Death of the Body (Crossing Death) (23 page)

She took the compliment well, simply responding, “Thank you, I know. I dress this way for a reason… men are fun to tease.”

She bit her lip playfully, more teasing, and went to open the door to my room, when I grabbed her hand. “Wait,” I said, taking her hand gently off the knob.

I pointed to the red tack that had been pushed into the soft wood of the doorframe.

“College boy sign?” Xia chuckled. “I thought it was a sock on the doorknob.”

“Socks are too obvious. Nicholas prefers a tack,” was all I responded, because as if on cue, we heard a strong masculine grunt from beyond the door. “How about we hit up the cafeteria?”

When we got there, Xia ordered a vegetarian spinach salad—light on the vinaigrette dressing. I couldn’t help but notice how much attention she got from the guy behind the counter. He even had to remake her salad because, while being distracted by her cleavage, he accidentally used the real bacon bits instead of the imitation ones. My tuna sandwich was thrown together miserably… In fact, I was pretty sure I had ordered turkey.

“You know,” Xia said after we had paid and filled our drink cups with the college’s most recent concoction they had the nerve to call iced tea, “lunch in a college cafeteria is an experience not to be missed.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s like watching ravenous wolves,” she chided.

“Is this some sort of commentary on people who eat meat?” I chuckled as we sat down.

Xia peeked at my tuna sandwich. “Not at all, actually. In fact, I wasn’t even talking about the way people eat.” She glanced back toward the counter, at the guy who was still staring at her. “So this nun…”

The change of subject was abrupt enough to catch me off guard. I flinched a little at being pulled back into the world of reality. Reality. Demons, death, and magic were reality. I didn’t want to go back to that subject. I wanted to be a normal college guy having lunch with an abnormally beautiful college girl.

“How do they make imitation bacon bits anyway?” I asked, poking at one in her bowl. “I mean, they would have to use pig flavoring or something, right? Wouldn’t that be even worse than the real thing? Killing a pig to make pig flavoring?”

She slapped my hand, knowing I was being playfully irreverent. “It’s imitation smoke flavoring on crispy crumbs of red-dyed bread. When are you going to go see her?”

Ok. I would allow myself this conversation with her, not because I wanted to, but because talking about it seemed to excite her.

“This weekend, I think,” I answered between bites of sandwich. “I really thought about doing it sooner, but I haven’t been to work in long enough that my boss told me if I ever come back I’ll have to work for minimum wage… so I think I’d better go back and try to smooth things over with him.”

“Well you should show him the cuts on your chest and tell him you’ve been sick,” Xia sympathized.

I laughed. “He’s a pretty decent guy. I really don’t think he’ll give me much trouble. He didn’t fire me now, did he?”

“What is it you do, exactly?”

I thought for a few seconds while trying to decide how I could answer this and not sound like a total nerd, and without offending her. After swallowing the bite of sandwich I purposely took to buy me some time, I still had nothing. “I stock a local supermarket. And work with meat sometimes.” Big whoop.

Xia didn’t seem too disappointed. She was smart enough to understand that this was just a job to get me through college.

“And your boss owns the place?” she asked.

“Yeah. Owner and manager—and butcher,” I grinned.

Xia’s face twisted into an ill look. “If you EVER come home smelling like meat…” but she didn’t finish her sentence.

She didn’t need to. I smiled at the idea that she was thinking about being wherever I was when I came home. I got the feeling that it was now her turn to hastily stuff something into her mouth in order to keep quiet.

“I want to go with you,” she blurted out awkwardly after clearing her throat with a gulp of iced tea. “To see the nun, I mean.”

“Sister Mary Elizabeth,” I corrected. “You probably wouldn’t want to call her ‘the nun’ to her face. Really. She’s a bit… opinionated. I don’t even know that she’ll be willing to talk to me.”

“Well, Nicholas and I talked about it, and I think we both want to go. Strength in numbers, right? Not to mention the fact that you really can’t just leave us at home wondering what is going on. You’ve involved us all now.”

“What about Quon? And your schooling? How long are you in town anyway?”

Xia waved dismissively and her throat made a noise that matched her apathy. “Quon doesn’t really seem to have an opinion about all this, but he’s always been the least spiritual person in our family. Buddha himself could appear and he’d go take a nap. As for school? I took this semester off, and we have two months before the next one starts. I was thinking of maybe transferring—”

“Nicholas wanted to come?” I interrupted.

Before Xia had the chance to answer, an extremely bubbly blond dressed in a Santa hat knocked loudly on our table. I found the gesture not only odd, but unbelievably annoying.

“Hi guys,” she started, without any observance for our former conversation. “I’m Brittany and I’m collecting donations for ‘Change for Jesus.’ Get it?” Her resulting chuckle was so condescending that I had to suppress my desire to punch her.

“Anyway, this year the Christian students have teamed up together to collect money to renovate an old church somewhere in the city. We’ve collected over three thousand dollars just on campus. Will you donate?”

I smiled. “The money is going to renovate a church? Not feed the hungry or clothe the poor?”

A look of complete seriousness fell over her face, “By helping Christians here you help Christians everywhere.”

“We aren’t interested,” Xia glared sharply.

“But Thanksgiving is just a few days away,” Brittany pointed to her Santa hat like she was making some sort of coherent statement, “now is the time for giving.”

Her sugary-ness was too sweet to handle.

“We don’t believe in Jesus. Xia’s Wiccan, and I’m not religious,” I said tersely.

Brittany’s eyes grew big, but not in shock or surprise… I was pretty sure it was anger.

“But without Jesus you cannot be saved, for no man can enter the kingdom of God but by him. He performed many miracles, healing the sick and turning water into wine—”

“Here,” I interrupted, reaching for my cup. “Will tea do?” I shook the cup three times, and peeled back the lid. Alcoholic dregs slid slowly back down the sides. “Now it’s wine. See? Nothing special.”

Brittany wasn’t fazed. “It was always wine.”

I reached for Xia’s cup angrily. She graciously traded me for the wine and snickered.

I repeated the trick, this time showing Brittany the tea first. When I showed her the transformed liquid, she glared at me with cougar-like intensity.

“You
dare
mock God?” she screamed loudly enough that half of the cafeteria stopped to stare, and the other half, wondering why the whole place just went silent, stared too.

“Yup,” I replied, as matter-of-factly as I could. I wasn’t upset or annoyed anymore. This was actually sort of fun.

Brittany took one step backward and pointed a finger at us. “He will judge you,” she said, shaking uncontrollably. She glared at us a moment longer as if trying to leave us with a lasting impression of guilt before she then turned and stormed off.

“Too bad she didn’t cry,” Xia said, chuckling, once Brittany was out of earshot.

“If she would have, I might have felt bad. I don’t mind religious people, it’s the hypocrites I can’t stand.”

Xia took a sip of wine, her eyes deviously questioning.

“Brittany, for example,” I continued, “really,
really
, enjoys her fornication.”

Xia’s brilliant smile flashed before her mouth burst open into uncontrollable laughter. “How could you possibly know that?” she chided.

I grinned back. “The wind told me.”

Xia hiccupped and then held up the glass of wine. “Just for future reference, I would have preferred a cabernet.”

Sixteen

We talked long after our lunches were finished. I couldn’t remember the last time I had so much fun. I couldn’t help but laugh as the wine loosened Xia’s tongue and her reservations began to crumble. She told me a rather elaborate story about her arrival to the US when she was two, which included details so minute and hilarious that I knew they had to be made up. For the past year and a half she had been living in Florida, going to a small private university, but had taken this last semester off to return to Japan to do some humanitarian work.

The walk back to the dormitory was brilliant. I don’t know if it was the fact that she couldn’t walk straight or if not walking straight was an excuse, but Xia pulled my arm over her shoulder and held on tightly to my waist the entire walk. The closeness was refreshing, even more refreshing than the scent of lilac shampoo that the wind picked up as it blew gently through Xia’s hair. I think I was as intoxicated by her scent as she was from the twenty-four ounces or so of wine.

We entered the elevator in the lobby of a very quiet dorm building. After I pushed the button for the third floor and made some joke about us going to the penthouse, Xia shifted herself so that her arms were wrapped tightly around me and her head was resting on my chest.

“Hmmm,” she sighed. “Let’s take a nap.”

I reeled over the suggestion and my hormones surged powerfully enough to make me dizzy, but real-life was quick to bring me down. “I have to go to work soon.”

“Just for a few minutes,” she cooed.

I hummed in agreement as the elevator doors slid open.

Cold air shot into the elevator as if someone had left a window open in the middle of an arctic winter. At first I thought the air conditioner must have been stuck at the lowest temperature setting, but once Xia moved away from me I felt how cold the air was—too cold to be coming from any air conditioner. My next exhale was visible.

I glanced down at Xia whose face was confused.

I took a step out of the elevator into a hallway that was lit only by a flickering florescent emergency light directly above my head. Xia carefully approached from behind. My immediate reflex was to keep her behind me by blocking her path with my left hand. The hallway had never had any windows, but usually, even without the lights, beams of light would mark the doorways that were the entrances to each room. I quickly doubted my own sense of time—but I quickly assured myself that it was still mid-day.

I listened intently but couldn’t hear anything except a faint high-pitched ringing in my ears.

“Hello?” Xia yelled so loudly that it made me jump. My left hand instinctively went from her waist, where it was holding her behind me, to her mouth. I stole a look at her and shook my head in warning.

Something was definitely wrong. I hadn’t noticed it sooner because I was so happy with Xia that I missed the gentle warnings that reverberated through the air. Now, I felt like I was standing in the middle of an earthquake; everything was buzzing frantically.

I took one step into the darkness. The carpet sloshed under the weight of my foot. Unthinking, I turned to examine the bottom of my shoe in the light. At first, I thought I had stepped in tar, the substance was so black in the dim light, but as a drop of liquid rolled off my shoe and onto the carpet below me, I saw a faint glimmer of rusty red.

Xia was no longer looking at me, but at the red stained carpet. Her face turned white before she sank to the floor.

Seeing her face caused panic to bubble up inside me and I found myself all-too-conscious of the fact that we were standing under the only working light in the hallway, our presence illuminated against the darkness. If something were in the hall it certainly would be aware of us.

I focused on the light above me, pulling the flickering light into my body and concentrating them in my hand. “Luthos,” I yelled, and brilliant light flashed from my outstretched hand. The spell only lasted as long as a flash of lightning, but it was long enough to sear the image of the hallway onto my retinas.

The walls, the floors, and the ceiling were all smeared in sticky red. A body with indistinguishable features was lying in an unmoving heap at the end of the corridor. The trails of blood on the walls suggested it had been smeared, not splattered, and the carpets ran red so uniformly that I knew numerous bloody carcasses must have been drug off to some unknown location.

Xia must have seen the hallway too because she was now poised tensely against the wall, half hidden by the shadows. The muscles in her hand were so tight that it looked like she was reaching out with shaking claws instead of hands.

We couldn’t stay here. I tapped the elevator button swiftly, but it didn’t light up.

Xia’s eyes pleaded with me. She was holding her breath as I tapped the button again and again. Nothing.

I muttered profanity under my breath.

I took Xia’s outstretched hand and tried to pull her into me—my pathetic attempt at trying to make her feel safe. She didn’t move.