Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (41 page)

“That's the promise,” I said aloud, my brain churning, chewing at something that I couldn't bring forward.

When Harry touched the office door open, his silhouette marked the heartbeats in silence before he ventured in. “Do not let Agent Chapel catch you with that item,” he said, his voice very low and unhappy. “If he thinks you a common thimble-twister, he will never trust you again.”

I scratched an irritated itch in the center of my forehead. “Before I take offense to that, does thimble-twister mean thief?” At his slow meaningful blink, I moved off my knees to the floor to retrieve my pajamas. “Well, if the thimble fits…”

His face became blank, inscrutable. “I fed you more than I felt necessary, but you were quite apt in your juggling. You have a most agile mind, my pet. ‘Tis rather a nice change to be proud of you.”

I smiled wanly. “Thanks, Harry.” I think. “The original owner of the sunglasses was a revenant named Patrick Laurier. Mean anything to you?”

“I'm afraid it does not.” A casual shrug. “Perhaps he is young.”

Harry's idea of young varied greatly from mine. Harry thought any revenant under three hundred was a veritable puppy. I nodded, thinking I had heard the surname Nazaire before; Ruby Valli's companion, Gregori Nazaire, was over fourteen hundred-years-old. Certainly old enough to be making little puppy revenants, and a revenant almost always took the surname of his maker. I wondered if Gregori kept in touch with any of his Youngers, namely Patrick Laurier. Harry was watching me steadily.

“You are done in and dog-tired, my love,” he said. “Will you sleep now?”

“Soon,” I promised. He took the hint and excused himself. I locked the lens with the Beretta and the eyeball in the gun safe under my desk, then turned to purse my lips at the pentagram.

“Hestia of House and Home/Banish the foul dark ‘ere it roam!”

I tipped one of the white candles on its side and watched the hot wax spill down from desk level and hit the painted owls. In a sour green swirling cloud, it consumed whatever foul magic lay there in Latin, and the fire sputtered to an unhealthy end. I blew with pursed lips to dissipate the curse. Then, because I was feeling cheeky, I blew it a kiss and a wink.

“Toodle-oo, sucker.”

I grabbed the pencil and my tan Moleskine from the desk drawer, and wrote: Patrick Laurier, revenant. Nazaire master. Would Gregori Nazaire know what had happened to Patrick? And how would I get Ruby's permission to talk to Gregori, to ask? This might be tricky. It would take careful wording and social graces: so not my strong suits.

I wrote: Danika tried to Bond Patrick, he resisted. “She can't have access…” That phrase worried me more than the unsuccessful hand job and the sudden disappearance of the link to Patrick. Why was he resisting so strongly? Was it just that she was unsavory? Or that he was unwilling, or not enamored? What did he not want Sherlock having access to, through him? Was his Talent dangerous? Perhaps Patrick Laurier was pyrokinetic. I'd always thought that would be the most kick-ass superpower to possess, a Talent I categorically did not want Danika Sherlock to seize. As I wrote this
possibility down, the lead of my pencil broke and I reached towards the ceramic froggy pencil holder to get another.

And that's when I saw them.

Tiny little black fangs, scribbled on my froggy pencil holder. Ink. Rats! I squinted at it, licked my thumb and rubbed them. Permanent ink! Double-rats! Did Danika do this? Did the mysterious hunter do it? Did the mischievous glove thief do this? I stopped my bare spit-covered thumb's rubbing and pressed hard, opening my mind again to Grope.

An impish, lopsided grin. A twinkling glitter of wickedness in those lake-bottom blue eyes, his handsome face crinkling with smile lines. A black marker in his tanned, calloused hand.

My jaw dropped. I struggled between outrage and a reluctant smile, felt my eyes narrow down to mere slivers even as my lips twitched upward.

“Hilarious,” I drawled, standing to make for the door. “Cheeky-ass hunter thinks he's funny. And you!” Against the wall: the froggy doorstop had big pointy black ink fangs. Likewise, the stuffed frog in the chair with the surprised expression. “Oh he's so gonna get it.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

The ceiling creaked and a door overhead shut with an audible click. That's the blessing of living in an old, ill-made cabin: lots of noise. I considered the situation as I flossed with Harry's cinnamon wax: upstairs, directly above my bedroom, Batten the frog-vandal was still awake and moving around. Maybe undressing, my cruel imagination suggested, that powerful, limber body reflected in the tarnished mirror above the guest room dresser. Lucky fucking mirror. Was the overhead light on, or just the bedside lamp, casting half of him in shadow? Was his shirt off, revealing the hard abs and broad shoulders that made me hungry like a carnivorous castaway on veggie island? Were his boxers off yet, or would he sleep in them? Since he was so fond of secretive forbidden sex, I could go up and find out for myself…but would Harry be as tolerant, now that we had come to a “someday more” understanding? I was already amazed that he tolerated Batten as well as he did.

Looking down at the claw foot tub, still filled with cooled water, I worried about my companion, and about Wes. The water would stay in the tub tonight, I decided, in case another Molotov attack caused someone to need a dunk. Or in case I needed to cool off to save myself from crawling up the stairs and begging Batten to please put me out of my sex-starved misery.

What the hell was wrong with me? Jerkface defaced my frogs, and here I was thinking about molesting him? Some punishment! Calling myself half a dozen versions of stupid, I kicked out of my socks and crawled into my cool, creaky bed. When my head tucked down, I slid so rapidly into a half-sleep that I almost didn't have the time or stamina to turn my face into the pillow. As my energy systems shut down, I kept a comforting hold on my awareness of
Harry in the next room, wrapping the feel of the revenant's solid presence around me like a security blanket until the very last moment.

*   *   *

I knew right away I was dreaming; someone's mouth slowly teased its way up the soft, yielding inside of my thigh, and that almost never happens. Their hot, moist exhale had me shivering with delight, and when the long lick of their tongue flicked out, my toes curled in anticipation. I writhed as my unknown lover teased me in just the right way, intuiting exactly what I wanted and when; that also almost never happens. It was like the head between my legs must be my own, somehow, so well did this lover know my needs.

Then there was the soft press of teeth, gently at first and then nipping. I jumped a little, surprised, thinking naturally of Harry, though he had never fed from the fat superior vena cava running down near my groin. As the mystery lover nipped again, harder this time, I tried to ask them to knock it off, but my voice wouldn't come, and though I knew that this was one of those dreams where you need to speak up and can't, I tried again. Regardless of how easily I tell people off in waking life, in my dream I was struck mute, and perhaps deaf too, because I heard nothing from below, no breathing or noises, no dirty talk. When I tried to lift my head off the pillow to look at my lover, it seemed to weigh ten times what it should; my neck was limp spaghetti, my head a cement block. I was lucid enough in the dream to think that was kind of funny.

Then with over-eager abruptness, the face pressed against me and his tongue, far longer than it should be, plunged inside, invaded deeply, explored but not gently, and not pleasantly. I wriggled and tried again to cry out, to look. My subconscious didn't want me to speak, but it hadn't taken my sight, I thought, so why can't I look down at my lover?

The ghoul's face shot up from between my legs; though rotted by heat and putrefaction, this ghoul's face was instantly recognizable
as Mark Batten. His broad chest was pale and discolored, greenly terrible; gone was the dark splotch of chest hair I'd once curled my fingers into. A yawning hole flapped over his left pectoral, empty of its beating organ, as if it had pressed the emergency eject button.

He stuck out his too-long tongue, slurping at me in the air. The connective tissue in the back of his throat gave way. Let loose, the slab of tongue fell onto my bare belly with a sick plop. I tried to scream and bat it away, but couldn't. My jaw worked, sound trapped in a dumb void. Rotting ghoul hands pressed my hips to the bed, palms slippery with gelid scum, pinning me in place. Vividly, I could feel the unstable flesh moving across the hard immovable bones of his hands, threatening to rub off. I bucked to get away but his arms were like iron bars. It's not a dream, my alarm bells clanged. Something's wrong, it's not a dream!

After what seemed like an infinity of squishy, slapping struggle, he reared back to show me the dark purple head of his bobbing cock, giving it a squeeze. My eyes widened though I wanted to cram them shut. What glistened at the tip was not semen; bright ruby red, a droplet of blood balanced there before running down the length of his shaft to the edge of his gripping hand. He stroked it once, displaying it for me, and the skin rolled off in his hand. Horror dragged a guttural choking noise from me.

His voice rasped, grated out in a foul gust: “Isn't this what you want, you filthy cunt?”

I broke from the nightmare with a windless gasp that turned into a half-sob. Flinging out a hand, I shoved my cool sheets off in a jumble. I scrambled upright, coated in sweat, dry-mouthed with revulsion, shoving strands of damp hair off my forehead. I tried to call out for Harry; my petrified voice box was hoarse and words didn't so much belt out as leak thinly. I tried again and failed. Worse yet was the sudden realization, the hole of vacant loneliness, the absolute blankness in the cabin: Harry was gone, everyone was gone, I was completely abandoned to my own resources. Except…

I didn't want to crane over the edge and look, but now I could hear it, closer, and holding my breath I could hear it even louder: talon-like fingers reaching, skittering on the hardwood, scritching, snagging the rag rug with jagged yellow nails. I felt my mouth form
a perfect O. The wood blackened with foul magic, creaking under the ghoul's touch, as though his flesh was super-cooled gas of a poisonous class and the planks were a living organism, infected. Smoky crystals formed in the wood like frost on a window.

“What do you want?” I tried to shout; my voice was barely a whisper. “Where did you come from?”

Wearing icy slivers on ruined flesh, the ghoul tumbled on his back on my floor to show me his face: above a bare strip of lip hanging atop exposed gums and teeth were Gary Chapel's hazel eyes, clouded by death. A wet snarl purled on the back of his tongue. “You brought us here. You did this. You did it.”

Goblets of fatty tissue and red flesh dribbled off the ghoul's body onto my rag rug. As I watched, his sockets sagged like melting wax running down the side of a candle, painfully wet-red with unseeing gore, gaping at me, and his eyeballs burst out to spill their contents in a runny ooze. (“You did this.”) His arms were hairless and skinless, shaking with the effort to roll back to his knees. He looked too weak, or too crippled by cold, to move quickly or unfurl his clenched arms. I could see every tendon pulling, every ligament and muscle and vein. It seemed each of its movements tore silent torment from its gaping maw. (“You did it.”)

I backed away, pulling my sheets to me, when it hit me: no smell. Still dreaming. Its hand landed on the side of my bed and hauled up, bringing its eyes level with the mattress. Shitfuckwakeup!

Bolting upright, I bit down on my tongue, hard. My mouth watered, and my eyes stung; awake for real this time. More evidence my brain hates me. Nobody needs to experience a dream like that. Ever.

Without a second thought to things lurking under the bed or anywhere else, I thrust out of bed and ran full-tilt to the living room, where Harry's reassuring cool familiarity was a bobbing buoy in the night sea.

Harry still lounged in his wingback chair, frowning unhappily down through his pince nez at a copy of Procession, erotic poetry by Ruby Valli. He did not look up, merely lifted a corner of the blanket from his lap in invitation. When I crawled there eagerly and put my head on his chest, he folded it back, tucking it up around my shoulders.

“That surely must have been an adventuresome dream,” he noted quietly. “Your sweet heart is knocking like a Jackson Model C.”

My throat still gluey with residual fear, I ground out, “I don't know what that is, Harry.”

“I know.” He paused in his page turning to stroke a soothing hand across my forehead. “No more dreaming. Sleep tight. Don't let the grave bugs bite.”

And I slept.

THIRTY-NINE

Morning had slithered into the living room starting with the slightest lift of darkness, easing the nervous press of night. Even before the clock displayed a reasonable hour, the heavy attendance of that black cellophane glaze lurking at the windows traded places with a softer, greyer version. Dawn was made at last official by Harry's silent movement across the room to shut the blinds.

I'd spent the rest of the night where Harry had put me: curled up on the couch wrapped in a tight circle with a hot water bottle tucked against my belly.

I had to cling to the hope it was only Danika Sherlock behind the ghoul. Better the devil you know. If it wasn't, then I had somehow managed to drive more than one person to homicidal rage. Goody. I know I'm not exactly charming, but I had no idea I could inspire such malevolence.

A bottle full of butane sat on the coffee table. Harry's engraved lighter sat beside it. I hadn't seen Harry fetch them, but they were, combined, an excellent idea. Ghoul plus fire equals no more ghoul problem. Too bad fire didn't banish nightmares, too.

Harry still sat where he had for the last three hours, in the wingback chair. He had traded Ruby Valli's poetry for another copy of Bed and Breakfast Ownership, with his rimless pince nez perched low on the bridge of his nose, delicately licking a fingertip with each page turn. I didn't see how he could be so nonchalant after everything that had happened. I was still vibrating at overload on the angst meter. The memory of standing at the funeral home sink rinsing rotted, slimy matter off my hands flashed back and stars prickled and swam in my vision. I pressed my face into a throw cushion and willed it away.