[Venom 01.0] Venom & Vanilla Read online

  He drew himself up, and I knew in my belly what he was going to say. I held a hand out. “Don’t you dare sell my bakery to that woman. Don’t you dare!” If he sold my bakery to Colleen Vanderhoven, I might die on the spot and be glad of it. She’d been the bane of my existence from the day I set my shop up. The closest thing to an archnemesis I’d had in my entire life. She’d done everything she could to sink my business, from setting up her bakery a street over, to attempting to steal my recipes, to actually stealing some of my employees.

  “We’re signing the papers next week.” The words started out of his mouth strong and ended on a sigh.

  My bakery. I leaned back against the headboard, eyes aching as though tears fell from them. I loved Vanilla and Honey almost as much as I loved the house my grandparents had left me. Shaking, holding back the gulping sobs that leapt up to escape me, I managed another question. “Tell me about this business partner. Who is she?”

  What if he was partnering with Colleen in more than one capacity? Burn my sugar biscuits! If he partnered with fat-nosed, mean-as-a-badger Colleen in the dog-grooming business, I would strangle him myself.

  Roger nodded. “I don’t know why you’re surprised. You were the one who said I should move on with my life. To find love again so I wouldn’t be alone.”

  What was he going on about now? I opened my eyes and stared at him as his words settled around me.

  Dahlia let out a low groan from her side of the room. “Oh, you didn’t, you dumb schmuck. Tell me you didn’t.”

  He acted like he hadn’t heard her. As he leaned close, his helmet moved like a bobble-head doll on the dashboard of a car, giving the illusion that his head wasn’t quite attached the way it should have been. Which in that moment I could believe. “I love her, Alena. I know you understand because, really, this was your idea. But Barbie doesn’t want me coming back to see you anymore. She’s afraid I might get sick, and she has a point. Not to mention the cost of the ferry back and forth all the time. I have my whole life ahead of me. You said it yourself. So I’m getting on with it.”

  “But I’m not dead yet,” I whispered, horror making my voice soft. Or maybe that was the growing anger that wrapped itself around my throat, cutting my words in half.

  His suit crinkled as he backed away, and he lifted a hand in a feckless, offhand farewell. “A part of me will always love you, Alena. Take care of yourself. I mean . . . as much as you can now. You know.” He shrugged, cleared his throat, and left the room.

  The door whooshed shut behind him, the click of the latch signaling it was closed tight. I stared at the metal panel with the square window as I attempted to process the last ten minutes of my life. A week? It took him a week to find someone new and decide he would leave his dying wife in her hospital bed alone because some woman named Barbie told him it was a good idea?

  “Tell me you didn’t hear that, Dahlia. Tell me I was dreaming.”

  She sucked in a slow breath. “I’m sorry, honey. That totally happened. He’s a dickwad.”

  There were no tears, of course, but the sobs in my chest were real enough and my bones creaked with the force of the shaking.

  “Don’t cry over him, he doesn’t deserve it. Alena, don’t cry. You’ll hurt yourself,” Dahlia said, her voice soft and gentle.

  “Take care of myself? What does he think is going to happen in the next few weeks? A magic damn cure? The doctors are going to come in here and wave a wand over us and that’s it, we’ll be all better?” The words exploded out of me, and while they hurt my throat, it was better than holding them in, letting them fester along with the pain in my heart.

  Silence fell between us, or at least as silent as a hospital got. Outside our room the slap of feet on the cheap tile and the hum of voices drifted through the thick auto-closing door. Here the quiet was never real, rather an approximation of the big sleep that would soon come for us both.

  Dahlia shifted and her bed creaked under her. “There is a magic cure. If you can afford it, you know.”

  Again, I wondered if I was hearing things. “What?”

  “It’s expensive, but if you’ve got the money . . . a warlock can help you.” Dahlia’s dark-green eyes locked with mine as they had so often over the last week.

  “Dahlia, those are urban legends. I heard the rumors before I got sick too. I even saw that special exposé on TV. The Supe Conspiracy. That magic is the cure, and it’s only a matter of time before the world knows. But there is no way our government would allow so many people to die if they could help.”

  She smiled, her pink gums shining between the few teeth she had left. “Really? Do you not pay attention at all? They’re trying to corral all the Super Dupers above the forty-ninth parallel. Keep them contained. The fewer there are south of the border, the better. They did the same thing in Europe and Asia, put up walls to keep the Supes contained in the middle, away from the humans. Every time someone is found to be a Supe, they ship them. My house isn’t far from the Wall, I’ve seen large vehicles cross the border more than once in the middle of the night.”

  She leaned closer and I tried not to sigh. Dahlia was a confirmed conspiracy theorist. Aliens, monsters, government. You name it, she had a reason it wasn’t the way people thought.

  Her green eyes locked on mine. “That Wall isn’t what they say it is. It isn’t protection for the Super Dupers. It’s confinement, like an oversized zoo. I’d think living so close to it, you’d know that too.”

  My mind wandered. Maybe this time she was right. Seattle was close enough to the newly built Wall that I really should have known what it was all about. But Vanilla and Honey had taken all my time and attention. I’d barely seen outside my bakery for the last two years. Between the setup, launch, and day-to-day running of the bakery, I’d worked seven days a week, easily sixteen hours a day for almost my whole marriage. There was a reason my shop had been booming before I got sick; I’d given it everything I had.

  Maybe I should have given more to Roger too? I didn’t want to think about it. He’d barely worked the last two years, happy to live off what I was doing. Happy to be at home and let me cook for him when I left the bakery. Happy.

  I thought he’d been happy.

  I sank into the thin pillow at my back. “Dahlia, I know what you’re doing.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a good friend, but you don’t have to distract me from what just happened. Roger . . . I was going to have to say good-bye anyway. Maybe this is better.” Those were the words I said, but they weren’t honest. I wanted to scream and rail against the injustice in life. To have my dream home, no financial burdens, running my own business, life had been too good. I should have known it would crash down around my ears. That the fates would deem my dreams and me a necessary casualty in the war of life.

  My mother had been telling me for the last year that I was doing too well. That life would find a way to humble me. I plucked at the hole in my sheet. Humble. I’d never thought of myself as prideful, yet it looked like Mom was right.

  Talk about hitting the bottom of the barrel and crashing on through to the other side.

  “Listen,” Dahlia said, “I’ve got a warlock coming tomorrow. My parents thought they could get the money into my bank by then. You’ll see. You talk to him about the cure. You have the money. You said so yourself.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned back in my bed. What was the point in discussing this with her? Hope was a dangerous word as close to death as we were, and I knew it would eat her up. I thought about my bakery, of the different recipes I’d been perfecting. Like the vanilla-mousse cupcakes I’d developed right before I got sick. I whispered the recipe to myself, trying to push away what I really wanted to think about. After ten minutes of mumbling recipes and messing them all up, I rolled to my side and looked at Dahlia. I had to ask her one more question. Just out of curiosity, of course.

  “How much does this supposed cure cost, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. The fee is differe
nt for everyone. I’ve heard as low as fifty, as high as two fifty.”

  I was pretty sure she didn’t mean only fifty dollars. Fifty thousand was a big number, but we did have it in the bank. I’d put every bit of profit into savings and built up a great nest egg even before my inheritance. We had more than fifty thousand in the bank—a lot more with the addition of the inheritance from my grandparents on my dad’s side. I clutched the edges of my sheets and allowed myself a thin measure of hope. To believe maybe there was a way out of this that didn’t involve a pine box, hearse, off-key choir, and questionable meat platter.

  As long as it didn’t involve breaking my moral code, I was willing to listen to the warlock. Who was I kidding? Just interacting with a warlock was enough to send me straight to hell, according to Pastor Wrightway. And yes, that was his name. Rather convenient for a pastor.

  “I see it in your eyes, Alena. You know I’m right.”

  I settled deeper into the bed. “I’ll talk to him, if for nothing else than to show you that you would be wasting your parents’ money. I’ve seen my share of charlatans, Dahlia. They’d come into the bakery with their miracle tool that would save me time and money, the tool that would do the work of three people and ten machines. The spinning whisker. The fancy chopper. The silly egg cookers. All garbage.” I blew a raspberry.

  Dahlia went off on a tangent that I listened to with only half an ear.

  “Hey, I asked if you have any siblings?”

  Her question sent a shot of pain through me. Five years ago we’d lost my only sibling, and it was a loss I felt daily. Since childhood when I’d been picked on for having crooked teeth and glasses, he’d been my defender and my best friend. There had been no one I trusted more. No one I thought of as often.

  I smoothed a hand over the sheet. “I did. A brother named Tad. He . . . he caught the Aegrus virus about five years ago.”

  “Shit, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your poor parents.”

  I bit my lip, wanting to blurt out that they were anything but poor; oh, poop on it. “They think it’s punishment from God. The virus, that is, and since he left the church, they said it was justice.”

  “Oh, man.” She sucked in a slow breath. “They’re Firstamentalists, then?”

  I didn’t want to correct her that it wasn’t just my parents who’d gone to the Church of the Firsts. I’d attended with them every week since as long as I could remember. My big mistake? Marrying outside the church. Roger had been my one rebellion, and it had gotten me kicked out of the congregation. Since then, the fact that my parents spoke to me at all was a wonder.

  Yet the faith was still the way I’d been raised, and I had believed. Even if I wasn’t allowed to attend anymore. There were things I’d grown up with that were so firmly ingrained I couldn’t let them go, even now that I’d turned away from the faith. I didn’t drink, I didn’t swear. But I wore shorts that came above my knees and let my hair go unbraided. I was a real rebel as far as my parents were concerned.

  The church forbade anyone from within its congregation to interact and befriend people outside the Walls and was rather strict with the rules. My family had followed the way of the Firstamentalist beliefs for longer than I’d been alive.

  Even my grandmother on my mother’s side, my yaya, went to services. Though her attendance was rather erratic and she was likely to spout off when she shouldn’t, she got away with it because of her age. Pastor Wrightway tolerated her since she didn’t really do anything wrong. He said she was crazy. Some days I thought he was right. Most days I just enjoyed the way she saw the world. Yaya had been the one to start my love of baking. She saw me take to it and encouraged me from a young age to pursue my passion.

  “That’s why your parents haven’t come to see you?” Dahlia asked. Her parents had tried at least, and they lived on the East Coast. Maybe that was why they hadn’t made it: to save money for her supposed cure?

  I cleared my throat. “Yeah. They think they’ll go to hell if they show me compassion, since I obviously deserve to be sick and die.”

  “Shit, that’s rough.”

  I shrugged. “I knew it would be this way the second I was diagnosed.” Not that knowing the way things would fall out made it any easier. Compassion wasn’t something Firstamentalists understood. One of the reasons, outside of Roger, I pulled away from them. I could believe some things the Firstamentalists taught, but not everything. In other words, I was a mess of contradictions and I knew it.

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  Apparently, though, the day wasn’t done with me yet, because it got even stranger when my grandmother pushed her way through my door.

  Without a hazmat suit on.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Yaya!” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; her wrinkled face and sparkling green eyes were a balm to my aching heart even while her presence terrified me. The last thing I wanted was for her to get sick. If me getting sick weren’t bad enough, to infect my own grandmother, who was the sweetest and probably the sassiest woman I knew, would surely send my soul to hell.

  “Yaya, what are you doing here?”

  She closed the door behind her and went on her tiptoes to peer out the square piece of glass.

  “Have they stuck a tracking device in you yet?” Her words were muffled as she turned side to side, as if trying to see farther down the hall.

  “What is a yaya exactly?” Dahlia rattled the rail of her bed to get my attention.

  “It’s Greek for grandmother,” I said absently, not even looking at my roommate.

  Yaya stared at me. “I came to see if you were really sick. Your parents keep telling me you’re on vacation. But that asshat you married, you know I saw him out in the parking lot kissing a blonde with huge fake boobies? I think if I poked one, it would pop like a balloon.”

  I pulled my blanket up over my mouth and nose. “Yaya, I don’t want you to get sick. You’ll die, and I couldn’t bear knowing that I was the cause of it.”

  She waved a hand at me. “I’m old. And everyone dies, Alena. You know that. I came to make sure you weren’t doing anything you shouldn’t. Getting into trouble runs in our blood, you know.”

  If I’d had hair on my eyebrows, I’d have raised them. “I’m lying in bed, slowly dying. What kind of thing could I be doing?”

  She spread her hands wide. “The magical kind of things. Things your mother always told you not to even think about. I want you to be very sure of your decision when the time comes.”

  Oh dear. Maybe she’d been listening in on our conversation? Time to play it innocent.

  “Yaya . . . what exactly are you talking about?”

  She smiled, the skin around her deep-green eyes crinkling up. “Your mother got into the wine last night. Several bottles, to be fair.”

  I was going to get whiplash from the way she moved from topic to topic. “Wait, Mom doesn’t drink. Are you sure she was drinking? Maybe it was that sparkling apple juice she likes. She keeps several bottles in the pantry for when Pastor Wrightway visits. Between the sugar and the bubbles, she gets a bit silly; we’ve all seen her crack a knock-knock joke after a glass of Martinelli’s.”

  Yaya clapped her hands together, just once, then pointed a finger at me. “That’s what you think. You should have seen her. She stood up on the table and wailed at the top of her lungs some song I didn’t know. Something about having faith, you gotta have faith. She didn’t know all the words, but she kept singing that damn chorus over and over. It’s stuck in my head like Krazy Glue now.”

  The thought of my straitlaced, prudish, ultraconservative mother getting drunk and standing on the kitchen table was impossible to conceive. Especially singing a George Michael song. “No, she didn’t.”

  “She did!” Yaya slapped her hands on her thighs as she laughed. “That blonde out there, Roger’s boinking her now?”

  Dahlia choked on a laugh. “Oh, God. Boinking. That’s one I
haven’t heard in a while.”

  “Yaya. Please don’t make me laugh.” I couldn’t help myself; it was funny. Maybe there was something wrong with me that the thought of my husband boinking some girl named Barbie was enough to send me into hysterics. Or at least something more wrong with me than the Aegrus virus. The laughter’s edge curled tight to the edge of dry tears, and I struggled not to break down again.

  The three of us settled, the laughter slowly dying out like a record fading into nothing. Yaya patted my leg. “Alena, there are things you don’t know about our family. I’ll tell you someday. Okay? But for now, will you trust me? Don’t do anything . . . super stupid. Got it?” Her eyes darted around and she hunched her back. “Be careful. Will you do that? Just be careful. Whatever you do, don’t believe everything you hear. We’ll talk soon. I can’t say more, I’m being watched.” She blew me a kiss and backed out of the door. As she turned, my last glimpse of her was a side profile, the shape of her jaw and the fluffy salt-and-pepper curls that fell to her chin.

  She pointed as she left the room. “Roger, get your hand out of there. You don’t know where that girl’s been or who she’s been playing with! She could have rabies for all you know, you idiot.”

  The door slowly shut on Yaya giving Roger hell. I could easily imagine him cringing as she put him in place, and I didn’t try to stop the smile. What was Roger doing back in the hospital?

  The truth circled around me. Probably he was trying to find out how long I had left. Maybe Barbie had put him up to it.

  “Oh my God,” Dahlia said. “That’s your grandma? She’s a riot. I wish I’d known her before.”

  The two visits back to back had drained me, and I rolled onto my side. “Good night, Dahlia.”

  “It’s only five.”

  “I’m tired.”

  Except I didn’t fall asleep. I lay there, my heart hurting. Roger had been my first love, my first in so many ways. He’d been the hand I’d needed to cling to in order to leave everything I’d ever believed was true. I’d already seen that I didn’t want to be a Firstamentalist, but I didn’t know how to cut my ties on my own.