Page 26 of Capitol Matters (Marionette #2)

“You knew about the champagne.” Holland stared me down from across her desk. Shadows smudged around her exposed eyes, a testament to a difficult weekend dealing with the press as news reports rolled in. The gala had been sabotaged and was widely regarded as recklessly dangerous, turning public opinion against Maximus and his vote.

By Monday afternoon, toxicology reports came back. Those who fell ill at the gala had been dosed with a concentrated form of the plague virus. The disease was not typically deadly, but the unfortunate few who partook of the tainted drink were failing fast.

This private chat in Holland’s office wasn’t an interrogation—not officially, at least—but it might as well have been. I was sweating as profusely as if Holland had a spotlight aimed at my face.

“You knew there was something wrong with it, didn’t you?” the investigator prodded .

I shook my head, refusing to sit and feel further caged into this discussion. “Besides that I wanted to dump it all over Tobin’s smug self?” I huffed a breath. “No, I didn’t know anything about it.”

“You stopped me from drinking any,” Holland continued despite my denial. “You even tried to talk me out of it. Why?”

She’d suspected me that very night. All but accused me of hiding things from her. She’d told me once she didn’t think I was stupid. I knew for a fact she wasn’t, either.

“You even sent me to talk to my father before you went to the fountain!” she blurted, every bit a detective on the case. “Did you do it?” The revelation pulled her features slack.

“Did I poison the champagne, then dump it?” My nose scrunched. “Is that a legitimate question?”

She’d been ramping up since we started talking, but my incredulity slowed her. I had additional holes to punch in her logic—like where I would get concentrated plague in the first place—but kept quiet while she processed.

I was tempted to hang the blame where it belonged. The Capitol had security cameras, likely even in the banquet hall. Reviewing tapes from the gala would show me chatting up Ripley and Maggie, and Ripley adding his toxic backwash to the fountain. But, if they had that kind of evidence, Holland wasn’t letting on. She looked more perplexed than ever.

Finally, I decided to give the dog a bone, or at least put it off my scent .

“Look, Holland,” I began, “I’m a suspicious son of a bitch. Comes in the ‘Life of Crime Starter Kit.’ If your dad wanted to make himself look good throwing a fancy Capitol shindig, there was bound to be someone who wanted to use that same opportunity to make him look bad.”

“You think it was the Bloody Hex?”

I shrugged, and Holland nodded.

“There have been rumors since they broke Ripley Vaughn out of prison,” she said. “He’s known to have a kind of poison ability. Very old magic. And the timing of it all is convenient, to say the least.”

Her mental gears were turning.

“How is Tobin, by the way?” I asked. Not my smoothest transition, as proven by her reaction.

“Don’t pretend you care, Fitch. And don’t try to change the subject.” Her scowl lasted only a moment before she confessed in a softer voice, “He’s not well.”

Guilt nagged at me. I’d been almost gleeful to see the snooty investigator guzzling the tainted bubbly. A stomach flu was far from the worst fate I might have wished on him but, judging by Holland’s sudden sobriety, he may have gotten far more than that.

“I know he wasn’t kind to you, but Toby is an excellent investigator,” Holland said.

Breaking out the nicknames, were we? And were those tears glistening in her eyes?

“I’ve known him since the academy,” she continued. “He was always right on my heels, so competitive…” A smile curved her lips. “It’s been an honor to have him on my team. ”

Past tense. Yikes.

I gripped the back of one of her guest chairs, feeling the prickling heat of the imagined spotlight once more. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that.”

“They called in his family,” Holland said grimly.

“Shit.”

“I have an officer meeting them at the quarantine center today,” she said. “I should have gone myself, but…”

The pinch of pain on her face betrayed remorse I didn’t fully understand.

“Some investigator I am, huh?” Holland leaned back in her seat. “ You could see something was wrong, but I was so worried about that stupid speech that I missed it entirely.”

Tobin trashed my car. Practically killed it. At the very least, he put it on life support. My appetite for revenge was far from sated, but I didn’t want the guy to die. Death surrounded me lately, and I had grown weary of it.

I may not have had the cure for what ailed Tobin Moreno, but I knew who did.

Standing on the doorstep of room 145, I scrubbed my shoes on the mat that proclaimed Whalecome! over the image of a cartoon whale spouting water. It was sole evidence Ripley did, in fact, possess a sense of humor.

The sun warmed my back as it sank toward the horizon. I’d come here straight from work, so it was closer to night than morning, but all the guys kept odd hours, so there was no way of knowing if the grouchy healer would be awake or even home.

I’d knocked several seconds ago and was ready to try again when the chain lock clattered. The door creaked open, and in its frame stood the teen dressed in black sweatpants and a tank top. He rubbed a hand against the side of his face, his cheek creased with sheet wrinkles.

I flashed an uneven grin. “Morning, sunshine.”

Ripley’s eyes—one near black and the other solid white—narrowed. Gripping the door, he shoved it toward closing. I stomped a foot inside the frame, stopping it mid-swing.

“What do you want, Farrow?” he asked, his accent thicker in his drowsy state.

Shoving through the cracked door, I stepped into the darkened room. A quick look around found it to be vacant. “Where’s Mags?” I wondered aloud.

“About.” He stared at me sternly as I entered.

Matching double beds were done up in avocado green comforters and illuminated by the light filtering through the tattered blinds. The room stunk of mothballs and age and contained surprisingly few personal items. Even Ripley’s prison cell had been homier than this. But that had been ten-plus years in the making, and he’d had only a few weeks to settle in here.

The separate beds did not surprise me. I’d seen and heard enough to know that Ripley and Maggie’s relationship was essentially platonic. She was too childlike to be a sexual conquest, and he seemed content to fill the role of her caregiver.

While he closed and relocked the door, I dropped onto the nearest bed—Ripley’s judging by the tangled sheets—and grabbed the television remote from the bedside table.

I consulted the boxy television housed in the entertainment center on the opposite wall.

“You didn’t answer me.” Ripley moved into my line of sight to stand with his arms crossed. “What do you want? Need another body disposed of?”

“So you can tattle to Grimm again?”

Clicking the power button caused the TV screen to flash to life. It was paused on a scene from what looked to be a video game. A horde of gray-skinned, grizzled undead swarmed the camera, climbing over the corpses of their peers in some kind of office-building bloodbath.

I waved the control toward the television. “You don’t get enough of this in real life?”

Ripley stepped forward and snatched the remote, punching the image to black before setting the control on the table.

“I told Grimm nothing then, and I wouldn’t now,” he replied. “I was as surprised as you were to see him there.”

I shook my head. “But you said—”

“ I said nothing. You assumed,” he stabbed a finger at me, “and I didn’t correct you.”

Thinking back to Grimm’s arrival at Lock n’ Roll brought more confusion, and I frowned. “Why not?”

“People pleasing is a young man’s game. And I am old. ”

It sounded strange coming from an apparent teenager, which prompted me to question, “How old?”

Even Holland implied Ripley’s powers predated us. I’d certainly never seen anything like them.

He waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t keep track of those things.”

“Who was president when you were born?”

“No presidents, mate.” His white eye narrowed as it peeked through his shaggy bangs. “Kings.”

My grunt of acknowledgment was meant to downplay my surprise, but I wasn’t sure it worked.

“So, you didn’t come about a body, and I’m not fond of idle chatter. What then?” he asked. “Why are you here?”

“You know that stuff you put in the champagne fountain at the gala?” Or regurgitated like a mother bird feeding her fledglings?

“Plague,” he said flatly. “What of it?”

“You have the cure, right?”

“I am the cure.”

My mouth twisted into a frown. It might have been too much to hope I could package Ripley’s power. And what would that look like? A Ziploc bag filled with his breath that I could pop in Tobin’s face?

Maybe I could take the cure directly to the dying investigator. In disguise. Somehow.

“I can… work with that,” I began, though I doubted it already. “If you’re willing to come to the quarantine center and—”

He scoffed, turning away. “You truly are shameless to be asking me for favors. You’re the reason I’m here, and you’ve been nothing but a bloody bellend since I arrived.”

“A what?”

“A dick, Farrow.” He glanced over. “For weeks, you’ve been an obnoxious little shit, and you owe me an apology.”

I laughed. “I’m not apologizing for a damn thing. Definitely not to a Capitol-informing rat.” Even if I believed his claims about the storage facility, he couldn’t deny his original sin.

“How do you not see that we’re on the same side of this?” His voice turned suddenly severe. “Yes, I betrayed the Hex. For you. And your brother. My allegiance has never changed. It’s with you, you barmy prat.”

I shook my head at the gibberish. “I don’t know what that means—”

Ripley threw up his hands. “Christ’s sake, it isn’t kind. Surely you can infer that much.”

“If you’ve always been on my side, then why’d you try to kill me in prison?” I asked.

“You assumed I was trying to kill you.” He echoed his earlier statement. “And I didn’t correct you.”

He looked so smug that I wanted to punch him. I rolled my eyes and stood from the bed.

Peering into the bathroom found more signs of Maggie. Hair supplies and makeup littered the sink counter, but more interesting than that was the bold, red doodles adorning the mirror. X’s and hearts interspersed with illegible handwriting. It looked to be written in lipstick.

“What do you need it for, anyway?” Ripley asked, then clarified, “The cure. You aren’t sick.”

“One of the investigators is dying,” I replied.

The pseudo-healer’s expression had returned to impassive and stayed that way. “How unfortunate,” he said.

“Look, I don’t even like the guy.” I huffed a breath. “But Holland’s pretty torn up about it, so I figured I would try.”

Ripley stepped around me to the closet and slung it open, rifling through a swath of fabric so uniformly black I was surprised he could tell one garment from the next.

“As surprised as I am by what appears to be an altruistic gesture, my terms remain.” He pulled out a long-sleeved thermal and tugged it on over his ratty tank top. Rolling his bony shoulders, he concluded, “No apology, no cure.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“For?” he pressed.

I growled. “Being a barmy prat.”

Ripley snickered and nodded. “For being a barmy prat.”

He wandered into the bathroom area and stooped below the counter to dig into the small, square trash can.

“This is an improvement, though,” he muttered. “You’re doing some good for a change.”

“You know we’re criminals, right?” My eyebrows raised. “Doing good isn’t usually on the agenda.”

The sound of the plastic liner swishing accompanied Ripley’s search of the garbage. “No, but doing what is necessary so you can live with yourself very much is. We all have our own tolerance for evil, Mister Farrow. From what I’ve heard, you are quickly reaching yours.”

I’d bet money Nash had been talking. He and Ripley got along, and he’d had ample time to worry since my bathroom breakdown last week. I had the missed calls to prove I’d been on his mind. None of which I’d returned because I kept hoping he would forget the absolute mess I’d been.

“Here we are.” Ripley straightened, holding an empty soda bottle aloft. Untwisting the cap, he put it to his lips and spit. Saliva strung from his mouth to pool in the bottom of the bottle.

I gawked, speechless as he sealed the container and offered it to me.

When I didn’t immediately reach for it, Ripley gave the soda bottle a shake, splattering the inner walls with viscous fluid. “Do you want it or not?” he asked.

It wasn’t for me, I reminded myself. It was for Tobin. The douchebag investigator who totaled my car. I would let him drink Ripley’s super spit, then I would laugh about it all the way home.

“Sure, man.” I grabbed the bottle. “And thanks.”