Chapter Seven

"Old grudges, scorned lovers, sometimes I wonder why we all don't move on."

The Graverobber could still remember what he had thought when he first met Olivia Stewart. He'd been peddling Z on the street for four years at that point and he'd come to understand his customers. There was a 'rebel' group from the schools that liked to get a hit of zydrate every now and again so they could feel cool. Most of those kids would never do Z after that, while some of them would get hooked and be dead within a few years. Then there were the very few that would merge their lives with zydrate and survive to at least their thirties if something else didn't kill them first. The Graverobber could always tell who those people were. It was in the eyes.

Olivia, or Livvy, had come with a gaggle of Goths into his alley. At first glance she blended in fairly well with the brooding teenagers. Then he saw the right side of her face and blending became impossible. He knew he had a sale the second those scars came into view. He knew he'd met someone he'd know for years when her eyes met his. Olivia didn't have the eyes of a rebel teen looking for a little drug adventure. For one, she was genetically flawed. One eye was lightning blue while the other was a murky green. For another, both eyes were shining with rage. It was a kind of anger that didn't die quickly or easily.

Thinking that she would be a customer of his for a long, long time, he gave her a hit for free. Free first hits were a good policy since it brought people back and he never forgot a face. Not for the last time, Olivia surprised him. She was the second person in his career to suffer an extreme allergic reaction to zydrate. Almost immediately she fell to the ground, convulsing hard. Her fair-weather friends fled and he was left with a decision. He could take her to the nearest hospital or he could leave her. She was lucky. If she'd met him ten years later, he would have left her in a dumpster. Nothing personal, just practical. There was no reason for him to expose himself for some angst-ridden kid. But he did it then and she lived.

His next surprise came a week later, at night. He was in a graveyard, doing what he did best, when he stumbled on the same scrawny, angry kid he'd nearly killed. She'd stared up at him with those mismatched eyes and asked if he needed a lookout. Years later, he still wondered why he'd said yes. It turned out to be a good thing later on but he couldn't have possibly known that then. He guessed it had to do with guilt. He had only been nineteen after all. His ability to feel guilt hadn't completely vanished. Besides, it hadn't been a bad deal. She would watch his back as he worked for a tiny fraction of his profits.

As the weeks passed, he learned things about Olivia Stewart. She was fourteen years old and the scars on her face were so screaming red because she'd torn out the stitches a couple of times. Deliberately. She didn't talk about why. Occasionally she'd mention her aunt and uncle, of whom she had a very low opinion. It was nearly two months before she'd talk about her father. He'd died when she was thirteen. Without a donor or money for transplants, his lung failure killed him. It took six months for Olivia to mention her mother.

"She had a heart transplant a couple months before my dad was diagnosed. We were having a hard time making those payments. Once dad couldn't work anymore, things got worse. I didn't know." The two of them were sitting on top of a dumpster while she talked. The Graverobber remembered her dirty fingernails beating a rhythm against her thigh. He never talked much, not about things that mattered, so he rarely commented about her life story. He just memorized. "My mom was ninety days delinquent on her payment a few months after dad died but I didn't know. One night I had this stupid idea about sleeping in the graveyard so I could spend all night telling my father how I was sorry about being such a disappointment, how I'd try harder from then on. I chickened out about twenty minutes after I left the apartment. So I went back. She… She was repossessed."

It didn't explain the scars. The Graverobber waited for the rest of the story, waited another two months. He might have waited longer if he hadn't nearly been shot. A GenCop had caught him, an event that happened from time to time. Olivia had beaten him over the head with an Encyclopedia she was reading for fun. Even after the cop had dropped, she kept beating him. The Graverobber had had to drag her out of that graveyard. She'd cried harder than he'd seen anyone cry then apologized for not seeing the GenCop in the first place. "It's my job to look out for you and I failed. I'm useless," she'd whispered, refusing to look at him. It didn't take long for him to figure out she wasn't really talking about him anymore.

Olivia Stewart's mother had not been dead when Olivia came home that night. She'd been alive, struggling and screaming. A Repo Man had come to repossess her heart. Olivia had started throwing anything she could lift. Every dish in the kitchen was shattered against the tall, black figure. She even managed to hit him with a chair before he picked her up by the back of the neck and threw her through the glass door that opened onto the balcony. She remembered that shards of glass sliced into the right side of her face but after that there was nothing. She heard later that she'd been found hours after the fact, that maybe if someone had responded faster she wouldn't be as badly scarred as she was. If.

The Graverobber knew all about Livvy. His drugs paid for the medical books she'd memorized. His connections had gotten her the job in the morgue. The two of them had a bizarre friendship of drugs, cutting truths and sarcasm. So when she asked him a blunt question, he wasn't afraid to answer it.

"Why aren't we in love?" The Graverobber looked up from the corpse he was extracting zydrate from and toward Livvy. Her mouth looked like she'd been savaging it with her teeth, a sure sign of frustration. He shrugged at her question.

"I guess the sex wasn't that great." She rolled her eyes.

"It's not as if we'd remember. We were both completely wasted at the time," she replied flatly. It had been her eighteenth birthday and her only wish was for alcohol. He barely remembered that night either, so she had a point about the quality of the sex not mattering. "It's just that we've known each other for about sixteen years. We're closer to each other than anyone else. I'm the only living person you talk to regularly. It would make sense for us to have a romantic relationship."

"It would make perfect sense," he agreed, sliding the body back into its refrigerated spot and closing the door. "That's probably why we aren't intimate. Romance isn't about sense. Generally it's the polar opposite of sense."

"You're right about that," she muttered, staring moodily at the floor. The Graverobber studied her and realized she was the picture of a sexually frustrated woman. It made him grin.

"So who's the guy?" Livvy jerked.

"What?"

"The guy you wish you weren't interested in but are anyway," he explained casually. She glared at him.

"There isn't a guy."

"You don't get out much and when you do you aren't exactly sociable so… Aha! The kid's father, right? Isn't he in his forties or something? I didn't know you liked them aged," he teased. Livvy's face had turned bright red, confirming his every theory.

"I'm not interested in Nathan Wallace. Never have been, never will be, not in a thousand years. Never!" she snapped.

"Protesting a bit much, aren't you?" he asked with a smirk. Livvy shrieked her frustration, turning quickly on her heel and storming out. The Graverobber continued to smirk. So Livvy had her eye on a man. God help him.

"I wish we could have watched together."

The next time Olivia went to the Wallace house, it was Halloween. It had occurred to Olivia that Shilo would get a kick out of the holiday. She had stuffed her bag with make-up, candy, a few scary movies and the makings of a witch costume. Olivia, naturally, had also dressed up. The plan that had struck her as brilliant at one point no longer seemed so great once she realized that Nathan was going to see her in all her Halloween glory. Of course, she only figured that out when she walked up to his front door.

"Er, trick or treat?" she joked weakly. Olivia saw his eyes widen significantly behind his glasses. It wasn't exactly an admiring look, either. "What? It's Halloween. People still dress up for Halloween."

"You realize you look like a… a…" Nathan struggled to finish his sentence. She knew he was making an attempt at being polite and failing badly. She took pity on him.

"A dark fairy? Yeah, that was the point." Olivia slipped past him and took a moment to reassess her outfit. It probably wasn't the black lace up thigh high stockings or her high-heeled boots that had made Nathan think she had given up her job at the morgue for something more lucrative. The cinched purple velvet corset might have, although she didn't have much cleavage showing. It was probably the matching mini skirt with all the lace ribbons. She'd never shown this much leg around Shilo before so it was natural for her father to get a little concerned. She turned around to possibly apologize for not warning him about her enthusiasm for Halloween. Instead she stared at him. He was staring, too, so she wasn't alone. The problem was that he was staring at her legs while she was staring at his expression. It was dangerously like the one he'd had when the awkwardness in the hallway arose last week. She cleared her throat. "Nathan?"

"Huh?" The fact that he sounded like a stunned teenager finally sank in for Nathan. He cleared his throat and looked away from her. "Did you need something?"

"Just thought I should get permission for Shilo to watch some scary movies with me," Olivia said, deciding not to apologize after all. Nathan nodded absently.

"Yes, of course. I'll just be - "

"Working," she supplied, smiling briefly. "I'll look after Shilo." She walked up the stairs and it took everything she had not to look back to see if Nathan was watching again. She assured herself that she didn't want to know. She just wasn't sure if she believed it or not.

"Oh, my God, Livvy! You look amazing," Shilo squealed. She was clearly ecstatic about the new look but she had an ulterior motive. "Dad saw you in this, right? Your coat wasn't buttoned or anything, was it?" Damn! Why hadn't Olivia thought of doing that?

"No, it wasn't. And yes, he saw me. He saw enough of me to last a lifetime," she added dryly. A matchmaking Shilo was the last thing either Olivia or Nathan needed. Best not to encourage her. "So don't I get a 'Happy Halloween'?"

"Oh, right, it's Halloween today," Shilo said. Olivia widened her eyes dramatically.

"You do not honor this most fun and funky of holidays? Sacrilege!" She took Shilo by the arm and sat her down in a nearby chair. "Luckily for you, I came prepared for the worst. We'll get you all made up in no time. How much do you know about make-up?"

"Everything except… I'm not much good at eye shadow," she admitted as though this were a sin of the highest order. Olivia just grinned.

"We'll soon have that fixed."

They spent an hour fussing over Shilo's costume and make-up. It wouldn't have taken nearly that long except Shilo wanted to know exactly how Olivia had made her eyes look so smoky. She taught her how to curve the brush and how exactly to blend one color with another. Finally she got the teenager into her costume, which included a short black cape, a witch's hat and a spider web necklace. Shilo spun around in the middle of the room, skirt billowing out around her.

"Happy Halloween!" she declared, experimenting with a cackle. It didn't sound right so she just settled with giggling. Olivia smiled.

"You make a very pretty witch, Shilo Wallace. Very pretty indeed." Shilo's smile faded as she looked past Olivia at the portrait of her mother on the wall.

"You mean I look like her," she murmured. Olivia didn't hear any pride or longing in that statement. What she heard was jealousy and resentment. "Dad says I look just like her." Olivia let out a sigh. Yes, there was a lot of resentment there.

"I look like my mother, too," she told Shilo as she walked over to the bed and pushed the plastic curtain out of the way so she could sit down. "It's hard, sometimes, not to constantly compare myself to her. I know I'm not the woman she was. I won't ever be. But, then again, I'm not a corpse and she is. I have to remember that difference or I won't be able to look in the mirror."

"Compared to a corpse," Shilo whispered. "Yeah. I get that." Another piece of the puzzle that made up Shilo fell into place for Olivia then. Shilo didn't just want her around because she was a woman. She wanted her because she'd never known her mother. She wanted to be around Shilo only because she was Shilo and not because she looked like a dead woman.

"I get the feeling that you're in the mood for a gory movie," Olivia said, not so subtly changing the subject. Shilo grinned.

"You bet! Did you bring some?" Olivia gestured at her bag and Shilo went to investigate.

"I brought several movies along with a few bags of candy. Of course, depending on the movie, we may not want the candy."

"Wow, this is a really old one. Can we watch this?" Olivia winced when she saw the movie Shilo was holding up.

"No candy, then." Shilo's television was pretty small but to the two girls curled up on the bed with candy spread in front of them, it was just the right size. Saw was exactly what Shilo wanted to watch and she had no problem holding down her candy despite the gore. Olivia shielded her eyes for most of the film.

"Come on, Olivia, nothing's even happening right now. It's safe to look at the screen," Shilo cajoled, elbowing the older woman. Olivia kept her hand over her eyes.

"That's just what they want you to think. It lulls you into a false sense of security." Shilo snickered.

"For someone who works at a morgue, you're a real wimp." Olivia waited until something violent happened in the movie that captured Shilo's attention before replying,

"You should meet my other personality."