for the light to change. She startled when I caught her handlebars. But when she saw my hair and clothes and shredded stockings, her expression turned to concern.

“‘Circle to circle,’” I said, breathless, in French.

She said, “Huh?”

Oh, well. It had been worth a try. “I’ve been attacked, and I don’t want to go to the police. Can I have a ride?”

She said, “Climb on.”

I did, the light changed, and we buzzed away, easy as that.

That’s when I started shaking.