“Just kill the bitch,” I insisted. “Problem solved.”
“It isn’t just Vivian,” Caryl protested. “We’ve known for some time that she’s the head of a network, but we’ve yet to identify any of her conspirators.”
“Other than David and Teo, you mean?”
David had the decency to cringe. Caryl blinked, and tears started to her eyes. “Teo?”
Right. She’d missed that bit. Also Gloria dying, but I thought now would be a bad time to bring that up. “Yeah,” I said gently. “I think it was Vivian he was calling when we were planning this little trip.”
“Teo?” she said again, faintly. “No. No, not Teo. He taught me to play hopscotch.” Her eyes took on a glassy look, and she slipped her thumb into her mouth.
“Aaand we’ve lost her,” I said flatly. I looked around. “Where the hell is Tjuan? Didn’t he come in here too?”
Still staring vacantly, Caryl took her thumb out of her mouth to point toward a place by the altar where the flimsy wood exterior had fallen away. It left a triangle-shaped gap just barely large enough for a person to squeeze back out into the desert.
“Why the hell did he leave you alone?” I wondered aloud. “All right then. David, help me and Caryl to the doorway.”
“What for?”
“Just do it,” I snapped. “I’m the director now.”
David had the decency to shut up and let me lean on him so I could hobble one-legged to the door with Caryl clinging to my other hand.
“What’s the matter, Vivian?” I shouted melodramatically toward the square. “Afraid of a little make-believe holy ground? Why don’t you just haul Johnny back up so he can de-glamour it for you? Oh, that’s right, because you cut the fucking rope just to hear someone die, you psychotic moron.”
I could see her through the doorway as she strode onto the sagging porch. She stopped just short of entering but stood where I could almost touch her, one hand on her hip. Her -satiny red skirts were dulled with dust.
“Is this where I charge furiously into the chapel because you so skillfully taunted me?” she said. “Instead of that, how about I stand here filing my nails while you starve to death?”
“If that was your Plan A, you’d be filing your nails, not talking. You want something from one of us.”
“Well, darling,” she said amiably, “that backstabbing geezer of yours seems to have pushed my GPS down a well.”
I started to laugh. “Oh, this is fantastic. You don’t know your way out of here either.”
“So, what do you say?” Vivian batted her eyes. “Can we be pals? Let bygones be bygones? A fey’s word is bond, and I will promise not to cause you harm if you will in return promise to dispel the ward on this soundstage and keep your cold little hands off me. Do we have a deal?”
Caryl popped her thumb out of her mouth and leaned into me. “Say yes,” she whispered in my ear. I could smell blood on her breath.
“Promise to undo what you did to Caryl and Teo,” I said. “Cause no harm to them, or Tjuan either.”
“Bah,” said Vivian with a little wave of her hand. “It isn’t worth leaving four witnesses just to save myself a few days of trial and error. You have five seconds to take the deal I offered, or I am walking away.”
48
Vivian actually started to count down. “Five,” she prompted cheerfully.
I stood there, feeling anger clouding my higher thought. She’d killed Gloria, maimed Teo, broken Caryl. I hadn’t gotten far enough in my therapy to swallow the bitter rage that rose up in my throat. “I’m not negotiating with you,” I said.
“Four.”
Caryl tugged my hand. “Do it, do it, do it!”
“Three.”
“Please, Millie.”
The childlike desperation in her tone almost undid me, but I violently shook my head. “She’s asking me to let her kill you all—”
“She can’t kill me,” David reminded me.
“Shut up,” I snapped.
“Two.”
I didn’t care. Nothing in this world, even fear of starving to death and rotting on a soundstage, could make me deal with her. But then I saw Tjuan approaching cautiously behind her, holding my prosthetic.
“All right!” I said to Vivian. “Stop counting. You have a deal. But first . . .”
“First what?”
Tjuan gave me a questioning look from behind Vivian. He pantomimed tossing the prosthetic to me and raised a brow.
I shook my head emphatically.
“What?” prompted Vivian irritably, just as Tjuan gave me a very similar look.
“Something just hit me,” I said to Vivian.
“What?” she said impatiently.
“I mean, hit me figuratively, as in a realization. Not the way your friend Rivenholt hit me earlier with my own leg.”
Tjuan got my message, and my prosthetic was subjected to its second round of abuse as he swung it with enthusiasm at the back of her head.