Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (40 page)

“I'll have you know, I haven't even begun to make a fool of myself yet.” I gulped my drink and then heard what I'd said. “That sounded a lot better in my head.”

I saw Hood's shoulders shaking, while Chapel held the plywood steady over the broken window.

Chapel offered, “Harry, you said there were snowmobile tracks? We'll have CSIU come out right away and take plaster casts.”

It was an hour before the windows were all boarded-up and the firemen concluded that everything was sound and stable and safe. In that time, Harry prepared for me an endless line of carajillo—espresso with a shot of brandy—in hopes of keeping me awake. I blame the alcohol for my wandering eyes. I watched Batten's lips on
the neck of a beer bottle, remembering the sensation of them working at my nipples. One of his fingertips played with the curling edge of the bottle's label, and what sort of cold fish would I be if the gesture didn't remind me of those fingers on my…

“Welp, I'm done thinking,” I announced thickly, standing. “I mean, talking, I'm done talking. I was talked-out hours ago.”

Harry served Chapel another coffee, with lots of cream and sugar. “Darling, we were not saying a thing.”

“We weren't? Oh. Well, that's a relief. You won't mind if I slip off to bed, then.”

“What are the chances you'll be going to bed for good this time, Dr. Dunce?” Batten asked. There was a teasing, casual-yet-suggestive lilt to his voice that was almost an invitation. It made Harry's upper lip tighten.

I swiped Batten's beer bottle cap from the table, folded it tight in my palm and bent close to Batten's ear. Along the soft, vulnerable edge of his lobe I breathed: “Blessed be this little charm, sleep ye deep and safe from harm.” Then I slid the cap in his jeans pocket. He watched my hand go down the front of his pants without complaint, raising one dark eyebrow.

“Just do me a favor,” I said. “Don't take that out until I say so?”

Batten's head fell back and to the side to watch me. He rolled his eyes with a soft snort-laugh. Then his eyes rolled back even further, and he promptly passed out in his chair. Released from their control, his knees fell apart and his long, lean arms plopped into his lap.

I nodded once at Harry and Chapel, satisfied, and picked up what I hoped would be my last carajillo for the night. “Good night, gentlemen.”

“Nicely done, my only love,” Harry said, beaming.

Chapel scratched the back of his neck and watched without comment as I closed my bedroom door.

THIRTY-SEVEN

“I'll show him Dr. Dunce,” I yawned, setting my last carajillo on the night stand. My eyelids, despite all the caffeine, alcohol and excitement, were heavy and roared with the hot, dry need to stay closed whenever I dared blink. It was nearly 4 am. I touched the buttons at my chest to change into my pajamas.

It was then that I realized I had been running around putting out fires and arguing with a drippy revenant and a hot FBI agent already dressed for bed in my two-sizes-too-big plaid pjs. That's me: smooth like a fresh-made bed of nails.

I flicked off the overhead light and fell into bed with a disgusted splutter, my head spinning. I had to try three times to pull off my socks and when I went to put them on the nightstand, I missed. I was beginning to suspect that I was drunk. Either that, or the flickering renewal of our Bond had sent me reeling. If I was sexually frustrated before, I was doubly so now that Harry had agreed to meet me half way, whatever that meant; the details were still foggy. If he was even half as hungry for the taste of a woman as Hot-Ass Batten, I could totally handle being the appetizer while waiting for Harry's mysterious “sign” before the main course.

Then again, the evil part of my brain pointed out (because, as I've said before, my brain hates me) Harry's been making love to a multitude of women for over four hundred years. His experience was not being called into question. My three boyfriends and a two-night stand really didn't measure up. Oh Dark Lady, I was destined to disappoint.

I sat bolt upright in bed, eyes forced back open by near-panic. Finally, that issue of Cosmo was going to come in handy. I yanked open the drawer and fished around in the dark, and my fingers
brushed something cool and smooth and plastic. The Blue Sense spiraled white in my mind's eye, the tiny black point opening in the center, widening until it formed a viewing platform. The lens. I fingered it out into my palm, bounced it there once, and then brought it into bed with me.

I'd tried a couple times to link to Danika Sherlock through the lens. Each time, I felt pushed back, shoved out by the murky protective shelter around her, a psychic bitch-slap. Maybe this time I was burnt-out enough to really not care at all, drumming up that gossamer wisp that was psi?

Here? I laid in bed, my body screaming yes, just lay here. Please? Sooo, sooo tired. But I had no protection in my bedroom, no supplies, few candles. Like Harry always says, if you're going to do magic, do it right…only when he says it, he uses big antique words that hurt my head.

I dragged myself out of bed, opening my door a crack. The kitchen was blessedly empty now, quiet. I could feel Harry nearby, the inexplicable push of the otherworldly. I slipped the lens in the waistband of my pajamas, near the bandages I probably didn't need any more, while another yawn rocked my face. I attempted to tip toe past the living room.

A glance told me Harry was deeply engrossed in a big leather-bound tome; I was guessing Chaucer rather than Shakespeare, but I was wrong. It was a book of poetry, entitled A Suite Burlesque. A quick peek at the author revealed him as one G.S Nazaire. The fire was high in the woodstove, and his lap was covered with a blanket. I'm sure he heard, felt and smelled me pass by, but he never turned his head.

In the office, I clicked on the banker's lamp by my laptop. The room stank of scorched wood but at least it didn't reek of ghoul goo. Since it usually smelled like vanilla scented candles, it drove home the reality that someone had actually tried to smoke us out, armed with the tools to get the job done. A man, Harry had said. A man? Maybe Sherlock had employed an Igor-type? As if I didn't have enough to worry about.

I opened the cabinet and reached for my dried lavender but hesitated, the Blue Sense flaring hot under my bare palm. Something
was wrong. My fingers hung over the sackcloth pouch, itching with suspicion. I grabbed a pencil from the desk, one of the few that survived the fire, and used the tip to open the lavender pouch.

Monkshood. Holy flaming shitballs. I narrowed my eyes. Bitch put monkshood in my lavender sack? Aconite poisoning through my skin would have been nasty. I poked around with the pencil and also identified wormwood and a poppet meant to represent me. It had short blonde hair shorn in a jagged edge. I squinted at it as though it had personally offended me.

“That's fine,” I told it, keeping my voice low. “Do your worst, Skanky McTwatwaffle. I'm done playing.”

I ran my hands out into the space around me, palms questing, tasting the region of my herbs and candles. My fingers shook and then steadied, nice and calm. Everything else was untouched by the intruder's taint. Rosemary, chamomile, several white candles collected, I shuffled through my gemstones to find blue lace agate for easy energy flow and peridot for improved clarity. I set them on a far edge of my desk and moved the rug aside with a nudge of my foot.

My gentle pentagram had been vigorously desecrated with slashed black symbols. Struggling to read along one line, I realized it wasn't a language still spoken just before my eyes crossed and fluttered. I nearly fell forward into the circle but caught myself with one palm on the desk.

“Well, fuckanut,” I barely breathed out. Grabbing white chalk from the cabinet, I stepped out of my pajamas and drew a hurried makeshift circle on the desk top, filling it with a perfect star. I tried not to think of the cursed ugliness splattered across the owls my sister had painted.

I climbed up naked on the desk, and knelt in the circle, pulling my things in with me. Making quiet invitations to the Watchtower, I did deep-breathing exercises while I waited for them to respond. As the worry and stress seeped out of my bare shoulders, they went limp, and a serene smile crept onto my lips. Unable to comprehend the shift in my feelings, I let my fingertips trace my mouth, following the curve up at the corners; yep, I was okay, not crazy, only bordering on happy. Just checking.

Starting with praise helped lift my heavy heart, and as my breath came quicker and stronger, the smell of burnt wood around
me no longer seemed a slap in the face; it seemed a victory, a line in the sand. Yes, I had been attacked, more than once.

But this is my place. Here I stay.

“Holy Mother, I remain/ All that serve shall rise again/Vengeance shall not from me flow/From above nor from below.” I breathed in sweet, clean air and the smell of wood freshened, like I was walking in the forest out back, and with each imaginary step I took, the ground became softer, until it was springy like root-bound ground. I paused in my journey of the mind, traced back into my unclothed body, brought the lens before me, lit the candles.

“Hail Hecate, Eyes of Night/Blade and chalice, dark and light/Lady serve me in this hour/to call upon Thy Ancient Power/That I might have clarity of mind/with truest sight now entwined.”

Harry's snap-spark of burning molasses played under my nostrils, scorching sugar, atop my own weaker version of the sugarburn. As our Bond deepened over the years, it would increase in strength like my psychometric power would. The empathic side of our Bond would as well, and possibly let me feel humans as effortlessly as Harry could. I mean, living humans. Until then, I borrowed from him, and knew that he felt me drawing upon the intimidating well of his seemingly infinite power.

I felt no resistance; from the next room, Harry let me have all I could manage in a steady unfaltering stream. As the cool touch of his undead Talent thickened me like a sponge dropped in a full sink, the delicate touch of the Goddess’ blessing also brushed across the bare skin of my forehead, travelled down across the bridge of my nose like a feather. I heard a hush, a gentle exhale, and wondered if it was me, Harry or something other.

Quivering with power, I brought the stolen lens back into my palm and visualized Harry's influence rising black and cold like a laser beam from a mausoleum. All the little hairs at the nape of my neck pricked up; I sensed Harry hovering just outside the office door now, curious but maintaining his distance.

I looked past Danika Sherlock in the lens, behind her, around her, side-stepping past the blurry, semi-blocked image of her, completely ignoring the pollution of her on the plastic. Taking the back door in, I tried to link to the person who owned the sunglasses before Danika.

The Blue Sense ripped into being like a puma spilling down out of the trees onto prey below; my head rocked back. If my hair wasn't already a spiky ruin, it would have stood on end with crackling energy. The vision was brilliant, sparkling and mind-searing, but I didn't back down. I pulled more from Harry and his immortal clout responded enthusiastically, awash with cold heat. Again, he worked at relaxing his hold to feed me another length of power.

My lips started moving, and blindly I groped for the chalk. Hand moving across the desk top on its own, I linked to the owner of the lens and wrote his name. His name, I boggled. His old name, and his new name. Patrick Laurier. Patrick Laurier Nazaire.

Revenant.

The good news was that it wasn't either of my revenants. I stroked the lens and let it pour forth its secrets; “I can't let her…” I didn't so much hear Patrick's words as see them forming across the matter of my mind. “She can't have access…without the element of…to add a dimension…”

Access to what, I wondered. An element of what? What could terrify an immortal so much that he'd be… I stopped. He had to prevent… my mind skipped backward and then forward three steps; psychometry is about as straight and clear as a bowl of scrambled eggs. At some point in the near past, Danika Sherlock had tried to force the Bond on this young revenant, was possibly still trying. He was refusing. Why would he resist?

I rubbed a thumb across the plastic. So hungry. They hadn't fed him in weeks, but there had been blood in the room, blood in his face, blood lashed on dirty grey cement. Blood at the drain. Blood on the baskets. Blood in the circle. They? I frowned in thought. Who were they? What room? What circle?

“Where are you Patrick?” I murmured, sending a tendril of my mind out, opening myself fully to receive the flavor of him. “Where did you come from?”

And then I was assaulted with an erotic scene: Danika strokinghim, her small hand firm and insistent on his cock, trying to get Patrick hard for her; since he had been refused blood, this was impossible. She spit on her palm and tried again. He laughed at her, a laugh that said finally, hopelessly, I'm going to die but
heyfuckYOUbitch. I saw what he feared the most, as Danika tried with cold, malignant determination to beat him into some form of erection: the rowan wood stake in her left hand. And then I saw something worse. Danika was petrified, because if she failed…

The lens practically jumped in my hand and suddenly it was hers, her sunglasses, and Patrick was gone, I couldn't reach him, he was just gone. Danika tilted the sunglasses back onto her glossy strawberry blond hair, driving. Glad to be away from the storeroom (what storeroom?) and away from the revenants (more than one, how many?) and hurting. Hurting so badly. Searing pain down her right arm, ending in a hot, severing edge. A needing, hungry emptiness, almost vampiric itself in its intensity. I'd never felt a human with such a gaping maw of need and loneliness before. Fraught with anxiety of a magnitude that was driving her unavoidably insane, she was resolute even in her psychosis. “I'm gonna get one. That's the promise.”

I tried to maintain the link to Danika but it slipped away as though I were waking from a light sleep. (“That's the promise.”) Clutching the lens in one hand and the blue lace agate in the other helped to briefly stutter the vision back into being, but all it showed me was black… black… black… and a strange purple light.