High Voltage (Fever #10)(48)
Scowling, I whipped it out, tidily boxed recent events threatening to erupt in my skull.
PICK YOU UP AT EIGHT. WEAR A DRESS.
My eyebrows climbed my forehead and vanished into my scalp.
Seriously? Furious thumbs flew over the keys as I typed Barrons’s words from a few years ago. He’d been right.
All caps make it look like you’re shouting at me.
His reply came so swiftly, I swear he’d already had it typed and ready.
I was. You never listen otherwise.
“Wear. A. Dress,” I fumed, steam building in my head. I know Ryodan and he knows me. Which meant he knew telling me to wear a dress would pretty much guarantee I’d choose anything but a dress.
But…you have to take things a little further with that man because that’s how he thinks, always looking ahead. Since he knew telling me to wear a dress would make me choose something else—and he also knew I was fully aware of how his manipulative brain worked—he knew I’d ultimately decide to wear the bloody dress just to prove I wasn’t being manipulated by him. So, he’d get me in a dress either way.
This was a complete clusterfuck. How did I win? By wearing a dress or not?
I now fully and completely understood why That Woman had gone into battle with Sherlock naked.
The only way I could win was by not being there to be picked up at eight. My screen flashed at that precise instant with a new text from him.
This isn’t about us. Our city is in trouble. Be there.
“Oh, screw you,” I growled. Right, provoke my innate, highly dysmorphic sense of personal responsibility.
I shoved my phone back in my pocket, resisting the urge to mute further texts. I wouldn’t let him make me let my city down by not being there if someone in need texted me.
I was storming back to my flat to demand Shazam’s presence (and counsel!) when I saw one of them: a bird with a broken wing, maybe two.
I sighed, and circled back to a food vendor, placed my order, rearranging priorities, watching her from the corner of my eye where she huddled on a bench outside a pub, trembling and pale, badly bruised.
I didn’t know her story and didn’t need to. I knew the look. This was a pervasive problem: the disenfranchised could be found on nearly every corner of every street in every city in our world.
Their stories were some version of this: their families/children/lover got killed when the walls fell and they lost their job; they watched their siblings/friends/parents get seduced and destroyed by Seelie or Unseelie; the worst of humans had preyed on them.
Glassy-eyed, sludge-brained, terrorized, once victimized, they were prey magnets.
Not everyone was as lucky as me. Not everyone had a hard life, so when the going gets tough, they don’t know how to get going.
“Here. Eat.” I offered the woman the sandwich I’d just bought. She was young, too pretty to go unnoticed, thin.
Trembling, she raised her head and looked at me. Shock glazed her eyes, fear blanched her skin to snow. She made no move for the wax-paper-wrapped food, and if she didn’t take it soon I might fall on it myself. It was one of my favorites, a hot, breaded fresh-caught fish and tartar sauce delight nestled in a sesame bun, with chips, dripping grease.
“I’m Dani,” I said, settling on the far end of her bench, keeping the bulk of it between us so she wouldn’t feel cornered. “I help the folks that need it. Take the sandwich and eat it. I don’t want anything from you. But if you stay here, some bastard is going to hurt you worse than you’ve already been hurt. Do you understand?”
She flinched. Someone had beaten her. Recently. Her lower lip was split and one eye freshly swollen shut. I know bruises, her eye and half her cheek would be black before nightfall. She knew she was vulnerable but whatever happened had left her fractured, unable to make decisions. She was here because she had no ground to go to, no one to take care of her while she regained—or learned to have for the first time—fighting strength. That’s where I come in.
“Seriously. You’ll feel better after you eat. Here’s a soda. Drink it. Sugar makes everything look better.” I placed the can gently on the bench in the expanse between us.
After a moment she snatched the sandwich from my hand and took the soda. When she fumbled, trying to pop the flip-top, I reached for it to help and she flinched again.
“Easy, I’m just going to open the can,” I said. The backs of her hands were scraped nearly raw, bloodstained nails broken to the quick.
She took her first bite of the sandwich with seeming revulsion, chewed automatically, swallowed hard. The second went down the same way.
Then I saw what I always hope to see but don’t always get: she fell on the food ravenously, tearing off big chunks, cramming them in her mouth, shoving chips in alongside, smearing tartar sauce and grease on her chin. Her body was hungry and, despite its trauma, wanted to live. Now I just had to get her mind back in line with it.
When she was finished, she slumped against the wooden slats of the bench, wiping her face with a stained, frayed sleeve.
“I don’t know what happened and don’t need to,” I said quietly. “I’m offering to take you to a flat I keep stocked with food, water, everything you need. I have dozens of places like it around the city for folks that need them. This one’s yours for thirty days. You can stay there while you work through whatever you’re dealing with, eat, sleep, and shower in peace. Periodically, I’ll drop by to make sure you’re okay.” Usually in a week, they were ready to talk. Needed to. I offered thirty days because a time limit was pressure and a firm hand lends shape to Play-Doh. If they needed more than thirty days and were earnestly trying to recover, they got it.