Wicked Appetite

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I shook my head in a reflex action to clear the confusion. I was sitting on a bench at the edge of the park, and Diesel was squatting in front of me, holding my hands. The line of his mouth was tight with anger, his eyes showed concern.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” The truth is, I felt okay, but Diesel looked worried and a little shaken, and his anxiety was infectious.

“Do you know your name?”

“Lizzy.”

“Do you know how you got here?”

“No.”

“You were with Wulf,” Diesel said.

“Oh yeah. Now I remember.” I looked down at my hands. “Am I burned? Do I have blisters anywhere?”

“The parts of you I can see look okay. I’d rather wait and examine the rest of you at home so I can take my time. Right now, we need to get moving. I’m illegally parked.”

“You’re supposed to be a powerful Unmentionable. Can’t you cloak your car in an invisibility shield? Can’t you make the sign disappear from the handicap parking space?”

Diesel tugged me down the path to the sidewalk. “No, but I can make you wish you were nicer to me.”

I looked up and down Boylston Street, but I didn’t see Diesel’s SUV. “Where’s your car?”

“I swapped it out. I was getting a migraine from the monkey smell.”

The only car illegally parked was a black Porsche turbo. “You swapped it out for a turbo?”

Diesel opened the passenger-side door for me. “Gwen takes whatever is available and fits me.” He angled himself behind the wheel and pulled into traffic.

“Where do the cars come from?”

“I don’t know. I never get an answer when I ask, so I’ve stopped asking.”

“Wulf is living in one of the high-rise condos bordering the park. He had his own elevator, so I’m guessing it’s a penthouse.”

“That sounds like Wulf.”

“It was nice. Beautiful art on the walls and elegant furniture. And Wulf wasn’t terrible. He was very quiet and civil, but there’s something about him that frightens me.”

“Maybe it’s because he burned you, and he kills people.” Diesel took the road through the park and turned toward Storrow Drive. “How did it go with your dad last night?”

“It was good except for the mashed potatoes.”

Diesel cut his eyes to me.

“Carl wanted to sit at the table and eat with us,” I told him. “So I fixed him a plate of steak and green beans and mashed potatoes.”

“You didn’t try to get him to eat mashed potatoes with a fork, did you?”

“Yeah.”

“Been there, done that,” Diesel said.

“Anyway, everything else was nice, and it was great to see my dad. I miss my family, and I wouldn’t mind living closer, but I don’t miss northern Virginia.”

Diesel hit the entrance to Storrow and went from zero to seventy in about three seconds. Traffic was all coming into the city, and we were leaving the city.

“I was waiting for you in front of your house,” Diesel said. “I didn’t expect you to come out the back door.”

“I didn’t want to wake my dad.”

Diesel’s brows knit together. “I usually sense Wulf. I don’t know how I missed him this morning.”

“It wasn’t Wulf. It was Hatchet. He stun-gunned me and brought me to Wulf’s penthouse. Why didn’t you just read my mind?”

Diesel grinned. “You don’t actually think I can read your mind, do you?”

“No. Of course not. That would be ridiculous.” I gave up a sigh. “How do you always know what I’m thinking if you can’t read my mind?”

Diesel slowed for traffic, changing lanes for the Tobin Bridge. “Lucky guess?”

I wasn’t sure what I hated more… thinking Diesel could read my mind, or knowing I was so transparent he always knew what was in my head.

“Anything happen in Wulf’s condo that I should know about?” Diesel asked.

“It turns out there are four charms. Wulf wants me to find the fourth one. I said I was working with you, and he said it didn’t matter. He said it’ll come down to a deal and a roll of the dice.”

“Why doesn’t Wulf have Hatchet find the fourth charm?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he thinks it’ll go faster with two people looking. At any rate, you apparently need all four charms to find the real Stone, and Wulf’s determined to find the Stone.”

“Do you have any idea who that fourth charm holder might be?” Diesel asked.

“Yes. Do you?”

He nodded. “Yep. I’m guessing it’s serial mom.”

That was my guess, too. She wasn’t at the reading of the will, but she was in the photo with the other charm holders. And she started having children at the right time.

“I need to get to the bakery,” I told Diesel. “I’ll be done around noon, and we can go talk to Melody. I imagine mornings are chaos in her house anyway.”

It was precisely seven o’clock when Diesel dropped me off at Dazzle’s. Clara was up to her elbows in bread dough, looking like she needed a vacation. Her hair was more eccentric than usual and shot with flour. Her expression was somewhere between a death in the family and royally pissed off.

“Where the heck have you been?” Clara half shrieked.

“I was kidnapped.”

“That’s no excuse,” she said. “You could at least call.”

I hung my sweatshirt on a hook by the door and buttoned myself into a clean chef coat. “I don’t have a cell phone. And anyway, I was unconscious a lot of the time.”

Clara pushed her hair back with her hand, and a glob of bread dough stuck in the hair just above her ear. “I was really worried. Ten more minutes, and I was going to start calling hospitals. How could you get kidnapped? Where was Diesel? I thought he was supposed to be protecting you.”

“My father unexpectedly showed up last night, and there was no way I could explain Diesel without creating a family crisis. So I kicked Diesel out. I guess it was a dumb thing to do, because Steven Hatchet was waiting for me when I opened the door to come to work this morning.”

“Who’s Steven Hatchet?”

“He’s the guy who sliced my arm.”

“You said it was a freak accident with your carving knife.”

I measured out the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder for the first batch of cupcakes. “I fibbed.”

Clara stopped working and looked at me. “I’m starting to get a bad feeling.”

“Steven Hatchet supposedly is an Unmentionable. And supposedly, we’re the only two people on the planet who have the ability to find certain empowered objects.”

“The SALIGIA Stones.”

“Yes. Unfortunately, Hatchet is a complete psycho nutcase who thinks he’s living in the Middle Ages. And now, his whole life is centered around impressing Wulf. He calls him his liege lord. And it gets even better, because Hatchet is an authority on toxins and torture.”

“Cripes,” Clara said.

I dumped butter, milk, the flour mixture, and vanilla into the big mixer and turned it on. “Anyway, Hatchet snatched me and brought me to Wulf’s condo.”

Clara had both hands flat on the island, leaning toward me, eyes wide. “You were in his condo? Omigosh, what was it like?”

“It was in a high-rise on the park in Boston. Beautifully decorated. Old Masters type art on the walls. They looked authentic, but what do I know.”

“What about his bedroom and his kitchen? Does he cook?”

“I only saw the living room.” Thank goodness.

I whipped up egg whites, added them to the rest of the batter, and filled the cupcake tins. I shoved the tins into the oven and started another batch of cupcakes.

A half hour later, I pulled the cupcakes out of the oven and set them on a rack at my workstation. Clara came over and looked at them with me.

“What are they?” Clara wanted to know.

“Cupcakes.”

“They don’t look like cupcakes. They’re all flat and lumpy.”

“I don’t get it. My cupcakes are always perfect. I’ve been making cupcakes for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never had this happen.”

“Maybe there’s something wrong with the oven. Maybe you forgot the baking powder.”

“I have a second batch baking in the lower oven.”

We went to the oven and looked in. Disaster. My chocolate cupcakes were oozing over their wrappers and dripping onto the oven floor.

“This is horrible,” I said. “How could this be happening?”

Clara’s face went pale. “You’ve lost it.”

“Lost what?”

“Your ability to make Unmentionably superior cupcakes.”

“That’s ridiculous. It was the flour or something.”

“It happened to me,” Clara said. “I never talk about it, but I’m going to tell you because you have to know. I used to be an Unmentionable. I come from a long line of Unmentionables.”

“Get out!”

“There was this guy I was dating after my first divorce,” Clara said. “He was really nice, and one thing led to another, and next thing, we spent the night together. And when I woke up in the morning, I was a Normal.”

“Are you serious? What was your ability?”

“Cookies. I still make cookies, and they’re okay, but I used to make cookies that were perfect. And my cookies made people happy.”

“They still make people happy.”

“It’s not the same. Everyone who bit into one of my Unmentionable cookies smiled. And then there was the other thing,” she said.

“There was more?”

“If I really concentrated, I could bend a spoon just by looking at it.”

“Jeez.”

“I know it’s a parlor trick, but I really enjoyed it. The cookies I can manage, because I can still make decent cookies, but I feel bad about losing the spoon bending.” Some of the color returned to Clara’s cheeks. “It was great at a dinner party. All of a sudden, someone’s spoon would curl up, and everyone would freak out.”

“No one knew it was you?”

“Some might have suspected. It was known that the Dazzles weren’t all normal. Mostly, there were all sorts of wrong rumors about our abilities. Like flying and casting spells. The truth is, most Unmentionable abilities are pretty mundane.”

I plucked one of the misshapen cupcakes out of the pan. “I never knew I had help making cupcakes. I just always figured I was really good at it. A natural ability.”

“You were right about the natural ability,” Clara said.

“So how did I lose it?”

“I suppose you lost it the same way I did. You had sex with another Unmentionable. Did you sleep with Diesel last night?”

“No. I haven’t slept with Diesel at all. At least, not that way.”

Clara bit into her lower lip. “Wulf?” she whispered.

“Not that I remember.”

“That’s not a definite no.”

I put my hand to the island to steady myself. “I was unconscious for some of the time.”

Clara fanned me with a kitchen towel. “You don’t look good.”

I slid down the side of the island and sat hard on the floor, legs out. “I don’t feel good.”

“Is there any other possibility?”

“Hatchet.”

I leaned forward, head between my knees, took a bunch of deep breaths, and tried to wrap my mind around the horrible possibilities. “The thing is, I can’t imagine either of them doing it.”

“You don’t think they’re capable?”

“I think they’re both capable… just not under these circumstances. Hatchet is impulsive, but I can’t see him messing with a woman he thought belonged to his liege. And Wulf wants me to find the fourth charm.”

Clara pulled me to my feet, and we looked at the cupcakes.

“Cupcakes don’t lie,” Clara said.

My emotions were mixed. The thought that I might have been violated while I was unconscious made my stomach sick. The possibility that I might have lost my Unmentionableness (if in fact I ever possessed it) wasn’t completely disappointing. The scary people would leave me alone, and I could return to a normal life of mortgage payments and cupcake making. Okay, so maybe my cupcakes wouldn’t be spectacular, but I could learn to make them perfectly enjoyable. I mean, anyone can learn to make a cupcake, right?

“Are there any telltale signs of… you know?” Clara asked. “Is your underwear on backwards?”

I checked around. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to be.

“I’m going to make another batch of cupcakes,” I told her. “And I’m going to follow the recipe and concentrate.”

Diesel strolled into the shop at noon and stood in front of the pastry case.

“You must have had a run on cupcakes,” he said. “There are no cupcakes here.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “I want a double cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate milkshake.”

I traded my chef coat for my sweatshirt, hung my purse on my shoulder, and avoided looking at the trash bag that held a little over two hundred cupcakes not fit for sale.

“You’re either pissed off or celebrating,” Diesel said. “I can’t tell which.”

I swished past him, out the door to the turbo. “Exactly.”

Carl was crammed into the miniature backseat. He peeked out at me and gave me a finger wave.

“Your dad rolled out around ten,” Diesel said. “Cat was looking like he needed some alone time, so I brought Carl with me.”

“He just fits in the backseat.”

“Yeah. It’s monkey-size. You want to tell me about your day so far? I’m not getting a clear signal.”

“I can’t make cupcakes.”

“And?”

“No matter what recipe I use, the cupcakes are awful.”

“Honey, it’s not the end of civilization.”

“I thought you would be upset.”

“Guess I’m not in a cupcake mood. I thought the cheeseburger sounded like a good idea.”

“Cheee,” Carl said from the backseat.

“What about my Unmentionableness? You said I made Unmentionable cupcakes.”

Diesel rolled the engine over. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but not everything I say is true.” He glanced over at me, his expression unreadable. “Is there anything more you want to tell me about you and Wulf?”

“I was unconscious for some of the time, and when my cupcakes flopped, I got worried that Wulf might have used the opportunity to unempower me.”

“Wulf won’t unempower you until he’s in possession of the SALIGIA Stones. If Hatchet gets run over by a truck, you’re the only one who can identify the Stones. And until Wulf has the Stones, he won’t chance being reduced to a Normal.” Diesel grinned at me. “Anyway, you can count on me to save you from Wulf. The minute I think you’re really in danger of getting unempowered, I’ll make the sacrifice and do the unempowering myself.”

“Gee, thanks.”

A half mile later, Diesel swung into a drive-through and ordered burgers and fries.

“This is a new car,” I said to Carl, handing him his bag of food. “Be careful. I don’t want to see any crumbs or ketchup stains back there.”

“Eee,” Carl said, taking the bag.

I ate my double cheeseburger and sucked up some milkshake. I checked Carl out in the rearview mirror and saw that he was eating his fries one at a time, working at being neat. I nibbled at a single fry from my own bag and inadvertently sighed.

“There’s something going on in your head,” Diesel said. “I can feel anxiety leaking out of your ears.”

“I can’t stop thinking about the cupcakes. What if you’re wrong, and they really were part of my Unmentionableness? What if something did happen when I was unconscious?”

“You’d still be the same person,” Diesel said. “Being Normal or Unmentionable doesn’t change who you are.”

“It isn’t that. I don’t care that I might not be an Unmentionable anymore. I never wanted to be one in the first place. It’s the way I might have lost it. There’s another possibility besides Wulf.” I squinched my eyes closed. “It’s so awful I can’t even say it out loud.”

“Hatchet?” Diesel asked.

I nodded my head yes.

Carl tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to look at him, and he burped in my face.

“Yuk,” I said to Carl. “That was gross.”

“Eep.”

“He’s drooling,” I said to Diesel. “Have you ever known him to drool?”

“Gorp,” Carl said. And he threw up burgers and fries and chocolate shake all over the backseat.

Diesel grimaced and rolled his window down. “I totally screwed up my karma. I don’t know what I did, but it must have been bad, because now I have this monkey.”

“You made him carsick. It’s your driving in this car. You rocket around corners, and zoom off from stop lights, and then you stop short.”

“Yeah. It’s fun.”