Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (8 page)

Then I thought of Harry, and his lectures about the soul and redemption. Of purity, and salvation. Oh, Harry, my mind cried out, wishing now I'd answered his last call.

Danika took a fistful of my hair in her hand and I heard the snick of the scissors. The sawing motion of my hair being shorn away pulled my head back and forth. Handful by handful she threw it aside, dropped it in sprinkling, tickling piles across my face, and on the blood-soaked carpet.

My fingertips brushed the onyx and I focused on slowing my breath again. Tears welled in my eyes, leaked across my face in thin rivulets. I just let them fall.

I wanted Mark. No, strike that. I wanted my Harry. He was too far away for me to feel him, so I knew he probably couldn't feel me either. It was for the best; he'd been wide awake for grandma Vi's death. I didn't want him to experience the gut-wrenching on-off switch of mine.

Hail Aradia, to thee I bend/Grant thy touch, my life to end/ Death's embrace dost Thou command/ Unlock the gates, take me in Hand. /Breath to cease and pulse to flee/An’ it harm none, so mote it be!

My heart stuttered to a sudden stand-still. It was far from pleasant. The sinking weight of the Lady's dark and grudging gift was not much better. My body fought death immediately; frantically my diaphragm jerked and spasmed, trying to pull air. The pain from the stab wounds diminished, only to be replaced with something far worse: desperate contraction in my chest, the cramp of need in
heart and lungs. My tongue crawled against the back of my teeth. I kept my jaw clamped tight. I was drowning, drowning, my airways burned.

I could hear Danika panting, rattling thick with phlegm, as she straddled me again, and I felt her stare. My dry eyes longed to blink through a mat of shorn hair strands.

“Not pretty now,” she said softly, sliding her fingers to my throat. They were slick; she had cut herself while stabbing me to death. Poor baby.

Despite my lack of pulse and breath, she'd know I wasn't really dead if she got one of her so-called “flickers” about what I was attempting one-handed under the bed. I wondered if my pupils were actually dilated like a real corpse as I stared unblinking. I knew I was still losing blood; I could hear it squelch in the carpet's padding under Danika's knees. She palpated my throat. A retching gag escaped her.

She rolled off me to all fours to vomit forcefully against the side of the bed, splattering my jeans with sour bile. When I retold this story to everyone I knew, I was definitely going to leave out that nasty detail. Add vomit to the stench of old cigarettes in the carpet, spilled coffee, and the coppery tang of blood, and you had the horrible potpourri of her revenge. She stood, wavering uncertainly on her feet, turning her back on me.

She coughed, spitting to clear her mouth. “Getting late. Be on my way…” she breathed, whipping off the robe and depositing it in a swish of terry on the floor. She peeled off the yoga pants to reveal weatherproof rubberized pants, the kind worn by hardcore all-weather fishermen. They were wet with my blood but would wipe off easily. “You had what's mine. Now I'll have what's yours. That's the promise.”

And my brain shrieked, Harry!

EIGHT

Funny things occur to you when you're dying. Bleeding out for the second time in three months, I thought deliriously, I could have used that damned No. 2 pencil. And: Soft palate impalement. That's what Batten called it. And: I think Batten waters down his cologne. How can I prove it? And then: I'm going to die, here. I don't want the reek of vomit to be the last thing I smell.

When I was sure she'd gone, I broke the sage pentagram with a trembling hand, accidentally flicking the onyx deep under the bed. The shuddering breath that followed was sweet, but the sharp pain of the stab wounds returned with my life. I'd never imagined anything could hurt more than gunshot wounds. Stab wounds gaped, flesh mouths silently screaming scarlet; every slight breath I hitched-in made it so much worse. Unfamiliar noises scratched and scrambled along the back of my throat, injured animal noises, sounds of plain, mindless desperation.

My cell phone was smeared with blood that had poured down my back to soak the rump of my jeans, and rolling over to free it from the sticky denim was torture. Sounds were starting to filter back: cars on the street, a motorcycle rumbling by. She'd left the door half open. Frigid winter air spilled in. Could I get up enough voice to shout for help? Would anyone hear? The front desk guy? A passerby? Out here? Not likely.

There was so much residual rage in the room I could taste it on the back of my tongue; I gagged, which tugged savagely in what must have been the worst stab wound, in my belly. I huddled around my pain, hissing through my teeth.

I should have dialed 911 first, but my heart contracted frantically for my Cold Company, hammered with an un-ignorable drumming,
fists on taut skins, a violent thundering pushing hot urgency through my veins. I knew this was the Bond's doing, the near-severing of our mystical tether firing off unrelenting pressure to reach him: my partner, my advocate, my champion, nothing else mattered. Swallowing back panic, I thumbed-in his number.

One ring. No answer.

Two rings. Harry, please!

Three rings and it went to his civilized, articulate message. I sniveled something indecipherable and tried again. No answer. No answer. If he was prone now in his casket… Oh, Harry, get out get out!

I spit out a blood-choked sob and dialed 911. Dispatch had barely said a syllable when I was gasping at her repeatedly, “she stabbed me, she stabbed me.” Part of my brain told me to smarten up, stop being a victim, calm down and tell her how to find me. But it was too incredible. What I wanted to shout was: That snot-gobbling fuckpuddle Danika Sherlock stabbed me. But what came out was a bawling, “Please, please send help!” My innards quivered nonstop. My vision started to blur. That's never good. The operator was asking me something. I didn't understand any of it. “Ten Springs Motor Inn…” My clammy hand reached for and found the knife she'd used. I rubbed my other glove off against my hip, and gripped the knife in my left hand, hard.

A blast of imagery slammed my head back into the copper-soaked carpet. I wrenched my eyes shut, as if that could protect a Groper from what she was seeing: that crazy nutjob had watched my cabin, had been inside, inside! Plotting it out. She had been told explicitly, repeatedly like a drill, how to break the DaySitter Bond through death or refusal to feed, mine or his. Sherlock had been waiting for her chance to strike like an injured king cobra in the shade of a Jeep. This day had been earmarked. On a calendar. In smudgy blue ink. For some reason, that struck me as insult atop injury.

If she thought she could just waltz up to Harry and say: “Marnie's dead, so you're with me now” she was streaming headlong toward a bad death. What a low opinion of me she must have, to think my companion would be so easily lured away. Harry would put her through a wall, repeatedly, and when the authorities found out, they'd swear out a warrant to have him staked. Kill-
Notch Batten would eagerly volunteer for the job. This was the end of everything. If I lived, I wouldn't want to.

The door swung open to the dusky outside and I froze, holding the phone half-leaning upright against one elbow. The jig was up. She'd put the blade across my jugular this time. I clutched the knife so tightly that my knuckles flared with pain, laying my thumb along the hilt like Harry had shown me long ago. I waved it at the figure in swift, warning arcs.

The legs that straddled the threshold were wide, sturdy and undeniably masculine. And dressed, I noted deliriously, for a winter night's ride. A double-breasted chesterfield overcoat I recognized flapped around his thighs, above salt-flecked biker boots that were otherwise perfectly polished. Only one man I knew was that persnickety. A cry of relief leaked from my throat.

Harry moved swiftly across the room in his dizzying blink-step, pale lips curled back in a silent snarl. He kicked the ruined TV out of his way; it tumbled through the air casting shards of glass and metal in a shower. Sweeping down beside the bed on one knee, whispering in furious French as he always did when angry, his tongue worked the words like a spell, his mouth caressing the sounds with a voice slightly sibilant around a hint of fang. The scent of blood in the air had him trembling badly. The old ones may play poker-face better than any human, but in times of bloodshed or in the face of arterial spray, even they inevitably lost their cool and had to work hard at controlling near-ejaculatory enthusiasm.

“Who's a brave soldier, then?” he said as he assessed and surveyed the damage with quick hands that scanned and catalogued too fast to follow, unzipping my jacket, clutching my shirt front to yank it out of his way. With a sharp jerk he shred its remains up the front.

“This…” Apparently there was no word for it in any of his languages. He diagnosed the wounds rapidly with bleak ash-grey eyes that had seen centuries of triage and casualty, much of the latter caused by him. “Right, then. Do not fight me, love, there is no other way.”

His hand snaked behind my head and pulled my face into his left elbow. I hadn't seen him break his skin there, but a small wound was pressed to my lips. Dizzily, I closed my eyes and calculated the
odds that he knew better than me what was best. Something leaky-sweet passed my lips and hit my tongue. Heady like thinned molasses but strangely tingling, alien and funky like a tomato gone bad. I didn't want to swallow as it trickled to the back of my throat; I gagged and turned my head.

Harry growled impatiently; the hand on the back of my head tightened, fingertips digging into my scalp as he forced my face back to his elbow.

“Time for trust, Dearheart.”

“Don't rush me, I'm enjoying the foreplay,” I groaned.

When I gagged a second time, he said, “You are out of options, now, DaySitter. You have lost too much.”

I'm going to die in the vomit-stink room. I opened my mouth around the wound and sucked, hastily swallowing. Unfortunate images flashed in my mind's eye: a waterlogged grave, a dripping crypt, an age-slicked corpse in a swamp. Once the cool, runny fluid of Harry's veins cleared my taste buds, something deeper inside me rolled over with savage energy, swirled its cold fist around in my gut like it was stirring a slushy. I felt Harry's fingertips dabbing at my wounds, and that same ancient, unnatural energy ravaged my skin, tingled icy-hot like Vick's Vapo-Rub. I thought deliriously, revenant blood would be great for chest congestion due to cold and flu.

Harry was watching me with a medic's attention. Satisfied, he shoved my gloves in his pocket and collected me carefully, lifted me as though I weighed nothing. Considering he could bench press a two-ton dumpster, my hundred and twenty pounds wasn't a huge struggle. He gathered me into his chest to shelter me from the cold, hurrying from the room before I could wail an objection. The clouds were good and deep above us, solid asylum, and the wind had picked up to howling intensity, screaming through the Aspens.

(“Don't you die yet, Marnie—don't you die on me yet, bitch!”)

Harry's persimmon-red Kawasaki Vulcan lay on its side, hastily-discarded next to Room 4. He slid me into the back seat of the Buick awkwardly. I backpedaled on my hands across the faded plush tan fabric. Despite the pain ripping into various parts of my body, I'd never been happier. My Cold Company was here, and as close to alive as he'd ever be. As a big plus, I was now feeling pain right down to my toes. I wasn't paralyzed. Yippee!

“Lay still, perfectly still. Are you hearing me? Place your hands here,” he advised, moving my hands to my burbling belly wound. “This is the one that yet requires attention.”

“She wants you,” I told him, my breath-fog making his face a momentary blur. My teeth started chattering. “She's after you.”

He hovered inches above my face, shrugging out of his coat. He hadn't been able to calm down enough to retract his fangs yet. In his urgency, he'd nicked his bottom lip. A translucent droplet bloomed there like a pale blue drop of alien oil and my mouth watered in response. Turning my face, I buried my nose in the bench seat.

“Calm down,” he said sternly. “Stop moving.”

“Harry, you're in danger.” I looked at him again, avoided his mouth this time.

“Yes, it is our very good fortune she is not your adversary, isn't it? Did you have a terribly nice visit?” Anger furrowed his brow. He hesitated, possibly considering stains, before tucking his coat around me. It smelled lightly of his 4711 cologne under embedded cigarette smoke, and the peculiar scent that marked the immortal, the burnt sugar tang of revenant power.

He whipped into the driver's seat and slammed the door. “Here's hoping blood can be removed from tweed. Hospital?”

I hesitated. “Can't you heal this much damage?”

He craned around in the front seat. “Not without turning you.”

It didn't occur to me at the time that this might be a rare, once-only offer. What I was thinking was: Surgery at the hospital with lots of drugs, or drinking sour blue vein-grease for three days before becoming eternally nocturnal? Decisions, decisions. “North Suburban's closest. Thornton. Grant Street.”

He shoved the Buick into gear and gunned it, firing the heat on full blast. We lurched backward, peeled out of the motel parking, swerving to avoid oncoming traffic.

I gripped the bench seat with one hand while holding my wound with the other. Under my palm, something pulsed, lively-exposed, slippery and wet, hotter than my bare skin. I tried not to think about what it could be.

Harry lived fast, if what he did could be called living. He had a never-ending string of speeding tickets, his sporting tastes ran to
skydiving at midnight, bungee and base jumping in the inky dark, and when he night-skied he went black diamond every time. No joining me on the bunny hill with my miner's flashlight strapped around my head. I guess when you're already dead, you're sort of fearless. If my bones knit minutes after a bad break, I might fly down those hills too, head bent into the wind.

I sometimes wondered if he'd been a speed demon while alive. If Guy Harrick, Esquire had been as free-wheeling. If the breathing Lord Guy Harrick, Viscount Baldgate had been hard-living before he'd encountered the elder revenant, Wilhelm Dreppenstedt, who would become his master. If I pried, invariably Harry answered with a sly wink, which was really no answer at all.