Jennifer Crusie - The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes

‘Nope, but I can fix it, although it’s a shame, it looks great like this.’ Mare tilted her head to concentrate as she began to pull the strands together at the top of Dee’s head, little blue sparks among the copper. It was like the sugar grains; the key was to think of the hairs individually and then to align them so that-

‘Stop it,’ Dee said, trying to shove her hair back into place, ‘it’s Xan.’

Mare stopped and Dee’s curls dropped back to her shoulders. ‘You saw Xan?’

‘No. Danny did. Xan sent him.’ Dee’s voice was miserable. ‘He hasn’t said so, but it’s a fact.’

‘Oh, hell,’ Mare said, feeling lousy for her. ‘Damn, I’m sorry, Dee.’

‘I think she’s close by,’ Dee said. ‘I can feel it.’

Close by, Mare thought, and her pulse kicked up a beat. Xan who really was Queen of the Universe and who could teach them how to control their powers and then… ‘Listen, she could set us free.’ And I could go to Italy. ‘She-’

‘No.’ Dee grabbed Mare’s arm. ‘She’s dangerous, Mare. She has real power, and she wants us. She’s unstoppable, so we can’t let her start.’

‘But she’s-’

‘And now I can’t find Lizzie.’ Dee sounded truly upset. ‘I left Danny as soon as I learned the truth and ran home to find her, but she wasn’t there. I’m going back out to find him and ask him where Xan is. If I can’t find out, we’ll have to run again. We’ll vote on it, but I just don’t think we have a choice. We’ll have to go.’

Oh, hell. Forget ever seeing Italy or even New York, Dee was going to bury them in another nothing little town again.

Unless something stopped her.

What would make Dee stop running?

Danny James.

Mare surveyed her sister. ‘We can’t vote until we know more about what’s going on. So I’m thinking, with your hair down like that, if you unbuttoned a couple of buttons on your blouse, Danny would probably tell you anything you wanted to know.’ She tried to unbutton Dee’s top button with her mind, but the material just puckered as the button pulled on it.

Dee slapped her hand over the button, her green eyes clouded with worry. ‘Stop it, this is serious. Xan’s tried to find us before, but this time feels different. I can feel it like that storm coming in. Can’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Mare said. ‘You wouldn’t believe what’s already come in for me. Crash is back in town.’

‘I heard. You don’t think he-’ Dee’s face changed and she said, ‘Shhhh.’

Mare turned and saw that Jude had come closer and was watching them, not even pretending to be doing something else. ‘That’s the vice president.’ She stopped, struck by a thought ‘You know, the VP turned up about the same time Danny did. You don’t suppose Xan sent him, too, do you?’

Jude cleared his throat.

Mare turned back to Dee. ‘Never mind. Xan’s a lot of things, but she’s not lame. Listen, I gotta go. The bottom line is, you have to seduce Danny to find out what’s going on. If he’s from Xan, he’s used to magic, so the whole mom-in-bed thing won’t faze him. And if it turns out that he’s just a pawn, he’ll leave and recover. Eventually.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ Dee said, her voice bleak. ‘Just keep your eyes open for Lizzie and stay away from Xan. You want an education, go to college, not to Xan.’

She headed for the exit, as sure as ever that she was right, so just as she opened the door, Mare messed up her hair, ruffling her curls in all directions, and Dee snapped around, looked enraged and really, really beautiful.

Go look like that at Danny, Mare thought, but she called, ‘Must have been the wind. Big storm brewing out there.’ Then she turned to see Jude right behind her, watching everything. ‘Yes, Jude?’

‘Was that your sister?’ he said as Mare heard the door slam behind her.

‘Yes, it was.’ Mare started to head for the counter and then stopped. ‘What makes you think that was my sister?’

‘You’re a lot alike,’ he said, meeting her eyes.

No we’re not, Mare thought. We look nothing alike. So how did you know?

Maybe Xan was that lame.

Up on the big flat screen, Victor Quartermain fired at a little gray bunny that went hurtling backward toward a white light. I know how you feel, Mare thought, and then the bunny ended up in the Bun Vac 6000 floating in rabbity ecstasy, not dead after all.

‘I love the Bun Vac,’ she said. ‘What?’ Jude said.

‘The Bun Vac 6000,’ she said, nodding at the screen. ‘You’ re vice president of a video company and you don’t know the Bun Vac?’

‘Oh, that.’ Jude polished his silver tie tack with his finger, almost a nervous twitch by now. ‘I don’t watch children’s movies.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Mare said, and turned back to the screen to watch Victor put a bunny on his head.

‘Have you thought about my New York offer, Mare?’ Jude said. ‘It would give you tremendous power. With your abilities you could go right to the top. Vice president in no time. President even.’

‘Queen,’ Mare said, her eyes on the bunny.

‘The sky’s the limit. No, not even that, no limit. Limitless power. You’d like that. Of course, you’d have to stop doing strange things…’

‘I’m thinking about all my offers, Jude,’ Mare said.

The problem was, the offer she needed most, the one that might set her free, that one she hadn’t gotten yet.

Maybe I need to talk to Xan, she thought, and turned speculative eyes on Jude.

Dee was still futzing with her hair and waving off blue sparks as she stalked out of the video store. Every strand of her hair still shivered in outrage from Mare’s trick.

Seduce him. Easy for Mare to say. She had the courage to try something like that. Dee had spent so much effort trying not to have sex, she swore she’d forgotten how. She-

‘Need this yet?’

Dee jumped a foot. There, leaning against a lightpost, was Danny himself. Smiling, rumpled, and holding out her briefcase like a Christmas present.

Dee wondered if he knew how good he looked in that Marlon Brando pose or whether he just couldn’t stand up straight for long. It didn’t matter. Her brief dalliance with the illusion of mutual attraction was over. Fantasies survived only in the dust.

‘Are you stalking me?’ she demanded, snatching the briefcase and hugging it to herself.

Danny looked around at the fairly deserted streets. ‘I must be. Here you are. Here am I. Waiting for an explanation for why you disappeared like The Runaway Bride.’

Giving her hair one last agitated yank, Dee sighed. ‘Please. If you like me, don’t quote movies.’

He didn’t like her. He was using her, just like the other men Xan had sent to smoke her out. Xan dealt in men the way a Crip sold crack.

‘You ran off so fast, I wasn’t sure what happened,’ he said, looking concerned. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

He stepped closer. Dee stepped back. The street by the store had emptied, and the wind had kicked up, catching a flyer for the Elks’ chicken dinner and plastering it against the Civic Pride trash container on the corner. At the horizon, a gathering of clouds showed purple. Portents of the storm to come.

‘You can explain about my Aunt Xan.’

He offered a chagrined grin. ‘She said you’d be upset.’

‘And she’d be right.’ Dee shoved her hair off her forehead. ‘I’m not fond of liars. I’m even less fond of people who play games.’

He held up his hands, the image of innocence. ‘No more games. No lies. I shouldn’t have done it in the first place, but this was important to Mr Delaney. And…’ He shrugged, looking faintly ashamed. ‘I didn’t know you then.’