“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, sir.”
“Are your friends male or female?”
“Two of each.”
He nodded. “We have three fully equipped guest rooms, as long as you don’t mind doubling up.”
I did the math and frowned. “That’s six—”
“I want you and Poe here, too.”
Suddenly, I was really glad he hadn’t guessed the nature of the relationship between Hallie and me.
“There will still be security, and the ladies will be located very far away from the gentlemen, but if all of you can see what she can, then you can try to protect her from it. I’ll be in touch with the guards while I’m gone. If things don’t stay aboveboard, I’ll reassess.”
I knew, in this case, reassess meant I’d be fired, and if he found out about Hallie and me, possibly castrated.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Take care of my daughter.”
“I’ll guard her with my life.”
Chapter 16
Hallie
Dune was in my dad’s office. I just hoped I would hear the ambulance over the music.
Since I was alone, I decided on a quick session of warm-ups. The familiar routine usually allowed me to leave myself behind, just for a while. I tried to let my mind float, but Dune eased his way in, keeping me anchored.
Even so, I let out a shriek when I saw him at the window.
I opened the door and waved him inside. “You’re not dead. That’s good.”
“Are there cameras in here?” he asked.
“Not in the changing room.”
He grabbed my hand, dragged me in, and shut the door. Then he planted a fat one on my lips, and opened the door again.
“Not that I’m complaining, but what the hell is going on?”
I was still in the dressing room, but he was already out in the studio proper.
“The Hourglass is on the way,” he said.
“He said yes.” I was shocked. Dune had been in his office fifteen minutes, max.
“They’re staying here.”
My stomach pitched. “Okay.”
“So is Poe.”
I stared at him.
“And so am I.”
We waited at NOLA, Emeril’s restaurant on Saint Louis Street.
“Are you okay?” Dune asked.
“I’m shell-shocked.”
“They were already halfway here.”
I nodded. “What if Dad had said no?”
“They would’ve stayed in a hotel.” He took my hand. “They want to help you, Hallie. It’s not like they’re coming down so we can all do illicit drugs and have orgies.”
I snort laughed. “How did we get permission to meet them in the Quarter?”
“Your dad’s setting up extra surveillance and he wanted you out of the house while he put it in,” he confessed.
“You’re a tech genius.” I grinned, thinking about how he’d looked on my bed. “How long will it take to reroute it?”
“I’m not going to. I promised your dad I’d take care of you, and I intend to keep it.”
It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. The place was almost empty, except for the waitstaff preparing for the evening rush. The quiet was getting to me.
Then the front door burst open.
“We’re here!” A blond blur zipped across the room, followed closely by a guy with dark, shaggy hair.
“Glad to see you.” The guy did the handshake-and-one-armed-hug combo with Dune before he held his hand out to me. “Hi, Hallie.”
“Hi, Michael.” I recognized him from the picture I’d seen in Dune’s bedroom. He had the self-confidence of someone much older. “That makes you Emerson.” I turned to face her.
“Hi.” In person, the perky cuteness I’d seen in the photo was tempered with something. Sorrow in her eyes, but strength, too. “We’re all so glad to meet you.”
Now Dune hugged a guy with a few piercings and visible tattoos.
“Kaleb,” the guy said, turning to me. The picture hadn’t done him justice. “Thanks for having us.”
“According to Dune, you were all going to visit, anyway.”
Kaleb grinned. “That’s the way we do.”
“I’m Lily.” She gave me a beautiful and genuine smile. Kaleb tucked his arm around her. They were breathtaking.
Ten to one they did it with the lights on.
“Welcome to New Orleans,” I said a little too brightly. “Let’s get some hospitality going.”
We took a seat and ordered, the lights above the table dimming slightly when Michael and Emerson bumped hands. Same as with Amelia and Zooey, it calmed after a few seconds. Everyone talked a hundred miles an hour, catching up while we waited. Except for me, since I had nothing to catch up on. I held Dune’s hand under the table and observed.
Lily and Emerson both made attempts to pull me into the conversation, but they were gentle attempts. Kaleb rivaled paid entertainment, engaging everyone, but Michael was quiet. Enough to make me feel comfortable, like I wasn’t the only person at the table who wasn’t a talker.
Dune leaned close to whisper in my ear. “They like you. I can tell.”
“I like them, too,” I whispered back. “But I have no idea what to say.”
“You’ll figure it out. Or they’ll figure it out for you.”
He was right. They were so comfortable with one another that it extended to me, instead of excluding me. I understood what Poe meant now. They were impressive as a team. They were impressive humans.
After dinner, which I didn’t eat, Dune, Lily, Kaleb, and I headed toward Bourbon. Em and Michael set out to find a LAISSEZ LES BONS TEMPS ROULER baby onesie.
“Planning ahead?” I asked Dune as they walked away.
“Em’s about to be an aunt.”
“I’m guessing Michael will eventually be the uncle?” I wondered if the tiny article of clothing would be recycled to their child one day.
“Probably.”
Lily touched my arm. “What should we know about the Quarter? Isn’t it dangerous at night?”
“It can be, but there’s some serious bulk in this group,” I said. “I mean, not me and you, obviously, but we have the Rock and the Hulk as personal bodyguards.”
“I do not turn green.” Kaleb shook his head. “Ever.”
“Just when any guy looks at Lily for longer than five seconds,” Dune said. “Which is a lot.”
I sensed I’d be doing some jealous kissing later.
“Okay,” Kaleb admitted. “I’ve totally considered going ‘Hulk smash!’ More than once.”
Dune nodded as he took my hand. “I know the feeling, man.”
Lily winked at me, and I decided to do some thank-you kissing now.
“Head that way. We’ll be right behind you.” I pointed Lily and Kaleb toward Saints & Sinners. Then I pushed Dune into an alley.
“What are you—”
I steered him where I wanted him to go, until his back was against a brick wall. “I wish we still had the room at the Bourbon Orleans.”
“I’m glad, but I’m confused. Where is this coming from?”
“Your friends are sweet to me.” I tucked two fingers in his waistband. “You’re sweet to me. You make me feel like a completely normal girl.”
“If making you feel normal gets this kind of response, remind me to do it more often.”
I slid my hands up his stomach to his chest, and then around his neck. His hands went down, over my waist and hips and stopping on my backside. I was beyond pleased when a low groan sounded in his throat.
“We are in an alley.” His mouth was on my cheek, my neck, and going lower. “In the very, very public French Quarter.”
“That doesn’t seem to be stopping you.” I leaned my head back to give him easy access.
“I can’t. I want to touch you all the time.” Lifting me up, he turned the tables and put my back against the wall. “I want to be with you all the time. Talk
to you all the time.”
“Talking is good. Not that I’m interested in conversation right now.” I wrapped my legs around his waist, and his hands moved to the backs of my thighs. His weight against me was mind-blowing. “Did I mention how much I wished we still had a room? I’m hanging on you like a tick.”
“I’m holding you like a life vest.”
“We’re not good at sexy imagery.”
He started laughing. “Do you want me to put you down?”
“No. I want to stay in this exact moment. Well, maybe where we’d end up in thirty minutes if this progressed the way I wanted, but we have work to do, and I just sent your friends to a celebrity bar, and I think I see a hobo coming, so we better go.”
One more kiss, and then I slid down his body slowly. I laughed when his eyes rolled back in his head. After I was sure we were both presentable and tucked in, I took his hand and stepped out of the alley.
Mardi Gras had come to New Orleans. On a Saturday.
Three months early.
Twenty years too late.
Dune
“Dune, wait.” Hallie stopped at the alley entryway. “Something isn’t right.”
The number of people on Bourbon Street had tripled. There were way more plastic beads and masks with feathers than usual for this time of year. Music blared, the crowds were raucous, and alcohol permeated.
Utter chaos.
Hallie took my hand and pulled me in the direction she’d indicated to Kaleb and Lily. We found them on the sidewalk, looking confused.
“It isn’t there.” Kaleb’s voice barely carried over the noise of the revelers on the sidewalk as he pointed to where Saints & Sinners used to be. “We saw the sign, and then we didn’t.”
I turned to Hallie and tried to pitch my voice over the heavy sound around us. “Do you recognize anything?”
She wrinkled her nose as she scanned the crowd. “Beer and sweat with a top note of vomit is how it usually smells here, but I’m guessing from the costumes, this is Mardi Gras. Parades on Bourbon were rerouted in the seventies. Oh, look. Love beads and Birkenstocks.”
“Great,” I replied. “The sixties. Booze and free love. Way to keep it classy, space time continuum.”
Kaleb took stock of the throng of people around us. “Look around. It’s not just the sixties.”
“I don’t see any eighties bangs. I don’t think it goes beyond the seventies, just back in time. And … the buildings have changed. Kaleb.” Lily grabbed his arm. “This is a rip world.”
My blood turned to stone. “It’s sucked us in.”
“How do we get out?” Hallie’s voice was frantic as she focused on the people around us. Not people, rips.
They stopped to stare at Hallie.
And then they started toward her, moving as one.
Chapter 17
Hallie
I could feel them coming.
“You can see them?” I asked Dune, squeezing his hand.
“I can.”
“They know what I am.” Panic made my heart race as my joints went loose. “They know, and they want me.”
Dune kept his voice as low as he could in the middle of the crowd, speaking into my ear. “I won’t leave you, Hal, I swear.”
My shirt was soaked with sweat. “Get me away from them.”
Dune didn’t wait for me to finish. He jerked me toward the alley we’d just left, running hard, pulling on my hand. Lily and Kaleb followed.
We were close, approaching the corner of the alley, almost there. So very close.
But the rips were closer.
Images rushed around me like water swirling down a drain. It happened so much faster than before, maybe because we were trapped in the rips’ world, instead of them being trapped in ours.
My body became a revolving door for rips. The blood in my veins pumped double time, triple time, as my cells regenerated and tried to give me enough energy to handle what was coming.
The mask is more than a Mardi Gras favor; it’s my chance to find Jean Claude, to make him mine.
I approach the entryway where he’s agreed to meet me, finally, and his arm reaches out to sweep me into the darkness. He says not a word, but his hands ravage my body. They grip my waist, my hips, linger on the curve of my breasts above the corset. Air kisses my skin as he pulls down my sleeves and his lips find my shoulder.
“Take off the mask,” I command. “I’ve waited so long for you.”
Heat rolls off his body, and tension keeps his muscles tight. “Here, in the dark?” he asks, tracing the neckline of my gown. “Instead of a bed?”
“Now.” He reaches for my mask, mindful of the feathers. He knows I must go back to my husband tonight. His mouth claims mine before I can tell him to mind the lipstick, and I decide I don’t care.
New world, new players.
“I don’t want to show you anything,” the girl yells back at me. I laugh and drop the beads for her, anyway.
I feel generous here. New Orleans is good to me. The beer is cold, and no one ever asks for my name. No one cares. About anything. Not if I drink, not if I squat, not if I steal. At the right parties, they don’t even care if I crawl into bed with them. If I get that far, they don’t care what I do next.
I stick my hand in my pocket. Wince when I catch a hangnail. Two rings, a wallet, cash. A set of car keys, a checkbook, and my favorite, a tiny knife with a pearl handle. A knife that sliced my cheek open before dinnertime, but belonged to me by sunset.
I can steal bigger things with a knife. I can hurt someone with a knife.
Will anyone care about that?
The possession let up long enough for me to reach out for Dune. I could feel him, hear him, but the next round slammed into me, swallowing me whole.
“Did you hear?” Carolina is aflutter, her fan flipping her ringlets at a furious pace. “The scandal is international. She buried bodies beneath the floorboards.”
Elizabeth has more to share. “There were experiments in the attic. She’d peeled back skin and let people—”
“Stop.” I speak too loudly for a lady, but my stomach is churning. “This isn’t a thing to sensationalize. These were human beings. People, with souls.”
“But they were just slaves.”
I stare at Carolina, wondering how her heart can be so full of darkness. How we could’ve been raised in the same household. How she can have such disregard for human life. “You should be ashamed of yourself. I’m ashamed to call you sister.”
My request doesn’t stop her. “Men and women were chained to the wall, body parts scattered all around in piles and in buckets.… ”
I cover my mouth with my handkerchief, my stomach churning at the thought of so much human pain, and the knowledge that my own flesh and blood relished it.
No more ugliness or horror. I pushed the memory away, but they wouldn’t let me go. Instead they just came faster and faster.…
Dune
I sat on the ground, her head in my lap. The rips shuffled her cells like they were a card deck, forming them into their own images.
Kaleb’s focus shifted from the rips on the street to Hallie on the ground. “What the hell is going on?”
“Rips. Funneling through her, controlling her.”
“Her face …” Lily reached out to put her hand on Hallie’s arm, hovering just above it. Tears filled her eyes. “Kaleb and I might know a way out, but I’m scared of what could happen to Hallie if the rip world dissolves while she’s possessed.”
“So am I.” I pushed Hallie’s hair out of her face, one that no longer belonged to her. The faces of those possessing her moved so fast her own features were a blur. She was underneath. She needed me.
Kaleb’s eyes were guarded. “We’ve got to stop this.”
“I don’t know how. She’s broken free from it on her own before. I never made her do it.”
“Dune?” Lily’s voice broke through my thoughts. “You need to see this.”
The alley was still dark,
but the sound of the party on the street echoed off the walls. The streetlights illuminated what had put so much fear in Lily’s voice.
The rips that had noticed us on Bourbon, at least thirty of them, were lined up across the entrance of the alley. Every single one stared at Hallie.
“Hallie. Come back.” Please.
As if she heard me, the transmutations slowed enough for me to distinguish some features.
A middle-aged woman with too much lipstick, most of it smeared.
A younger guy with a gash on his left cheek.
A girl Hallie’s age, her hair in ringlets and tears in her eyes.
The same faces were reflected in the rips’ lining the alley.
And then I caught a brief glimpse of Hallie, and she whispered my name. “Dune.”
“I’m here.” I grabbed her hands. “Open your eyes.”
Hallie groaned a little and her eyelids fluttered. When she gritted her teeth and squeezed my hands, I realized what she was doing.
“She’s trying to control the rip. She’s pulling it in.”
In the street where the Mardi Gras parade raged on, a bright light flashed and narrowed. The rips began to fade around the edges. A premonition pushed into my brain.
Suddenly, the rip world began folding in on itself. Inches faded at a time, and then inches became feet. The rips lining the alley disappeared all at once, and then everything was gone except for Hallie. There were a few seconds of peace, and I thought it was over.
I was wrong.
Voices roared. A gravitational pull fought against our hands, tugging at Hallie, snatching at her hair. The force of it moved her across the ground, toward the light, and Lily and Kaleb grabbed her arms.
They were fighting for her as hard as I was, but she had to fight for herself.
“Don’t leave me, Hallie.” I had to yell over the chaos.
Her eyes flew open and locked on mine.
“I’m not ready to lose you!” The whirling air around us snatched my words as they came out of my mouth. But Hallie heard me.
“I’m not ready to go.” She sat up. Her whole body tensed as a scream that sounded like a thousand voices ripped its way out of her. Power surged through the alley, and the roaring ceased.