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“Dylan was my best friend, and he told meeverything. I know how you treated him, when all he ever wanted was to love you and have you love him in return.”
I just shook my head at him. This queen was tripping, for sure, but this was so not the time or place to get into a fight with one of Dylan’s crazy-ass friends. “Whatever,” I said, ever the king of the snappy retorts. I snatched up my stack of flyers and turned to go.
And bumped right into a short, plump brunette—I thought I remembered her name was Sparrow, or something equally asinine.
She was a fierce, abnormally short thing who worked with scene construction and prop prep for the theater and even did a little acting. I’d last seen her a year or more ago as the fool inLear. Type casting at its finest.
She looked a little like Wednesday from the Addams family and she was glaring up at me from somewhere near the area of my chest. I’m pretty short, so that made her like a Munchkin, though not nearly as cute. “Excuse me,” I said pointedly, but she just kept glaring up at me with her squinty eyes.
“What the fuck did you do to Dylan?” she said, in her Minnie Mouse voice.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. What did you do? Tell the truth and give his friends some closure.”
“Are all you people crazy?” I asked, sidestepping her and heading for the door. She grabbed my arm with surprisingly strong fingers and dug her little blue tipped talons into my bicep. I could see she was all set to make a scene and I braced for it. She obviously wanted to throw down, and the way I was feeling today, I was about ready to drop my drawers and show my ass right along with her, when Dale Snyder’s wife, Ann, stepped up beside us. She towered over both of us.
“Let him go, Sparrow, you’re making a scene.”
Sparrow backed off after a moment, muttering imprecations. She sounded like she was practicing one of the witches’ scenes fromMacbeth. Good ole Toby had sprung from his seat and come to stand beside her, no doubt to lend her his support. Another pale, waiflike creature with long, yellow hair obscuring most of his face sidled up beside Toby and took his hand. Dylan’s latest conquest—Cassidy, I think I’d heard Dylan say. He looked me up and down like something that just crawled out from under a rug, from what I could see of his expression through the strands of oily hair. And speaking ofMacbeththe three of them grouped together like that reminded me of the three Weird Sisters. Sparrow’s next words clinched the impression.
She frowned at me. “We’ll meet again,” she threatened, and I couldn’t resist.
“Oh yeah, will we? When the hurly-burly’s done? When the battle’s lost or won?”
That earned me another ferocious frown from Sparrow and Cassidy just looked blank. He felt compelled to jump to her defense though, with a misquote of his own.
“Murder cannot be hid long, at length the truth will out.”
“I think you have your plays mixed up,” I said. “That’s fromMuchAdo About Nothingas far as I can tell from the way you mangled the line. Maybe you meant, ‘Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’”
I’d helped my dad with his play productions in high school, so I knew my Shakespeare. The waif surprised me then by taking a swing at me. He balled up his little fist and missed me by a mile, but even if he’d landed the punch, it wouldn’t have hurt me much. I was used to regularly taking punches from Tyler, not to mention Dylan, both of whom outweighed this twerp by probably fifty pounds. A camera flashed next to us though, right as his fist swept wildly past my jaw, and I flinched back. I turned with dread and saw that it was the photographer from the Journal.
Suddenly, Ann Snyder locked arms with me and turned me around to usher me toward the door. The woman was strong. She was nice about it and trying to smile reassuringly the whole time. “I’m so sorry about that, Jace. I’ll see if I can get the reporter not to use that picture. Sparrow can be a little high-strung and Cassidy has fancied himself in love with Dylan for a while now, though Dylan just strings him along. You know how he is. I told Dale it wasn’t a good idea to invite you, considering who else was coming, but you know how he gets.” I didn’t, really, as I didn’t know the man, but she was a nice lady, so I nodded to be polite.
“Dylan and I broke up,” I said. “We hadn’t really been together, but we made it official a few months before he disappeared. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about what happened to him.”
“I know that, dear. And I think I also know how things really were with you and Dylan, despite Dylan’s stories,” she said, her tone conspiratorial as she leaned into me. “Dylan could be charismatic when he wanted to, but I only ever believed about half of what he said. And I wouldn’t trust him till the water got hot.” She must have heard how that sounded, because she smiled at me again and shrugged. “Of course, we all pray that he’ll be found soon and that no harm has come to him. He’s very handsome and charming. All of us here love him, as I’m sure you know.”
“Right,” I said, nodding. “And thank you for all this. I hope the reward will help.”
“I do too,” she said, sounding as if she wasn’t at all sure it would.
We had stopped by the door, and she glanced over her shoulder at the table where her husband was getting ready to sit down. “I’d better go. Thank you for coming dear, and I hope to see you again soon, under better circumstances.” She turned to leave, and I made my way outside gratefully. I was almost to my car when I heard a horn blow from just behind me.
My nerves were shot all to hell by this time, so I jumped and whirled around to glare at whoever it was and flinched when I saw Will Logan looking at me from behind the wheel of a truck. It was a black Ford F150 with big tires, black rims and a V8 engine. I thought it suited him. He rolled his window down.
“Get in.”
“I-uh-I probably should be getting back home.”
“Get in.” His eyes swept me up and down. “Now. Or I’ll put you in.”
Chapter Nine
Logan
“Why the hell did you go to that theater tonight?” I asked him, glaring. He looked good, like he always did, and as usual he was pissing me off. I didn’t like the idea of him being around Malone’s other thralls, although I was pretty sure by now that only Toby was infected. The others were just idiots who had been taken in by Malone’s supposed “charm.”
