The Bliss Factor (8 page)

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go by yourself.”

“I’ll avoid the people who know me, and I don’t need to ask questions, so they won’t know I’m looking for something. I’ll be perfectly safe.” As long as she could avoid her parents, too.

ESPIONAGE DEFINITELY WASN’T FOR HER, RAE
decided, fighting the almost constant urge to look over her shoulder. She felt like she was being watched, which was ridiculous since the bad guys were carless, her parents were manning their shop, and she was careful to steer clear of any re-enactors who might remember her.

She opened the map, found the closest circled booth, and headed for it, clamping down on the little surge of excitement—and dread—that made her heart pound. She wasn’t in danger, she reminded herself. It was probably just a misunderstanding between Larkin and someone in his group. And yeah, hitting him over the head was a bit extreme. So was the gun, but some of these people were a turkey leg short of a feast, and he wasn’t the kind of guy you took on face-to-face. She could even understand how one of these kooks might think it took a gun to put a good scare into him.

All she had to do was discover who’d sent the clowns in the Honda, figure out what their beef was, and get them to talk it through. Child’s play, right? Except she’d lived with a group of these people the first eighteen years of her life. They were a hell of a lot harder to handle than children. But if there was even a remote chance of solving this thing and getting Larkin off her hands, she had to take the shot.

She kept her eyes open, making sure she didn’t run into anyone who knew her. She checked behind her at fairly regular intervals to quiet the buzz between her shoulder blades. Since she failed to spot anyone threatening, she wrote it off to the general feeling of menace that had dogged her since the guys in the Honda had used her car for target practice.

The first circled booth she came to was called Earth Enchanted, proprietor Onyx Chalcedony. Yeah, slight possibility that wasn’t her real name.

Rae wandered the booth, sifting her fingers through the bins of semi-precious stones, looking at the mystical and Celtic symbols strung on chains as pendants or fixed to hoops for earrings. She worked her way around the small enclosure, moving steadily toward the back room.

“Can I help you?”

“Jeez.” Rae jumped, slapping a hand over her heart as she spun around.

A small woman wearing a deep red wench dress stood close behind her, eyes darting around so quickly they looked like screen-saver balls bouncing off the sides of her eye sockets.

“I’m just browsing,” Rae said, turning to look at the next section of goods.

Onyx jumped in front of her. The dozens of stones at her wrists, neck, waist, and ears rattled, and her fingers worried at the cords twisted around her neck. “The designs are mystical,” she said of the silver pendants on the counter in front of Rae. “I create them right here in my shop—” She lowered her voice. “—according to ancient Celtic rituals that imbue them with special protective powers. Are you from the police?”

She ought to be more worried about the men in the white coats, Rae thought.

“The Secret Service? The IRS?”

“I’m from Grosse Pointe.”

“You look like an accountant.”

Rae looked down at herself. She had a point. “Maybe it’s the jacket.”

“No.” Onyx narrowed her eyes, gave Rae another lightning-fast once-over. “You’re wearing turquoise earrings. Turquoise is for money, success—love, too, but you’re not wearing a ring, so that’s not it.”

“They’re just earrings,” Rae said, trying not to be insulted. She wasn’t entirely successful.

“Your eyes are squinty, like you spend all day staring at numbers.”

“What’s wrong with numbers?”

“People use them to hang you.”

“Rope works better.”

“Not kill, hang. You know, out to dry, twisting in the wind. Taxes, social security, license plates.” Her eyes darted around, and she dropped her voice to the scratchy whisper that had freaked Rae before. “It’s all a way for the man to keep track of you, keep you under his thumb.”

“Uh-huh, sure.” Rae reached for a pair of earrings, managed to get a look into the tiny back room, and didn’t see anything suspicious. Heck, there wasn’t much of anything to see at all, just a cardboard box with plastic bags sticking out of it, and a small table with what appeared to be a tackle box, probably where Onyx made her paranoia talismans. “If I see the
man
—” She used finger quotes. “—I promise not to mention your name.”

Onyx narrowed her eyes.

“Speaking of men, do you know the guy who makes the armor?”

“Why, did he say something about me? Is he a cop, too?”

Rae rolled her eyes at the idea of a floater like Connor Larkin being in law enforcement. “It just seems like he might be cutting into your business, you know, the smaller pieces he makes.”

Onyx snorted. “He’s just a technician. And anyway, mostly what he sells is sex.”

She had that right. And from what Rae had seen, there was no overlap between Onyx’s goods and Larkin’s—not that Onyx would have anything approaching a logical motivation for attacking him. Paranoia pretty much ran her life, and paranoia wasn’t logical.

Paranoia didn’t like contemplative silences, either. Onyx made a sound in the back of her throat and nipped behind the counter. Rae didn’t stick around to find out why; she’d been thinking the woman wasn’t the violent type, but she could have been hasty there.

The minute she’d put Earth Enchanted behind her—and assured herself it wasn’t Onyx causing the familiar itch between her shoulder blades—she felt better, foolish but better.

Her next stop was a shop called Paper Moon. A lot of the booths in Holly Grove were built in rows. Dozens of them followed the curving contour of the grove, with common walls, boardwalks in front, and small back rooms that were used as workshops for those who personalized items or made them on-site, and where most proprietors kept back-stock and bags.

Paper Moon was a little way off by itself, along one of the stone paths that wound through the center of the grove in a haphazard maze. Rae had a bad feeling as soon as she entered the place, but it had nothing to do with Conn or his troubles. The small wooden building was lined with prints. Prints of ladies in medieval gowns besieged by dragons, prints of ladies being stolen away on horseback by knights in black armor, prints of ladies locked in towers, in glass coffins, tied to stakes with fire inching toward their skirts.

It was a disturbing pattern, even before she met the proprietor. The sign behind the counter identified him as Hans Lockner. The way he looked her up and down told her the prints were more a personal statement than mere decoration.

“Say the word, and you can see more than a paper moon,” he said.

Rae felt her lip curl and tried to hide it with a smile she knew was sickly at best. “Do you print these here?”

“I don’t just print them, I do the artwork.”

“Gee, I never would have guessed.”

“I don’t look much like an artist. That’s what you’re thinking, right?”

She was thinking he looked like a pervert, and it wasn’t just the perpetual leer on his face. He wore the costume of an Elizabethan courtier, complete with a codpiece that would have been ridiculous on a giant, let alone someone who barely topped five and a half feet and who, presumably, wasn’t riding high on Viagra. That codpiece probably wasn’t regulation, either, since Hans wore a cape over his ensemble, only letting it flap open when he chose.

Unfortunately, he chose to flap for her, and despite the disgust she was sure showed on her face, he sidled a step closer. Rae scoped out his hands to make sure he wasn’t a grabber, backpedaling as far as she could without completely putting him off. That it took her closer to the back room was a bonus. Until Hans caught her looking toward the curtain covering the doorway.

“You wanna see the wizard?”

Rae froze, too revolted for even sarcasm to rescue her.

“It’s from the movie, you know, with Judy Garland.”

“I know.” Only in his version it would be called
Dorothy Does Oz
. “I . . . have to meet someone.”

“A guy, right? Women like you always have a guy.”

“Sort of. I’m meeting my friends at an armor-making demonstration. Supposedly it’s going to be the high point of my day.”

Hans’s face went through a range of emotions, from
Damn it
to
Oh well
to
Lots of fish in the sea.
No resentment, no surprise. If Hans had sent the Honda after them, he’d know Larkin had left Holly Grove, and as Rae had just noted, the man didn’t exactly have a poker face. He did seem like the kind of guy who’d get others to do his dirty work—and be cheap enough to hire cartoon characters. He did not strike her as someone who would bother, though, not unless he was jealous of Larkin, because what Hans Lockner cared about was between his legs.

“You sure you don’t want a print?” Hans said. “I’m willing to give you a discount.”

Rae took another visual tour of Hans’s salute to female degradation. “Thanks, no.”

This time, as she walked away, she knew she was being watched, but she didn’t have to fight off the urge to look over her shoulder. The need for a shower, now, that was another matter.

Mettle Works, owned and operated by Cornelia Ferdic, wasn’t far away. Cornelia was tall and gangly, wearing a plain, dark-colored wool dress with a paisley scarf wrapped around her head in a sort of turban, the ends of which were loosely nestled around her neck. She was wearing too much perfume, and she must’ve had really bad skin, because foundation was caked on her face.

“Can I help you with something?” she asked Rae in a two-pack-a-day voice.

“These pieces are gorgeous,” Rae said, bending to take a closer look at the earrings and pendants in the glass display, and not because she was using it as a ruse to get a look behind the sales counter.

The earrings were metal hoops filled with tiny gears and cogs that shifted like clockworks as they were moved. The pendants were flat glass disks, also filled with intricate workings in three dimensions. Rae lifted one, smiling as the colorful miniature gears rolled around inside their clear case, the patterns beautiful and mesmerizing.

“Do you make these yourself? There’s another booth with amazing metalwork.”

“You mean the armorer? The guy with the bare chest and the completely female audience? I hear he planted a hot one on a woman in the audience this morning, and now every female between the ages of twelve and ninety is hanging out at his place.”

Rae felt her cheeks heat again, not to mention the heat blooming in some other body parts that were reliving that kiss.

“He actually does some pretty intricate work,” Cornelia said with grudging admiration. “Nothing like this, though. I make all my own creations, right down to the gears and glass.”

“They’re very clever, and beautiful.” So clever and beautiful Rae pointed to a pendant. “I’ll take that one.”

It turned out to be a pretty good deal. For fifty dollars she got a unique piece of jewelry and a look at Cornelia’s back room, which consisted of nothing more than a tiny space at the back of the booth where she ran credit cards and bagged purchases.

She must have hit an odd lull, because just after she made her purchase the place was jammed with customers, and they weren’t just admiring the goods—they were buying. Cornelia Ferdic had nothing to worry about competition-wise from Connor Larkin. And of the three re-enactors Rae had met so far, she seemed the most normal.

She stepped out of Mettle Works and started working her way down the row of booths, visiting four more of Conn’s circled artisans with no more luck than she’d had with the first three. Probably it had something to do with the fact that she had no idea what she was looking for.

She came to one of the crowds that periodically blocked the path, as people gathered around some performer hawking a show or a demonstration like Connor Larkin making armor. She was working her way around the edge of the crowd when she was grabbed, spun around, and lifted into the air, leaving her dizzy and disoriented, struggling to make sense. Hard hands locked around her legs and arms. She fought, knowing it was useless but determined to inflict some damage. Rae didn’t know what her abductors had in mind for her, but she was damn well going to make them sorry they’d ever laid eyes on her, let alone hands.

“Relax. Stop struggling and you’ll be fine.”

Relaxing was out of the question, but she gave up the fight, and when she did the sound of bagpipes registered, along with the laughter and cheers of the crowd. She was facing up, the treetops and sky all she could see until she tipped her head back and realized she’d been hijacked by a bunch of men wearing kilts, and not much else. They were bare-chested but for a swatch of folded plaid slung over their shoulders. They all had bushy beards and big smiles—and really strong arms, she hoped, since they were passing her from one to another overhead. She’d never been a fan of crowd surfing. It was oddly invigorating, more than a little scary, and some of them weren’t very careful where they put their hands.

“Put me down,” she said, then screamed it over the din of the crowd.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” one of the muscle-bound idiots told her, “unless you keep squirming. We might just drop you then.”

“I’ll be sure to tell my lawyer I was threatened as well as accosted. And if one more of you guys cops a feel—” Her tirade ended on a shriek as she was grabbed again.

There was that moment of disorientation, of trying to find some frame of reference with the world—and her brain and stomach—spinning, and then she was plunked onto her feet. She stumbled a little, coming up hard against something solid, warm, and comforting. And very male.

Conn. Her body recognized him first, warming, weakening so all she could do was lean into him, lose herself in the feel of him hard and strong at her back. His hands came to her waist, flexed once before inching up her rib-cage, the breath that she had sighed out coming in fast and catching in the back of her throat.