Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (12 page)

I think I preferred hating him; it was a lot less complicated. “I don't like cheats and liars, especially ones I can't read.”

“You can't read me?”

I'd told him that already, more than once. I didn't know why he needed to hear it again. “After what Sherlock said, I thought you were a sleaze-ball.”

He didn't turn around to face me. “Don't know me as well as you think.”

An ugly truth. We'd known one another only a week before we drove each other into a frothing argument that got twisted into clutching, thieving, frenetic sex up against a bathroom door. That's so not me. If he hadn't taken that first rushing stride towards me with his hand out, I'd have had time to remember that I don't screw guys I don't know. But his hungry forward motion sparked something primitive in the non-thinking animal part of my brain, and touching him back seemed like the next obvious step. Of course, my version of touching him back was an attempted slap across his face, but it quickly turned into an eager pull to my open mouth, my lips quivering for contact. Guess my “oh no ya don't” needs some work. Sexual chemistry: one. Self-control: zilch.

Between that romp and the next, we barely spoke two words to one another that weren't directly related to the case, and even then it was tight and sparing. We pretended we were focused on the job, stake-outs done in strained silence, neither of us trusting ourselves to say the right thing. I thought he was trying to make believe it didn't happen.

“After she visited, I was sure you didn't return my calls or come to see me in the hospital in Buffalo because you'd been busted.”

He spun around, frowning. “I was there. Three days, then the PCU got called to Philadelphia and we had to go.”

“I didn't see you,” I argued.

“They had you on some pretty heavy drugs. Don't remember any yellow roses in your room. Chapel brought you Godiva chocolates. Was hoping you'd sober up enough to offer me one, but you never opened them.”

“I was awake?” What had I said? Oh, God.

“We had a few odd talks. You weren't making a lot of sense. Ranting about Barbary pirates, and lazarettos in Venice, and vampires behind the scenes of the Velvet Revolution. Figured you
were out of it.” He jerked a thumb behind at the door. “Are you going to remember that I was here tonight, or should I write a note on the back of your hand?”

“All right,” I snapped. “It's irrelevant, I guess. It's better this way.”

It wasn't at all better. Better was exactly the wrong word for it. But it was the only thing that made sense.

Batten quietly showed me the back of his head. What he was thinking, or staring at through the glass, I couldn't imagine. But he was still here and that was something. “This hostility toward me, you sure it's all yours?” he asked carefully.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Harry's back.”

“My emotions are entirely my own.”

He made a noise like he wasn't so sure. “You seem determined to write me off. I'm sure Harry's on board with that idea. Maybe the idea's his.”

“It hardly matters; the Feds aren't going to dissolve their fraternization rules any time soon.” Then again, if Sherlock carries through with her threat to expose our fling, neither of us have a career to worry about.

If I could touch him again without getting him in trouble, or without getting hurt…I distracted myself from that dangerous line of thinking with a brief revenge fantasy, during which I carved a hunk slowly out of Sherlock's impossibly tiny ass. I felt my lips curl up, and it felt ugly, cruel. But can you blame me? I had staples in my guts because of her. Having her arrested wasn't going to be nearly so satisfying.

“Speaking of rules,” Batten started. “When Harry was in the hall before, I think I made a gaffe.”

“Shocking,” I deadpanned. “You keep jerkin’ his chain, I will let him eat you.”

“I asked if he was here for a snack. He seemed upset.”

“Ya think?” I pointed my straw at him. “Harry's got indescribable patience, born of four centuries tolerating people's quirks. But when that patience runs out, he holds a grudge like nobody else. He'll either thrive on it, or chew your chest open. Neither will be pleasant.”

He ignored that. “He said, “Even if I were so selfish, it is not allowed. What'd he mean by that?”

“If your DaySitter can't provide you with enough while maintaining their own health, it's more honorable for the revenant to go hungry.”

He snorted softly. “There's an honorable way to use someone as food?”

“As a matter of fact there is, smartass. You've killed how many immortals? You still don't know a goddamned thing about them.” I glowered. “Noob.”

Batten scratched along the underside of his chin, where an evening beard was shadowy. “Tell me.”

“The Bonded revenant must consider the DaySitter's well-being before his own. They've been known to go into starvation mode if their partner is ill, and boy is that ugly.”

“Uglier than…” He let it go with a chesty rattle followed by a cough. “Ugly how?”

I folded my arms and waited until the argument had gone out of his face completely, until I thought he was ready to be civil. Caesar Millan would have called it a calm submissive state. I wondered if there was a Jackass Whisperer.

“A starving revenant enters lich-form, shrivels up, gets all ropey and sinewy. Think Harry's a monster now? Tie him up and don't feed him, then you'll see monster.”

“I wouldn't do that.” He must have thought it necessary to point that out to me. I nodded that I accepted his word.

“I've seen a sketch of a starving revenant. It was like a human died weeks ago and someone forgot to tell it to lie down.”

“Sketch, you mean an artist's interpretation?”

“In a doctor's file. A sketch because you can't take photographs of revenants, they don't show up on film, and they tend to fry digitals. This patient was starving because his DaySitter was in a coma and he had become depressed, refused to feed from anyone else.”

“So give him something for the depression?”

“That would have worked, if he had fed.”

“Animal blood?”

“Doesn't cut it. Only human blood works. Once a revenant feeds, he has a circulatory system. But how is Prozac going to help if you have no working circulatory system?” I pointed out. “Starving can drive them completely, irreversibly insane. A lich-form revenant gone too long without resting and feeding becomes like a rabid animal. Or he goes the other way, becomes melancholy, suicidal.”

“So what happened to the sketch vamp?”

“When his DaySitter died in the hospital without ever regaining consciousness, he…” Thinking of my Harry, I remembered my manners… “Antony Brossard Ledesma walked to the nearest baseball diamond, six miles from the hospital in Pittsburg, sat on the pitcher's mound in the snow, and waited for sunrise.”

A flicker of sadness crossed Batten's eyes. I said nothing, lest I break the bubble of momentary empathy I saw. Maybe there was hope for him yet. He rubbed his mouth with one hand, deep in thought.

“Antony was eight hundred years old,” I continued carefully. “In that time, he'd observed the invention of the printing press, the microscope, the first steam engines, submarines and hot-air balloons, vaccines, batteries, rockets and locomotives, the pianoforte and friction matches, sewing machines and streetcars, ether and nitroglycerine, dynamite and typewriters…” I drifted, but there was no lack of fascination in the vampire hunter's gaze; in fact, he looked like he'd never thought such things. I gave him a chance to disappoint me. He didn't. Encouraged, I added with an envious smile: “Steam turbines, combustion engines, telephones, microphones, fountain pens and elevators, X-rays and airplanes, motion pictures and neon. Helicopters. Microwaves. Nuclear energy. In the end, none of it meant a damn thing to him, not when he lost his Bond. Antony sat in the cold Pittsburg night waiting; he had hours to reconsider. When the sun rose, the eyes that had witnessed both the invention of the steam turbine in 1629 and high-temperature superconductors in 1986 lasted less than a minute. He was a waist-high pillar of ash in twenty-five seconds. According to witnesses, his final shriek could be heard for twelve blocks.”

“Were you there?”

I hadn't been, but I'd met him once, in Portland, when his DaySitter Kathy worked 2nd Floor. I didn't think I wanted to share that with Kill-Notch Batten, so I told him instead, “Immortals don't talk of suicide by daylight. They say, ‘he cast no shadow that morning.’ Harry told me that, the evening after Antony's death.”

He looked away from me. When he spoke, his voice was thick. “Vamps all do this lich-form thing?”

“There's a healthy option: wraith-state, a big feed followed by a long sleep, like a hibernating bear. Their casket is absolutely necessary for this kind of rest, and soil from their rebirthing, the place they were turned. Harry would choose that option, if he felt it necessary to deny himself for a long period, he'd never risk going lich. Besides, Harry clings to long-forgotten tenets. He's an Olympic-grade clinger.”

“Are there many other vampire etiquette rules?”

“How do you not know this? Of course revenants have rules.” I wiggled my fingers towards the water pitcher with a request in my eyes. He obliged, refilling my cup. “Even packs of pink-assed baboons have rules among the members of the troop.”

“Who sets these laws?”

“If I remember high school biology correctly, the baboon with the biggest, pinkest ass.”

He sighed impatiently. I grinned around my straw, sucked frigid water. “The upper echelon. Immortal hierarchy. They have a royal family. You knew that.”

“Tell me.”

“Okay fine, play stupid. Very convincing, by the way. There's the father of the revenant race, the Overlord.”

“He got a name?”

“Yeah, but it's creepy and I don't think it's a good idea to say it while I have open wounds.”

Batten's left eyebrow danced upward as it was prone to do. “What kind of sense does that make?”

“Superstitious nonsensical sense,” I agreed with a shrug. “Everyone's allowed to have shit they won't do because it gives them the willies. Like you and spiders. You pound wood through revenant chest cavities without blinking, but you panic and drop
your Fries Supreme in your lap when an itty bitty dangles in front of your face? Seriously, what's the dealio?”

“The Overlord, Baranuik?” Batten urged, putting his elbow on the arm of the chair and resting his chin in his palm. I couldn't not smile at the regret I saw in his face. He'd inadvertently shown me a moment of abject terror, sandwiched between all his macho posturing and genuine badass heroics. In his horror-struck moment, I had quietly reached across the front seat of the unmarked car and pinched the spider between thumb and forefinger, flicking the smudge of remains into a Kleenex, rolling my eyes while he struggled to regain composure. “The Overlord rules from where?”

I side-stepped. “The Overlord leaves the ruling to a king, the First Turned, who also has a name I don't like to say out loud. And then there are those whom the king made first, the four princes.”

He rocketed forward to the edge of his seat. “Just four? Are you sure?”

“So Harry says,” I said cautiously, not liking his sudden eager lean.

“Males, all?”

I frowned in thought. “Harry's never mentioned any females, so I guess so. I'm not sure Harry was even supposed to tell me that much, but sometimes I drink absinthe before feeding him to get him drunk off his ass and probe him for secrets.”

“A whole royal society of the undead, hunh?” he prodded.

“None you'd wanna meet. Creatures so old, they predate human history.”

“How's that possible?” His face had been tuned to dig for dirt, and I expected more vamp-bashing was on the back of his tongue waiting for a change to spring out.

I debated telling him. He always seemed to maintain a detachment from reality. In the face of a demon, I had no doubt that Mark Batten could maintain that he didn't believe in demons. I'm sure when he blew the heads off werewolves with silver bullets, he was sure there were no such things.

So why not tell him that the original revenant, the progenitor of undeath, was a fallen angel who had flanked Satan in the War in Heaven before the Dark Mother rose beside God, her Consort, and backhanded a third of the angelic host from heaven?

Because I didn't need Kill-Notch Batten armed with the knowledge that the ancestral source of Harry's power, passed down blood-to-blood, was actually a demonic, soul-devouring school chum of the devil, that's why. My Wiccan power was blessed and light, but Harry's immortality was hell-wrought; though he avoided using it for evil, it was miles from petunias and puppy tails. Sounded like an opportunity for a messy spiritual debate with a man I would peg as an atheist anyway. How could Batten listen to the truth about immortals, without considering then the possibility of things he'd always shunned? He barely bought the whole Blue Sense/psychic power thing, and I hadn't yet been able to impress him with it, since I couldn't read him at all. He certainly thought my witchcraft was irrational baloney. Now he wanted the history of the primeval powers without me going into the mystical? Impossible.

Batten rubbed his face, looking as tired as I felt. “So who's this Overlord?”

The Overlord's true demon name sprang to the tip of my tongue then; it stung like hot cinnamon candies on Valentine's Day, sweet and excruciating, the kind that make your spit into lava and blister the inside of your cheeks. It niggled the front of my skull, writhed like a maggot preparing to molt. I crammed my eyes shut.

Dear heavens, is He listening? I saw the word forming on the insides of my eyelids, lighting up like a sparkler scrawling in near darkness, capital A, capital S…I forced my mind onto something neutral: macaroni and cheese. There. Thoughts of comfort carbs, the ultimate demon-be-gone.

“Can we talk about it another time, please? These painkillers are making me seriously loopy.”

“Sure. We'll have plenty of time.”

I didn't have time to ask what the hell he meant by that. Harry swept into the room; the sight of my Star Trek thermos in his hand cheered me up; the night was finally looking up.