Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (21 page)

At first no one noticed the immortal on the covered veranda manipulating hundred-foot shadows clear across the yard. Then someone let out a guttural exclamation. Another cursed, drawing the attention of the rest. Nervous laughter punctuated by the backpedaling of heels on hard-packed snow, men putting space between themselves and what they were witnessing with well-wide eyes. Hood vaulted from his truck, rigid with attention while the K9 dog went bat-shit berserk, flipping out at the very end of his tether. Batten's stern decree ordered someone to put up his weapon, which
meant a trigger-happy nincompoop was drawing down on my Cold Company. Dirty Harry vs. Dracula, I thought. Not that it would matter. Bullets couldn't kill a revenant unless you blew their entire head right off. These cops carried mostly standard issue Glock 9mm, and though bullets caused as much pain to revenants as it did to humans, their high-tech Tupperware wasn't likely to accomplish anything but slowing a revenant down or plain pissing him off.

The wind coughed, just enough to stir the hair from behind Harry's ears; it tousled from its perfect style. I knew that would bother him if he wasn't fully concentrating on marking each of his steps with deeper and deeper shadow, his asylum torn from the forest. He had made it all the way to the bottom step, shielding himself from the setting sun by sheer will, his power sizzling darkly within a sharply contained space. My own bravery wavered a moment and worry rattled through my jaw, making my teeth chatter. One slip of his focus and his shelter would whiff away, and the sun, full enough even though it was setting, would discharge him to ash in seconds.

One long finger pointed from beneath the cuff of Harry's wool coat and he rolled his voice at us across the lawn. Though he said it in flawless velvety French for effect, I knew it would stroke inside their ears in English. The marked disagreement between their ears and their brain would strip away any residual ballsy human folly.

“Silence enfants…maintenant.” Silence children…now.

I struggled to keep a straight face. Harry at his theatrical best, pulling out the Bela Lugosi eyebrow arch and everything. Oh, he was the perfect debonair Hollywood monster, his black coat stirring around his ankles suggesting an opera cape, his show-stopping eyes bright and flashing unnatural, lambent silver. Of course, the cops didn't notice him chewing Juicy Fruit, or see the square hint of the Nintendo DSI in his coat pocket. Probably would have ruined the effect.

Dead silence. Better. Point: Harry, to add to his total of eleventy-billion.

I snuck a peek at Batten, who was standing now with Chapel and Hood by the Explorer. I bet Batten noticed the gum. And the gaming system. And the platinum eyebrow rings that were the only indication that Harry wasn't lingering in a fantastic literary time warp.

Batten's color was high and mottled, his fists clenched. Tough titties. If he didn't want me to call out the big guns (or the weird guns anyway) then he should have done the job right. Pretty simple concept. If I wanted to track Sherlock and knock her teeth out, I was going to have to use what I had.

Harry looked at me expectantly. He snapped his Juicy Fruit.

I mouthed thank you, gratefully, as he retreated to safety indoors. It occurred to me for the first time that Harry and I made a pretty efficient pair, that perhaps he and I could solve this problem, or all problems, without the Feds.

I turned my attention back to the carefully-dressed head in my mailbox for second impressions. The cotton nose plugs were not a whim: this was something funereal, it had meaning to whoever tucked them there. The sunglasses were for shock value. I was supposed to whisk them away and be distraught by what I found, which told me her eyes were probably damaged or sewn shut or gone altogether. I really didn't want to be the one to find out which it was, but no one else had disturbed them yet.

I didn't have to touch it to know this head once belonged to Kristin Davis. There simply weren't that many missing heads to offer options in that department. What kind of nutcase would kill a twelve-year-old girl to put her head in my mailbox? Did said nutcase know her beforehand? How did the nutcase find Kristin, and was Kristin special for some reason, or just an opportunity that presented itself? Was the nutcase Danika Sherlock, or some other squirrel-brain?

I felt Batten closing in on my position as I reached out, my bare fingers inching towards the skin of her cheek. I brushed it softly, feeling the hard chill of frozen flesh just before the electric shock of the Blue Sense threw open a new window in my mind.

Everything went completely black. I inhaled sharply, jolted, but left my fingers stubbornly on the apple of her cheek. I saw nothing at all: not the lawn, or the head in the mailbox, or my own arm, or the winter-wrapped world that was my yard. I saw black.

“Blindfolded?” I asked myself. I tried to probe her last moments. “Are you blindfolded, honey?”

She didn't have anything to say to me. The dead never did, not in so many words. I can't see spirits in the Realm or talk to ghosts or loved ones long-passed: no human being can. Mediums are frauds.
The ability to see and hear the dead, that ability belongs to the dead alone. No living person can pierce that veil. All revenants can, through the dead's natural affinity for the dead, but this was one Talent they could not share.

The memories, however, the unlocked secrets marked on her remains, were mine to shuffle through. Places, scenes and secrets that could not be hidden from me were disappearing like pencil marks being erased with each minute that went by. If she was hovering there now in spirit to tell me what happened, she could cry out, howl and beat her ethereal breast, but I'd never know it.

“She didn't know who was touching her, drawing her away, into a vehicle but she trusted…because she had an idea that it was someone who knew her?… she fought only when she sensed danger. By then it was too late and she knew it, was angry at herself for being trusting. She was too close to the curb when she started to put up a fight, and she stumbled, twisting her ankle badly. She was dragged into the car. Van, maybe? SUV? Higher than a car. I can't see. I can't see anything. The vehicle smells funny to her, spicy. No faces, no places. She knows which bus stop she's at, though.”

Batten was at my elbow. “Bus stop?”

“Coming home from school. Special bus stop, right outside of the building. That's significant, don't know why. She's so accustomed to it that she doesn't give it any thought, takes it for granted that they pick her up next to the front door. It's not a regular school. She was late. She was alone, none of the other students remained. She must be blindfolded, because all I see is black.”

“A hand over her face? A cloth? Enforced? Drugged?”

“I don't know, I don't know. It was all black before she was approached.” I couldn't see, I could only feel lost in the dark.

“A scary black?”

It was the perfect question, completely enlightening. “No. A familiar black. Comfortable. Not strange at all.” I struggled to understand. “It's all she knows.”

“What do you mean?” Batten said, but his tone said he already knew.

“Kristin Davis was blind. Why didn't you tell me?”

I thought he was going to have a good answer to that—something other than “I was saving that tidbit back to test you”—but
before he could say anything, a flood of impressions collided into my brain. Overlapping, fighting to assert themselves: perfume, light and floral, rough hands on her arms holding her down, small hands but cruel without a trace of hesitation, wax and cat piss, an old musty cellar. Then sharp pain, sudden and searing along the front of my throat, savage, so unexpected and excruciating that I let out a gurgling scream and broke contact, flailing back onto my ass in the boot-churned slush.

Batten scrambled to help me up. I shoved his hands away angrily.

“I just forgot,” I hissed, embarrassed. “People are watching. Don't touch me.”

“Your stitches,” Batten reminded, stubbornly offering his hand. I didn't want to touch him without my gloves on. I fished in my pocket for lambskin and yanked it on with a quick tug. He waited.

“Forgot what?” he asked, pulling me to my feet.

“To brace for the pain of decapitation,” I snapped, cramming my eyes closed, unable to focus with his voice in the mix. “But there was something else.”

“Before? After?”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Shut the fuck up.”

It made no sense at all, the pain in her eyes after the throat slash. If her head was off, her eyes shouldn't be capable of pain, as she should be dead. Unless her head was off and her eyes were still alive to feel pain. But how? Why? That boggled my brain if it were true. I didn't really want to know the details. Brushing snow off my jeans before it could melt into them, I took a bracing breath before approaching the lid again.

I knew I wouldn't feel anything through my gloves, but that didn't make me any more confident, frankly. My fingers trembled as I reached for the sunglasses, slipping them down from the pale, finely-veined eyelids resting limply closed, strangely saggy.

The decapitated head of Kristin Davis opened its jaw with an audible crack. A wretched sloppy noise followed an icy hiss. Toppling to one side, its eyelids flew open accusingly; where her eyes used to be, ragged red holes gaped. What was left of her throat wetly gurgled at me.

I vaulted backwards with a shriek.

EIGHTEEN

“Fuckshit—” Batten's reaction time was too slow. I took the fall hard on the back of my head. Impacting the frozen ground made me nip the side of my tongue but I forced myself not to react. I lay in the snow, still, faking a faint, clutching my plastic piece of the prize.

Ice crunched under running boots, holsters creaking and keys jostling, coins in pockets, heavy huffing in frosty air. The K9's German shepherd was going ape-shit nearby. I hoped it didn't get loose and snap someone's arm off. Too much undead activity for the poor animal to handle.

“She tipped it over!”

“It moved, I saw it. It moved. Fuck me!”

“She moved it, dumbass.”

“Back off. Don't touch her,” Batten barked. His steamy breath bathed the side of my face.

One man said, “Yeah, like I want to touch the bloodsucking vamp's creepy psychic wife?”

Another piped up, “I swear it opened its mouth.”

“It was bullshit, that's what it was.” Whoever said it didn't bother to lower his voice or soften the disgust.

“Where are the sunglasses?”

“She broke them. There's a lens missing.”

“This is tampering with evidence, Agent Batten.” A gruff voice, demanding an explanation, accustomed to being in control. “Does the PCU regularly break evidence in the course of your investigations, or is it just this particular civilian you have trouble controlling?”

“Calm down, Jack.” Sheriff Hood's voice. “I'm sure it was an accident.”

“Marnie?” Chapel summoned calmly. I felt the back of his hand on my cheek, and the blue Sense instantly ripped me a new vision, of worry blended with excitement. “What happened, Mark?”

“The mouth opened. Made a sound. Then she fainted, the glasses went flying.”

“We should get her in near to Harry. I understand that might help,” Chapel suggested.

“What might help is if we don't let civilians have access to the crime scene,” the Jack guy said, snarky.

“What did this accomplish?” the gruff voice demanded.

“Are we about finished, now?” A coroner's assistant.

“Take it away,” Batten said.

“It didn't actually move, right?” The other assistant. Forced laughter.

“Missing the lens, Agent Batten.”

“We'll find it,” Batten assured them. “Fan out, it can't be far.”

“She's not coming-to.” Chapel, concerned and not hiding it well for a change.

Quietly, the second coroner's assistant, “No way it could fucking open its mouth.”

The first assistant, with a smoker's cough. “Well it ain't moving now. C'mon.”

My fingers worked with minuscule motion along my side, worked at tucking the missing lens in my waistband, praying that I wasn't being watched.

“Let's get her out of the cold at least,” Chapel said.

“With that thing in there?” one of the men scoffed.

Another man made a guttural sound. “Fuck that noise. He ain't human. You saw what he did.”

“I seen one of those things get both arms torn off and still manage to kill three SWAT guys in Juarez. True story.”

“Yeah but how old was it? See, that matters.”

“It don't matter, all them monsters the same,” Juarez-guy said.

“Telling you, it matters. The older ones are worse. I heard it right from the FBI seminar.”

“I don't care what you heard from no damn seminar, schoolboy, I seen it with my own eyes,” Juarez said.

“Yeah but how old was the thing?” Mr. Seminar demanded.

“This guy's American, right?” Another voice, quieter. “That means he's younger, and he can't do shit like that. Not like one of those fucking old-as-dirt European ones.”

“I ain't finding out today…are you?”

Hood talked around something in his mouth but I didn't smell smoke. “Put the lady in the van with the head, we'll take her into town, going by the hospital anyway.”

“Won't be necessary. I got her.” Batten's arms hoisted me easily. Being jostled against his chest was nice; I resolved to enjoy it while I could.

I thought about what the cops had been saying. If people did mistake Harry for American, then he wouldn't be as grand a prize. Why did Danika want him so badly? Did she hate me because she coveted Harry, or did she covet Harry because she hated me? Chicken and egg time. Why us? There were plenty of other young psychics worldwide, far more successful than I, with more powerful revenant companions with better Talents to covet, plenty of others to hate.

“Agent Chapel, we need you!” one of the coroner's assistants called, voice climbing a full octave.

The other yelled,

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck!” A plastic sound, rustling. “Thing's squirming, oh God. Oh Christ!”

“It's revenant,” Batten said to no one in particular, total delayed reaction. “And she's not his wife.”