The Cure for Dreaming(52)

You will not accept it.

I reopened the door. The bars vanished.

Without even grabbing my coat or hat, I closed up the house and leapt into the night.

Out in the side yard, my red bicycle waited for me against the house’s chipped planks. After buttoning up my shoes, I hopped onto the saddle like a dime-novel cowboy, wobbled my way across the front yard’s sparse and lumpy patches of grass, and pedaled toward the city with legs propelled by wrath.

The streets lay empty and silent, with rows of white arc lamps dangling from wires overhead, guiding the way, whispering, This way, this way, kill him, kill him. I pedaled faster, faster, faster, faster, hopping aboard smooth sidewalks to avoid getting slowed by ruts in the streets. A man stumbled out of a tavern and tottered into my path, but I swerved to avoid him and felt the graze of his arm against my elbow. He shouted a curse word, so I shouted it right back at him, even though I’d never cussed aloud in my life.

Outside the great Henri Reverie’s hotel, I tossed my bicycle to the ground and threw open the establishment’s front door. I marched straight toward the staircase sign at the back of the lobby with my nails sharp and poised to fight.

“Olivia?” asked a voice from one of the lobby’s chairs.

I stopped and whipped my head toward the sound.

Henry set aside a newspaper and rose from an armchair with a baffled expression that grew even more perplexed when I walked over and pushed him three feet backward.

“You made me vomit! In public!”

“I told you to trust me.”

I pushed him again. “You humiliated me.”

“You made your father torture me.”

“I threw up in the bushes in front of those people.” I kept shoving. “I got sick as a dog.”

“Olivia, stop. Be quiet.”

“Don’t tell me to be quiet. Who do you think you are?”

“Please—”

“You made me vomit, Henry. You’re as horrible and controlling a jackass as he is.” I raised my arm. “I could kill you!”

My nails sliced down his cheek, and to my horror, blood rose to the surface of four long gashes that stretched from his eye to his mouth.

He cradled his skin and staggered backward, dazed and whey-faced.

“Take your lovers’ quarrel outside, you animals!” yelled the hotel clerk with the Vandyke beard, and other voices joined in the commotion—those of concerned guests, a hotel employee in a round cap, and then Henry, who took hold of my arm and tried pulling me away while telling the clerk that everything was fine.

But my feet wouldn’t budge.

In a gilded mirror across the lobby, a red-eyed devil stared me down, her dark hair hanging in her face like poisonous black asps, her teeth bared and clenched, the dagger nails of her right hand dripping fresh red blood that stained the green rug below her. Every muscle in my body stiffened at the sight of her—of me—yet I couldn’t pull my eyes away.

“Olivia, please! Come outside.” Henry gave my arm a good yank and guided me out of the hotel.

The crisp blast of autumn air snuffed out some of the fire blazing inside me. With a whimper of exhaustion, I collapsed against a brick wall beyond the front window and leaned my cheek into a fuzzy blanket of moss. My legs quivered, the muscles and tendons straining to keep me upright.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Henry pull a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and cover his bleeding face.

I squeezed my eyes shut and sucked in my breath. “How much blood is there?”

“Hardly any. It mainly stings.”

“It looked as if it could turn into gallons.”

“You’re probably seeing it worse than it is.” He stepped closer. “Olivia, I promised you we were partners, not enemies. Why’d you have to bring up Genevieve and let it slip that we’ve seen each other?”

“I was trying to appeal . . . I just . . . he’s still my father. I thought . . .” I rubbed my forehead. “We’re not partners. A partner wouldn’t allow me to retch in front of strangers.”

“Your father gave me those orders when he had that medieval contraption wedged in my mouth.”

“But he took out the gag eventually.”

“We signed a contract back there in his office. A mutual agreement, saying if I completed the tasks asked of me, he would give me the full remainder of Genevieve’s surgeon’s fees.”

I closed my eyes again. “I’ll give you one hundred twenty-three dollars if we end everything tonight and send you on your way right now.”

Henry didn’t answer, and for a moment I thought he might have run away.

“Are you still here?” I raised my head and found him in the same spot as before, his mouth hanging open, the cloth pressed against his face.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“My mother has been sending me birthday and Christmas money ever since she left us when I was four. I’ve been saving the cash in a box in my room all these years.”

“What have you been saving it for?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I used to imagine heading out on great adventures, circumnavigating the world like Nellie Bly.”

“But”—he lowered the handkerchief—“what had you been planning to use it for before Genevieve and I came to town?”