Page 21

H elena Had a Plan

“S o what is this?” Cindy asked as she brought the cup to her nose to smell the brew.

“Uh, nothing,” Helena tried to cover. She leaned over to Cindy holding an open thermos to show her friend. An open thermos she hadn’t had a few mi nutes ago.

Dammit, Helena, he thought, as he realized she had used her power to create it and her poignantly avoiding his gaze was the confirmat ion of it.

“I just brought you some tea. I got the recipe from my grandmother’s old church cookbook, like I said. It’s supposed to be good for anxiety and stuff. I thought it would be fun to try and that maybe some old witch medicine might help you.”

“I mean it smells good, even cold,” Cindy conceded, then brought the cup that made up the top of the thermos to her lips and took a sip. “Though I really just feel better having gotten out of my parent ’s house.”

“Yeah, I’m glad I brought this thermos of it, but I was going to make it for you fresh at the house,” He lena lied.

She glanced over at Rafferty, who sat on the other side of her on the bench, feeling calm in the cool air of the train station platform. There were very few people around on the open-air platform. Most other passengers waited inside the small train station fieldhouse where there was heat and a bathroom.

Helena nudged his arm to offer him some of her tea as well, but he r efused it.

“I’m good,” he said, his arms lying limp on his lap. He felt tired, but it was a good kind of tired. A triumphant tired. He knew he should be upset with her spending her power to make them some of that don’t-be-depressed tea from before, but he just couldn’t. His emotions were all wrung out after the co mpetition.

Cindy glanced at him, shaking her head. “I still think we should have fought harder,” she said over he r cup rim.

“With your mom?” Hel ena asked.

“No! At the com petition.”

Helena sighed, leaning back on the bench. “I mean, there are worse ways they could have resolved it. It wasn’t technically a disquali fication.”

“They should have done more than just give you your entry fee back,” Cindy insisted.

“Like what?” Raffe rty asked.

Cindy huffed out a breath. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But they could have at least made a real attempt at apo logizing.”

“I didn’t fulfill the challenge,” Rafferty said, closing his eyes. “What more is there to say? An apology would have meant nothing.”

“Why aren’t you more upset about this?” Ci ndy asked.

He shrugged. “There are more things in life that are far more unfair. It was fun, and it was free. I win ei ther way.”

Helena shook her head. “I mean, let’s be honest, the whole setup was a mess. There are a ton of things I would do differently,” she countered, her gaze far off as she was imagining it while she ticked off her fingers. “If I was in charge of something like that… well for one thing there would be a whole lot more promotion. Guest commentators. Appropriate judging criteria. I would make sure all the equipment worked and have a recourse if it wasn’t. I mean there are just so many little details that could be taken care of that would make the whole experience so muc h better.”

Cindy looked at Rafferty again. “Are you okay with that Eleanor chick winning, though?” Cindy retorted.

“It was not her fault either. It just happened,” He lena said.

“It didn’t just happen,” Rafferty said as he glanced at Cindy. “You-know-who w as there.”

“You-know-who?” Helena asked, looking quizzically. “You mean th e agents?”

He met her gaze meaningfully. She gave him a little shake of her head. Sighing, he leaned forward and set his forehead to hers, quietly inviting her to take the memory. He would rather that than risk breaking his deal with the demon in question.

Helena understood that at least and touched her forehe ad to his.

“Okay, I’m going to the bathroom, you love birds,” Cindy said with wry humor. “Don’t let the train leave wi thout me.”

They waited a few seconds for Cindy to disappear into the little field house, then Helena leaned back, his memor y uneaten.

“It was Vassago, w asn’t it?”

Raffer ty nodded.

“Damn it,” Helena cursed, “I thought I felt like something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was that guy, the one who wouldn’t let you switch out your toaster oven. He was Vassago? What… wha t a jerk!”

Rafferty chuckled. “That is probably the mildest thing anyone has ever said a bout him.”

She shook her head. “And there is nothing we can do about it?”

“He kept his end of the deal. He did us no harm,” he po inted out.

“He sabotaged you! I would say that’s doing harm,” s he argued.

Shrugging, Rafferty folded his arms. “Not really. He could have been the one that got you the entry fee back, resolving the issue. I wasn’t entitled to win, and there were no real consequences for me not winning. It came out as neutral as possible.”

“Cindy is right. You seem really chill about this,” Helena pressed, her ir e cooling.

“If anything, I find it reassuring. If we hadn’t kept our end of the deal up to this point, he would not have been compelled to bend over backward to do the same. And besides, I still had fun.” He smiled so hard it made his face hurt. “I still feel li ke I won.”

Helena laid her head on his shoulder. “I’m glad. Now I just need to finish figuring out how to win, too.”

“What would winning look like for you?” he asked.

“I want to do it,” she said, her voice soft and intense. “I want to run one of these events, but I want to do it right .” She straightened and dug out her phone. “I was looking at the organization’s website. Anyone can host one of these, they just have to register it, and Scarlet Promotions could do this if I can convince Scarlet not to give up.”

He nodded. “I see what you’re tryi ng to do.”

“I can fix everything. I can help everyone,” she insisted, smiling. “I can fix Scarlet Promotions and save her legacy. I can get you a life you would love, a real restart, and show people what a good chef you are. And it’s like with the ice cream machine, if I’m there, then Vassago can’t act.” She paused, then asked, “You think he’s targeting Eleanor?”

Rafferty blew out a breath, considering his answer. “She’s who I would target. Talented and hungry. She’s so full of energy and drive. He could feed off that for a while if he can convince her to make a deal with him.”

“Do you think they’re already i n a deal?”

He licked his lips. “If they are, that is not your fault or your problem. She’s a grown woman making her own choices.”

“Yeah, but she can’t understand what it means.” Helena licked her lips. “Not that I knew either, but demons… they aren’t really like yo u, right?”

“Like me?” Rafferty raised a n eyebrow.

“You know. You were so… merciful, I guess.” Helena wrinkled her nose in that ado rable way.

Rafferty chuckled dryly. “No, demons are not like me. Not even me.”

“What do you mean?” She wrinkled her n ose again.

He looked at her, drinking her face in. “I have no idea why I spared you. Honestly. You were the perfect mark. I had you over a barrel, but I don’t know. Maybe it was because of…” His throat started to close up as he thought about the last person, the one before Helena, who had summoned him. “Because I was so tired of it. A ll of it.”

Helena seemed on the brink of saying something when her eyes drifted over his shoulder toward the train station field house. She suddenly had a look of concern, and her lower lip slipped between her teeth to anxiously bite. Cindy was returning, but something seemed to be botheri ng Helena.

Then Helena spoke again. “I’ve been thinking about telling Cindy the truth about me.”

His whole body flinched, and she refocused on his reaction. “It won’t violate the agreement, right? What happened to me is my secret and really has nothing to do with Vassago.”

“Uh… no, no it doesn’t,” he said, his mind spinning up into a jumble. “But why would you do that with everything you have going on?”

No, he thought, that is the wrong tactic with her.

“She’s my best friend. I have to,” Helena answered as if that rule wa s obvious.

“It’s not lying to her…” He scoffed at the notion. He leaned forward, fighting to keep his voice down with the urgency of what he needed to say. “How shocked were you when you realized for certain that demons were very real and not just a story you hear about on the news that happens to othe r people?”

Helena’s eyes went wide with t he memory.

He continued. “You almost lost your mind with that big of a paradigm shift, and you hadn’t tried to harm yourself a few short wee ks prior.”

“But… but I don’t want to lie to her,” she repeated in a small, childl ike voice.

“There is a big difference between lying and privacy ,” he answered.

Helena bit her lower lip and pursed her eyebrows together hard. He could tell she understood what he was saying. In a few more seconds, she would agree with it. A familiar smug feeling bubbled up inside him, and he hated it.

I’m not telling her this because I care, he realized, or rather, not only. I’m… I’m jealous! He could see what he was doing. But he wasn’t sure if he cared.

“He lena, I…”

Just then Helena set her fingers to his mouth to stop him, as Cindy returned to sit down next to him, but she wasn’t listening to them; she had her phone pressed to her ear. Whatever lightness in her expression they had achieved over the last few hours had been completely ob literated.

It annoyed him. Why was she doing this to Helena? Burdening her with her own problem? If they had been in the other place, Cindy would be another dark soul, reaching out to suck the energy out of whomever she could grab. The urge to protect Helena from that burned i nside him.

“Dad, I…” Cindy said, but the voice coming from her phone only shouted at her. Words like “ungrateful” and “disgraceful” came to him clearly, but th at was it.

Helena’s lips drew into a straight line as she heard every word. She opened her mouth to say something, probably “hang up,” but urgently Rafferty moved to put his face in her sight line to block her view.

You have your own problems, h e thought.

What he said, though, was “Do you think Scarlet will go for y our idea?”

She pinched her eyebrows deeper, and Rafferty wished he could use just a little bit of his demonic aura to make it harder for her attention to drift from him, to be more of a draw on her attention than her frie nd’s pain.

“Do you?” he pushed.

Helena looked back and forth between him and her friend, unable to choose. “Yes, I think so. This is a project Scarlet Promotions can totally handle,” Helena assured him as her gaze shifted back to Cindy.

“Dad, please listen—” Cindy’s face became more and more d espondent.

Helena leaned over Rafferty to gently set her hand over the phone. The two friends made eye contact, tears welling at the bottom of Cindy’s. Quietly, she yielded the phone, and Helena pressed down on the hang-up button on the screen to do just that, cutting off the still-ranting voice. Helena then pocketed the phone so that it couldn’t hurt Cind y anymore.

The burning raged in Raffert y’s chest.

Above them, the overhead speaker binged three descending tones. “Attention all passengers. The train going north will be arriving in three minutes. Please stand back from the blue line for your safety. Have all baggage with you and tickets ready to board.”

“Let’s get on the train,” Helena managed to communicate over the ann ouncement.

Rafferty and Helena gathered up their bags, but Cindy simply sat there, staring, as if she were numb and detached from all of it. Finally, Helena picked up her duffle bag to pass to Rafferty before taking her friend’s hand and tugging her up to her feet as the train rumbled into the station. Cindy let herself be led up into their wait ing coach.

Helena handled passing their tickets to the conductor, waiting at the doors to punch. None of them said anything to each other outside of functional directions to their first-class private room, the fortuitous upgrade coming in handy again: Helena and Rafferty side by side on the two-seater and Cindy dropped in the single seat across, her gaze returning to staring out t he window.

Helena’s fingers laced in between Rafferty’s, gripping hard enough to turn her knuckles white, while she watched her friend sink back into her own personal hell, the last few hours only a small rise above the surface. He laid his own hand over hers, squeezing, trying to communicate without words that there was nothing she could do. He had seen this sort of darkne ss before.

“Cindy? It’s going to be okay,” Helena sa id softly.

“Don’t say that,” Cindy responded, but she didn’t look away from the window as the train jerked into motion. “Ju st don’t.”

“I ’m just…”

“I’m going to stay with Chris and Charlie when we get back to the city,” Cindy said, crossing her arms.

The hairs on the back of Rafferty’s arms stood up. He could feel the eerie energy coming off of Helena and knew intuitively what she intended.

Digging in his pocket, he slipped out his phone. There were only two other numbers in it, one Helena’s, and hit he autodial on the other one.

A weak voice answered on the other end . “Hello?”

“Scarlet? It’s Rafferty,” he said loudly, capturing all the attention in the train car.

“Oh, yes, Rafferty. How can I help you?” she said, clearly speaking the words automatically, despite the fatigued undertones. “Oh, wait, you were just at that cooking competition event. How d id it go?”

“I enjoyed myself. It has some real potential, but I will let Helena tell you about it.” He then passed the pho ne to her.

Her eyes glanced at her friend but put on the spot like that with her boss, she couldn’t not take the phone.

“Hi, Scarlet,” she said into it, turning her guilty eyes toward t he window.

As they launched into talking, Rafferty glanced at Cindy. She didn’t look at him, only settled back, her face clean of emotion. He recognized it, but he couldn’t let her drag Helena down with her.