“His aura is fine. Garrett’s here, however, is quite unique.”
“Really?” I asked, squinting my eyes. I could see auras. Kind of.
“Quite unique.”
“My bugs?” I asked her.
“Oh, right.” She unloaded her bag and brought out a handheld device that I assumed swept for bugs. Then again, she could be a total charlatan. How would I know?
“I am thinking about adding surveillance of some kind. Like motion detectors and cameras. I’m tired of people breaking in without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“Normally, I’d say a camera was a bit much, but in your case, I’d recommend two and possibly some type of explosive booby trap.”
She turned on the device and started waving it over and under the most obvious places to hide a bug. She found one almost immediately and reached under my windowsill. It looked like a small black button.
“Very state of the art,” she said. She handed it to Garrett, who agreed with a nod.
“I doubt this came from your captain,” he said. “The government would never spring for such high-dollar equipment.”
“The Mendozas?” I whispered, not wanting them to hear me.
He held it up to the light and turned it in his fingers, admiring it. “Most likely.”
“Okay,” I said to Pari, “put it back exactly as you found it and make sure it still works. I’m going to need it later.”
She gave me a thumbs-up, then whispered, “It’s extremely sophisticated. It has a range of—” She stopped and let her gaze slide past me.
“Of?” I asked, before realizing she’d spotted my roomie.
“What is that?” she asked, straightening.
“That is a Mr. Wong. He’s my apartment mate.”
Pari had been able to see the departed since a near-death accident when she was twelve, but she could see only a slight disturbance in her vision, a light grayish mist.
“He’s a departed?” she asked.
“Yeah. He just kind of hangs in my corner. All day. Every day. He doesn’t get out much.” When she didn’t reply, I glanced back at her. She’d removed her sunglasses and stood transfixed. “What?” I asked. “You see the departed all the time.”
“You sure that’s what he is?” she asked.
That got my attention. “What do you mean?” I stepped closer to Mr. Wong. “He looks like every other departed I’ve ever seen. Maybe a tad more monochrome.” He was awfully gray.
“No, he’s not like every other departed,” she said.
Garrett watched our exchange, more interested in the receiver he was holding than in anything supernatural. He liked things he could see. Things he could touch and explain. For a guy who hailed from a family of practicing voodooists, not to mention went to hell and back, he was not very comfortable discussing the supernatural realm.
I squinted again, trying to see what she was seeing. “How do you know? What are you seeing?”
But she just stood there, her eyes glazed over, her face alight, her expression reverent. Pari wasn’t the most reverent person I’d ever known. Covered in tattoos, with her long dark hair styled in bold waves, she liked thick black liner and thin black skirts. If I had to describe her in one word, it would be
rebellious
.
“What?” I asked again. I turned my head this way and that. “What are you seeing?”
“Nothing,” she said, blinking out of her stupor. “Nothing at all.” She scanned the rest of the area. “But I do think I found part of your problem.” She pointed into my bedroom.
“Really?” I hustled to her side, stood there a moment, then walked into my room. Despite my earlier assessment that my bedroom hadn’t been disturbed when the intruder ransacked the place, something seemed to be missing. I rested my hands on my hips and looked around, trying to put my finger on it. My dresser hadn’t been disturbed. My closet seemed okay, considering it was my closet. My bed sat untouched, the Bugs Bunny comforter lying exactly as I’d left it that morning: in total disarray.
But something wasn’t right.
“Reyes. Alexander. Farrow,” I said.
Seconds after I spoke his name, Reyes walked into his bedroom, and I looked across the open space directly from my room into his.
He waited for me to continue.
“I feel like there’s something missing from my bedroom.”
A dimple appeared at the corner of his mouth. “You don’t say.”
“Any idea what that might be?”
He glanced around my room as well, then shrugged. “I can’t imagine.”
“Oh, wait,” I said, stepping from my room into his, “wasn’t there something here? Like, I don’t know, a wall or something?”
He looked up. “You could be right. I do seem to remember a barrier of some kind here.”
“Yep,” I said, stepping closer, “I definitely remember a partition separating our apartments.” When his only response was a mischievous tilt of his full mouth, I asked, “Where did you put my wall?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against his doorframe. “What makes you think I took it?”
“It was there this morning.”
“And that means I took it? Maybe you just misplaced it. Where exactly did you see it last?”
I pressed my lips together. “You tore down my wall.”
The smile he wore could’ve charmed the panties off a nun. Completely unrepentant, he admitted, “I tore down your wall.”
I stepped closer and he locked his long arms around my waist. “My apartment isn’t a safe place,” I warned. “It gets broken into a lot, it’s haunted, and it has a terrible aversion to cinnamon schnapps. Long story.”
“And you think taking down this wall was a bad idea?”
“Well, now that there is no barrier here, the curse that has been cast upon my humble abode has now seeped onto your side, too.”
“This is a non-seepage opening.”
“Really? Because it looks pretty seepy.”
“Seepy?”
“Seepy. And now we have this really long bed,” I said, nodding toward our two beds butting up against each other, no headboards in between. Then all the wondrous possibilities took shape in my mind. I beamed at him. “We can play Twister on it!”
“Twister.”
“And we can have massive pillow fights. I will, of course, kick your ass.”
“Will you?”
“Wanna bet on it?”
“I think you’ve done enough betting for a while,” he said, referring to my pathetic attempt to cash in at the poker table.
“That was with a lying, cheating demon. You can hardly blame me for losing to someone who eats souls for dinner.”
“I think your friend is upset.”
I whirled out of his embrace to check on Pari. She was staring again, only instead of the reverence she had when looking at Mr. Wong, she was regarding Reyes with a wariness that, if I wasn’t mistaken, resembled trepidation. She was terrified.
She took a deliberate step back when Reyes looked at her, then another and another until she backed up against Sophie and could go no farther.
“Pari,” I said, inching toward her, “this is Reyes Farrow, my, um, neighbor.” I didn’t know how to introduce him. Was he my boyfriend? Lover hardly seemed appropriate. And he wasn’t my fiancé. Yet. Still, boyfriend just didn’t seem right. “Pari?”
She snapped out of it and began gathering her equipment. “I’ll get to work on this ay-sap.”
Garrett had stepped to the doorway and was inspecting the new construction. It was uncanny. No one would ever have known a wall was ever there. It had been finished and painted to match and simply looked like one long room.
He turned to Pari. “Don’t worry, Farrow scares everyone.”
I scowled at him as I stepped past. “Are you okay?” I asked her, but she didn’t look up at me.
“I’m fine.”
I realized she was panting, but the emotions pouring out of her were only partly fear. There was so much mixed in there, I couldn’t decide which one was causing her the most grief.
I put a hand on her arm. “Pari, hon, sit down.”
She looked up at last, cringed against the light, jammed on her sunglasses, then said, “No, it’s okay. I’m fine.”
I led her to my sofa anyway. “You guys play nice,” I said, my tone warning. Not that it would do any good with those two, but they didn’t always get along. Once we got settled, I spoke softly to Pari. She was not the type to get rattled. I didn’t think she
could
get rattled. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.
She pulled in her lower lip, then leaned over to me and whispered, “What is he?”
She was the second person to ask me that lately. I didn’t know how much to tell her. She knew what I was because she could see me, my light, but what was she seeing with Reyes? “What does he look like to you?”
“He looks like, I don’t know.” She dared a quick look over my shoulder. “Have you ever seen the sky at night when the stars weren’t out but it was crystal clear, the sky such a deep dark black that you were sure you could drown in it, it was so beautiful?”
I nodded knowingly. “Yes, I have.”
“He’s that.” She slammed her eyes shut as though picturing him in her mind, afraid to look again. “He’s the deep, dark kind of beauty that you’d sell your soul to have.”
Wow, she was good. “I can’t argue with you there.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Like him. He’s made of fire. A black fire that’s so dark, so intense, instead of giving off light, he absorbs it. Bends it to his will.” She gave me her full attention then. “This is your Reyes,” she said, matter-of-fact.
“This is my Reyes.”
She cleared her throat, swallowed hard, and adjusted her collar. “I can see the appeal.”
“You seemed scared, Pari.”
She nodded. “Oh, I was. I am. Don’t get me wrong, but holy shit, there’s nothing sexier than something that beautiful, that enigmatic, and that deadly all rolled into one. Well,” she added, “as long as he’s not trying to kill me.”
I chuckled. “Can I give you a proper introduction?”
“No!” She started gathering her things again. “I mean, no, thank you. He’s just so— He’s too— I’m just not sure—”
“Gotcha,” I said in understanding, but burning with curiosity on the inside. I wanted to see exactly what she saw.
I looked over my shoulder toward him. He was leaning against his own doorway, and Garrett was leaning against mine. It was a standoff as old as time, when cavemen would challenge each other to a fight to the death with clubs. One of them had to be the alpha, and neither was willing to accede to the other. I squinted at Reyes, concentrated, gave it my all. Nope. He was just the hot guy next door. No starless nights or black fire.
“Oh, your phone is probably most definitely being tapped. Stop by and I’ll give you a clean one. You can use it for anything you don’t want them to hear, but just remember, they can hear you even when you’re not on your phone. Phones are the fastest and cheapest form of surveillance out there. If you need to have a conversation that you don’t want them to hear, you must take the battery out of yours. Don’t just turn it off.
“Call me later,” Pari said to me before tossing a wave to Garrett and hurrying out of my apartment.
“Okay. Don’t be a stranger.”
I realized Reyes was watching me when I stood to show Pari out, but the girl was fast, so I turned my attention back to the problem at hand. The wall thing. Seriously, who did crap like that?
Pinching Garrett’s ribs as I passed, I walked up to Reyes and stood with my arms crossed.
“Yes?” he asked playfully.
“This wall thing is not over.”
He hooked a finger in the top of my jeans and pulled. “We have a wall thing?”
My hands instinctively rose to his chest, the hard expanse smooth under my fingers. “We have a wall thing.”
“Charley!” Cookie called out.
“In here,” I called back, mesmerized by the dimples at either side of Reyes’s mouth.
She rushed in, winded with flushed cheeks. “What do you think of this outfit?” she asked, spinning in a circle until she noticed Garrett. Whom she’d just charged past. “Oh, hi, Garrett.”
“Cookie,” he said with a nod.
She’d been getting ready for the third and final date in Operation Punk Ubie. If this didn’t work tonight, she might have to do something drastic, like—gasp!—ask the man out herself. But she was a knockout. If this didn’t work, he was an idiot who didn’t deserve her.
“I was just getting ready for a date. Thing. Not really a date, but—” She frowned. “Where’s your wall?”
I jammed my fists onto my hips and glared at her. “That’s what I’d like to know, missy. Speaking of which,” I said, turning back to the wall thief, “why on earth would you tear down my wall?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “You live next door.”
“Yes,” I said, acknowledging that tidbit of info, “but why did you tear down my wall?”
He grew serious, studying me from beneath hooded lids. “You live next door.”
“Oh.” His meaning sank in at last.
Cookie sighed. “That’s what I want, damn it.” She pointed to us and questioned Garrett. “Is that asking too much?”
Garrett looked horrified by the thought.
“Okay,” I said, walking to her and straightening her scarf, “I found this guy in an ad in the back of the
Weekly Alibi.
”
“Wait, you don’t know him?” she asked, appalled.
“No, but he’s an actor. We need an actor for this one. Someone who can, you know, act.”
She groaned. “This could backfire in so many ways,” she said, and she was right, naturally, but I had to see the coffee cup half full. We were doing this for a reason. It would work. And unicorns sparkle in moonlight.
18
Remember, it’s all fun and games
until somebody loses an eyeball,
and then it’s, “Hey! free eyeball!”
—T-SHIRT
As I busied myself putting all my numbers in the phone Pari had loaned me, Cookie’s date showed up. Right on time. We ran through the script and told him that the whole thing was being taped for a new hidden-camera show that could be picked up by HBO. “If you want it to air,” we told him, “you really have to sell it.”
He was tall and well built if a bit too young and too clean-cut for what we were asking of him, but he’d agreed to our little skit and to the fact that we were more or less punking the man we were setting up.