“Rachel, you need to put your petty grudge aside and—”
“No!” I said louder, angry now, and his words cut off. “This isn’t about me. Trent can stand on his own. He’s better than you give him credit for. You asked me, I said no. Find someone else to spit in his eye.”
Quen pulled back from me, his face creased in anger. “That’s not what I’m doing,” he said, but there was a whisper of concern in his denial. “I simply don’t want him out there alone. There’s nothing wrong with someone having your back. He can stand on his own without having to be alone.”
Behind him, the TV was showing the front of Cincy’s hospital, lit up with lights and security vehicles. Have his back?
“I won’t bring it up again,” he said, shifting away from me and suddenly closed. “I think our table is ready.”
Confused, I slid from the stool, shimming until my dress fell right. If I was there, Trent wouldn’t see it as me watching his back. He’d say I was babysitting him. Quen had it wrong.
Didn’t he?
“After you,” Quen said sourly, gesturing for me to follow the man standing before us with two huge menus in his hand.
God, save me from myself, maybe Quen was right. “Quen . . .”
But then my gaze jerked up to the TV over the bar as I caught a familiar phrase, and my thoughts of Trent vanished. With a sudden flash, I recognized the new Rosewood wing behind the newscaster on the scene. The Rosewood wing was simply a fancy name for the three comfortable houselike facilities they’d built for the terminally ill babies suffering from Rosewood syndrome. The cul-de-sac was damp from the earlier rain, and lights from the I.S. cruisers and news vans made everything shiny. The thought of THIRD ABDUCTION echoed through me, and I jerked to a halt. Behind me, Quen grunted in surprise.
“Turn it up!” I exclaimed, turning back to the bar and shoving past Quen to get closer.
“. . . apparently abducted by a kidnapper posing as a night nurse,” the woman was saying, and I felt myself pale. “I.S. officials are investigating, but so far they have no leads as to who is taking the failing infants, and why.”
“Turn it up!” I said again, and this time, the bartender heard me, aiming a remote and upping the volume. I felt myself pale as Quen rocked to a halt beside me, both of us looking up. A phone buzzed, and Quen jumped, his hand fumbling to a back pocket.
“Because of baby Benjamin’s miraculous progress in fighting the largely lethal disease, officials are not hopeful for a ransom demand—they fear that he was taken by unscrupulous biogenetic engineers trying to find and sell a cure.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered, fumbling in my clutch bag for my phone. They’d killed all the bioengineers during the Turn. It was a tradition both humans and Inderlanders alike gleefully continued to this day. That I was alive because of illegal tinkering didn’t make me feel any better.
“Let’s hope they find them soon,” the woman was saying, and then the headlines shifted to the latest Washington scandal.
Head down over my phone, I punched in Trent’s number. It would go right to his private quarters, bypassing the switchboard. I felt hot, then cold, my grip on my phone shaking. He wouldn’t have abducted the baby, but he’d have a short list of who might have. HAPA maybe, now that they couldn’t have me. Trent had once promised that he’d give the demons the cure to their infertility, but after suffering through the chaos wrought by his father saving me, I couldn’t believe that Trent was looking to increase the number of survivors just yet.
The busy signal shocked through me, and I glanced up at the shadow of a man standing too close: Quen, his brow furrowed as he looked at his phone’s screen. Blinking, I remembered where I was. Quen’s lips twitched, and he held out his phone. It was smaller and shinier than mine. “He’s on my line,” he said with a thin, distant voice. “You talk to him.”
Fingers shaking, I took the phone. “He’ll know we’re together, that we talked.” Oh God, I didn’t want Trent to know that Quen doubted him. He looked to him as his father despite the monthly stipend.
Quen shrugged. “He’ll find that out, anyway.”
Mouth suddenly dry, I answered the phone and put it to my ear. “Trent?”
The hesitation was telling, but he caught his balance quickly. “Rachel?” Trent said, clearly surprised. “I’m sorry. I must have hit the wrong button. I was trying to reach Quen.”
I held the phone tighter, my pulse pounding. His voice was beautiful, and I felt glad for having turned Quen down. “Ahh,” I said, glancing up at a stoic Quen. “You hit the right number.”
Again Trent hesitated. “O-o-o-o-okay?”
“We were having dinner,” I said, explaining nothing, and Quen’s face went even more bland. “Quen and I. You saw the news? Do you know who did it?”
My worry came rushing back, crowding out my brief flash of pleasure for having caught Trent off-guard. It happened so seldom. The host was still waiting, and when Quen shook his head, he smiled ingratiatingly and walked away, dropping the menus on the bar with a loud smack.
“No, but I’m going out there right now.” Trent’s tone was tight, and my idea that he was fixing Rosewood babies died. “Since you’re with Quen, would you both meet me there?”
My lips parted, even as I heard the accusation in his tone. He wanted me there? With him?
“Rachel, are you there?” Trent asked, and I flushed, glancing at Quen before pushing the phone tighter to my ear.
“Yes. The hospital, right?” Where all the news vans were? Swell. I couldn’t help but wonder if his invitation was because he wanted my professional opinion or simply to find out what Quen and I were doing.
“Rosewood wing,” he said, his tone grim. “I doubt there will be any indication as to who took the infant, but I don’t want evidence to be buried if the I.S. doesn’t like what they find. If one of us is there, we will at least have the truth, uncomfortable or not.”
I nodded as Quen exchanged a few words with the bartender and slipped him a bill. The I.S. was an offshoot of the original FBI and local police force before the Turn, responsible for hiding Inderland crimes before humans could find evidence witches, werewolves, and vampires existed. Covering up the uncomfortable or unprofitable was in their blood.
“Rachel, may I talk to Quen?” Trent asked, shaking me out of my thoughts.
“Um, sure. I’ll see you there.” My stomach was in knots, and I held the phone out. “He wants to talk to you.”
Quen looked at the phone, his stance never shifting as he reluctantly reached out. Turning sideways to me, he drew himself up. “Sa’han?” He hesitated. “Having dinner.” Another pause. “Of course Ceri knows. It was her idea.”
Ceri was in on this, too? Frowning, I forced my arms from my middle. Trent would be pissed. I knew I’d been when my mom and dad rented me a live-in personal security guy for a few months.
“No,” Quen said firmly, and then again, “No. I’ll see you there.”
I could hear Trent complaining as Quen closed the phone, cutting him off mid-protest. That wasn’t going to go over very well, I decided, and when Quen gestured for me to head out before him, I meekly fell into place, my thoughts turning to the hospital.
Behind us people laughed and clinked glasses. Below, Cincinnati moved with her people, uncaring and unaware. It felt wrong now. Someone was stealing Rosewood babies. The “why” was ugly.
Quen was silent all the way to the elevator. He avoided my eyes as I handed him my ticket to give to the coat-check woman. I could have given it to her myself, but high-society came with weird rules, and it was no skin off my nose. “You’re not going to tell him?” I said, hoping he wanted to use the time it would take to get to the hospital to come up with some story other than Quen wanting to hire me to babysit Trent.
Gaze distant in thought, Quen shook out my shawl and I turned around, my head lowered. “You might be right,” he said, and I shivered as the silk settled over my bare skin. “I may have acted without thought.”
/> It was an honest answer, but Quen might be right as well. Trent didn’t need a babysitter, but everyone needed someone to watch their back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times bestselling author Kim Harrison was born and raised in the upper Midwest. Her bestselling Hollows novels include Dead Witch Walking; The Good, The Bad, and The Undead; Every Which Way But Dead; A Fistful of Charms; For a Few Demons More; The Outlaw Demon Wails; White Witch, Black Curse; Black Magic Sanction; Pale Demon; A Perfect Blood, plus the short story collection Into the Woods and The Hollows Insider. She also writes the bestselling Madison Avery YA series.
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ALSO BY KIM HARRISON
Books of the Hollows
A Perfect Blood
Pale Demon
Black Magic Sanction
White Witch, Black Curse
The Outlaw Demon Wails
For a Few Demons More
A Fistful of Charms
Every Which Way But Dead
The Good, the Bad, and the Undead
Dead Witch Walking
And Don’t Miss
The Hollows Insider
Unbound
Something Deadly This Way Comes
Early to Death, Early to Rise
Once Dead, Twice Shy
Holidays Are Hell
Dates from Hell
And coming soon . . .
Into the Woods
and
Ever After
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Pet Shop Boys” will appear in the collection Into the Woods, by Kim Harrison, available in October 2012 from Harper Voyager, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpt from Ever After copyright © 2013 by Kim Harrison.
PET SHOP BOYS. Copyright © 2012 by Kim Harrison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062237682
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Kim Harrison, Pet Shop Boys: A Short Story
(Series: # )
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