Wicked Ever After(10)

“Another bloody Bludman,” Emerlie muttered, standing and dusting off her turquoise pantaloons. “Suppose you’ll be wanting to dress in illegally bright duds, eh?”

Nana held out the sides of her polyester dressing gown as if she couldn’t stand to touch it for another second. “I was thinking a pair of pants like yours might suit. Tight fit but darker colors. Never did get the hang of floof.”

My head swiveled to stare at her. I’d never seen my grandmother in anything but shapeless slacks and housedresses, and the thought of her in Emerlie’s tight leather ballerina costumes was mind-boggling. Emerlie looked her up and down, eyes narrowed, but then she nodded and went to rummage in her trunks. When she turned around with an armload of leather and cloth, she had a smile friendlier than anything she’d ever given me.

“Nice to hear someone ’round here has taste. See what takes you, and I can hem up whatever works.” And she winked.

And then possibly the most terrifying thing I’d ever witnessed occurred: I watched my grandmother strip naked.

The second most terrifying thing? Thanks to her recent transformation, she had a hotter bod than mine under her housedress. Soon she was laced into tight leather pants, with Emerlie pinning the ankles. She waved a hand at corsets and bound up her chest with a long strip of linen before putting on a man’s shirt and waistcoat and an old pair of Crim’s boots, their toes stuffed with rags. My little old Southern grandmother was cross-dressing as a vampire dandy, giggling with one of my worst enemies, and letting Emerlie cut her auburn hair into a vixen’s sharp bob and line her eyes with kohl.

The world was upside down. I had everything I thought I wanted, but it wasn’t what I wanted at all. And then something even stranger occurred.

It happened while Emerlie was helping my grandmother put on earrings. They were having trouble with the clip, and Emerlie was cursing in her cockney gibberish, and my grandmother jerked away and went over very still.

“You yellow-bellied hussy!” she shouted, pointing at Emerlie. “He’s a nice boy. What’s wrong with you?”

Emerlie went red with fury and then white with fear, backing away. “Witch!” she hissed, pointing first at Nana and then at me. “Just like that one!”

Nana swiveled to me. “She’s sleeping with that nice Charlie Dregs on the sly. Right here in this room! But she won’t even sit with him in the dining car, no matter how he begs. Won’t make him an honest man.”

“Nana,” I said, sounding more like her mother than her grand-daughter, “did you get a little jolt and see her future?”

“Not exactly her future.” Nana thought about it, cutting her eyes at Emerlie. “More like her present and her past, all rolled up in a ball. But who’s Lydia?”

“Get out,” Emerlie growled, and I held open the door.

Nana took a last look around the jumbled wagon, grabbed a heavy black cape off a dummy, and sashayed out the door. As I followed her, she grumbled under her breath, “Can’t stand a damn hypocrite.”

Once we were safely on the trampled grass, I looked her up and down. “Nana, did you know that you’re a glancer, like me? That you can touch people and see their fate?”

My grandmother, now looking like a fabulous, forty-year old, cross-dressing flapper, cocked her head and considered me with cloudy blue eyes, so like my own but glittering with a Bludman’s magic.

“Call me Ruby, sugar. I don’t feel much like anybody’s Nana anymore.”

She frowned and walked away. She didn’t answer my question.

She didn’t have to.

“She’s a glancer, Crim.”

He stroked my hair back, curling it over my ears. “What of it, love?”

“My grandmother is a glancer, and a Bludman, and a cougar, and maybe a MILF, and she says I need to call her Ruby.” Hard as I’d been trying to keep it in, a hot tear streaked down the side of my nose.

“Don’t know what a GILF is, but I fear I’m going to have to give you a speech similar to the one you gave me about Demi when she wanted to leave the caravan. Time to let the little bird fly from the nest?”

I sniffled. “This little bird jumped out of the nest, landed among the bludbunnies, and is now spitting out their bones and whistling ‘Yankee Doodle.’ ”

“Is she happy?”

I had to look away at the frankness of his gaze. He could always see right through me. “She walked away before I could really ask. I don’t even know where she is or what she’s doing. I thought . . . I don’t know. I thought I could show her the caravan, get to see her enjoy the magic for the first time. There’s no magic in our world, on Earth, not really. I thought she would be grateful. Or at least friendly. That she would still want to spend time with me. But she doesn’t even seem to like me.”