Page 84 of If Looks Could Kill
He gave me a puzzled look. “That’s good.”
The sting of embarrassment was already spreading, and I couldn’t be politely appeased. Young ladies should be meek, modest, demure, and retiring. Not talkative.
Mike stopped and turned toward me, partially blocking my path so I had to stop too.
“Miss Woodward,” he said. “I’d like nothing better than to hear your story, and not just the two-minute version of it.”
It was hard to look at him and, because he was Mike, hard not to. There was something about him, the mouth especially, that one just wanted to watch awhile.
“You’re just being nice,” I told him.
“No,” he said pointedly. “I am entirely consulting my own preferences here.”
A little part of me flitted upward in hope at what these words might mean. But I had no experience talking alone with young men. Especially not when they were intimidatingly attractive and charming and worldly-wiser than I, with beautiful teeth to boot.
And this day. Oh, this day. What an exhausting, terrifying, heartbreaking day. And all the things that had happened in it that I could never tell a living soul.
Mike was watching me now with concern.
“I was only joking,” he said earnestly, “about entirely consulting my own preferences.” He paused awkwardly. “I mean, Iwas. Consulting my own preferences. That is to say, I am. But it’s not as if…” He glanced heavenward as if the words he needed might fall from above along with the snow. “I wouldn’t want you to think I have no regard for your feelings.”
I did my utmost not to laugh, and put my free hand on his arm. “I know that, Mike. I promise I do.” I mustered a smile. “You have nothing to fear, where I’m concerned.”
“There’s where you’re wrong,” he said, “but I’m glad if I haven’t offended you.”
“You couldn’t.” A single snowflake spiraled past my eyes. There’s where I was wrong?
“That’s kind of you to say, Miss Woodward,” he told me. “I certainly wouldn’t want to.”
“You don’t have to call me Miss Woodward,” I told him, “or Miss Tabitha. You can just call me Tabitha.”
He smiled. “I’d like that,” he said. “It makes us friends.” He held out a hand to shake. I set my suitcase down on the pavement and shook it. Both our hands were cold. I liked the feel of his in mine. I didn’t want to let go.
Something hard pressed into my back while a voice spoke in my ear. “You two,” it said. “Don’t scream, see? And come with me.”
Pearl—Tenth Street(Midnight, Monday, December 3, 1888)
Pearl stands outside a lodging house on Tenth Street. An unremarkable one, three stories tall, built of brick like its neighbors and like thousands of its sibling dwellings throughout the city.
She doesn’t recall the twists and turns that brought her here, but this is the place.
Just a random house where a random man sleeps tonight, a man who bumped into a random girl and annihilated the good life she had carefully and patiently built. Stripped it of all its hopes. Flung away from it whatever friendships she’d thought she’d secured.
Something pulses from the house with the rhythm of a heartbeat, deep and deafening. Crimson and orange with bloodguilt and damnation, on the other side of that door. It calls to her.
She’s not the only one watching the house. A man stands at the corner near a pub, huffing into his upturned coat collar. He tries to look nonchalant, as though passing winter nights on Manhattan street corners is normal for a professional man like him.
He is here, Pearl intuits, for the same mysterious person who drew herhere, though whether this makes him her ally or her competition is unclear. What is she here for, anyway? To neutralize a threat? To punish a villain? To fail at either and meet her death?
The man on the corner. “The enemy of my enemy.” Does he see and sense what Pearl does? Or is he here for some more prosaic reason? To collect a debt? To serve a court summons? To spy, for hire, upon a cheating husband?
No. None of those.
Pearl considers pumping this man for information, then decides against it. To ask is to engage; to engage is to be sucked down into a dark void of despair and accept the monstrosity of this fate, to face and fight this man as her demon self.
Monstrosity.Tabitha would’ve liked that. What had Freyda said? A “double intendry.”
Will this man be her death?
