Velveteen (31 page)

“That was really good. Until you lost your focus and screwed the pooch.”

He straightened, and puffed his chest out proudly. “Heck, yeah. It was awesome, is what it was. Damn fine ashtray lifting.”

“Uh.” Velvet shook her head. “I wouldn’t go that far. But it was a start!”

Nick agreed, nodding. “A start. So what now?”

She shrugged. “The next test.”

Velvet waited for Nick to bounce from the crack. She sat on a cushy couch, her legs were crossed elegantly, her ankle popping in her boots.

Nick slipped from the crack in the ballroom wall and tumbled across the freshly oiled floor.

“Took you long enough,” Velvet chided, giving him a sheepish smile.

She hopped up and sauntered across the room, feeling his
gaze lower to her hips. Velvet couldn’t deny that she took some degree of pleasure in him watching her, and if she were being honest, she’d have to cop to swiveling her butt around a little more for the boy’s benefit.

She couldn’t help but think of their night together. She could pretend she didn’t remember, but she’d been all over him. And their kiss.

Holy crap.

When she turned back to look at him, his eyes were dark with something completely unwholesome and his tongue played in the corner of his lips. Her heart pounded a haunting rhythm in her chest, and for a second, she was sure that he’d seen something in her expression. Something she had not meant to show him.

Desire.

Velvet turned away quickly. What was wrong with her? What was it with the boy? He was like a hormone magnet. And she was stuck in a perpetual loop of teenage lust and poor impulse control. But this wasn’t the place.

But what if it was? she mused. What if it could be?

“Welcome to the Friendly Acres Retirement Community and Skilled Nursing Facility,” she said, sweeping her arms out toward the space around them.

“Lovely.” He scanned the lavishly decorated walls dutifully, but mostly he just watched Velvet. “I guess.”

“Oh, it is. It’s also sad, and you’ll see that.” She glanced off to her right. “Or feel it, in a minute.”

They passed through a narrow wood-paneled hall that opened into a grand lobby, richly appointed with plush chairs, Oriental carpets, and a massive fireplace that was
blazing and crackling. A group of elderly residents sat in front of it warming themselves and gossiping. The sound of the fire joined the squeaking of aluminum walkers and wheelchairs and the soft
shurr
ing of crepe-soled nurse’s shoes. At the opposite end of the hall was a front desk of dark mahogany the size of a Mini Cooper. From behind it a man in a maroon cardigan and glasses with beads hanging from the arms glanced in their direction.

“Did that guy just wink at me?” Nick asked Velvet, pointing in the deskman’s direction.

“Barney is legally blind, so I seriously doubt it.” She pursed her lips and shook her head in judgment. “You’re really full of yourself, aren’t you?”

Nick took a defensive posture. “Absolutely not. I just thought he could see us, is all. He definitely seemed to notice us passing through.”

“Well, some people can, but they don’t really know what they’re seeing. I’ve heard that we kind of look like when you catch something in your eyelashes and the light hits it just right so you can see it in your periphery. Glowing orb things.”

“Yeah. Or maybe people are just crazy and want to see things.”

“Well, there is that.” She smiled.

She led him through a closed door into a hall lined with wheelchairs, gurneys, and chests of drawers. Nurses in paper hats crisscrossed the hall in front of them, darting from room to room, like some live-action video game.

Velvet paid them no attention, and when they passed through her, she didn’t even flinch. The same couldn’t be
said for Nick, who spasmed nearly every time one of the busy nurses clipped him.

“In here!” Velvet yelled as she watched Nick recover from a particularly heinous body violation by a nurse nearly twice as big around as he was. She pointed toward an open door into a shadow-filled room.

Nick stepped past her onto a floor as glossy as spun sugar. The sound of machines beeping echoed off the walls, and a gray curtain hung from the ceiling in a half-moon around a hospital bed. They peered around the corner to find an elderly woman harpooned by breathing tubes, the blankets on top of her stretched so tight that she seemed to be sunken into the bed, paper thin.

“She’s a vegetable,” Velvet said without a hint of empathy in her voice.

“You mean ‘comatose,’ ” Nick snipped.

She shrugged. “Sure. Yeah, that works, too.”

“What’s her name?”

Velvet crouched to read the chart hanging from the foot of the woman’s bed. “Rita Renjette. It says here she has lung cancer.”

Nick circled the bed, breezing across the woman’s exposed hand with the tips of his fingers. “Her face is so slack.”

Her skin hung from her cheekbones like the clothes from the lines in the courtyard, limp and saggy.

“It’s like there’s nothing underneath,” he whispered.

Velvet studied the creases around the boy’s light eyes. His sympathy was so apparent, it made her sad. It came so easy for Nick.

He cared.

“But we know that’s not true.” Velvet sat down in an emerald-green wingback chair, the fleur-de-lis pattern of the fabric obscuring her figure as she did. “You need to get on in there.”

“What?” He looked down at the old woman again, at her breathing tubes and wires and permanently sealed paper-thin eyelids. “She looks like a coffin,” he said finally. “Not
ready
for one, but like an actual coffin herself.” He glanced back at Velvet, beseeching her to excuse him from the task.

“I don’t think I want anything to do with body thieving, Velvet. It scares me.” Nick’s voice quivered.

Velvet nodded; it wasn’t for everyone. It took a certain degree of coarseness to pull it off, to commandeer someone else and strip away his or her humanity. It might
not
be for Nick. Poltergeisting certainly hadn’t been. But the test had to be done.

“We’re not here sightseeing, Nick.” She tried to speak softly. “This is part of your test.”

He shook his head and glanced at the prone figure. “Not this one. She reminds me of my own grandmother.”

Velvet stood up and joined him next to the bed. “Really?”

“Yeah.” He pointed at the thin skin on the woman’s wrists, bunched up like saggy panty hose. “I think it’s that.”

“I know what you mean.” She turned and caught his gaze. “We used to visit my great-aunt in the nursing home up until she passed away. She was always so … like, alive. And then the old age just took her and she got like this. This woman is just waiting to move on. She might not know it, but we do, right?”

He nodded his head, but his expression was grim.

“You’re not going to hurt her. She’s beyond that now. Just lie down in her place and see what happens, okay?”

He gulped. She’d never seen him look so horrified, and that was saying something, considering the panic she’d witnessed as he’d broken free from the bonds of the crystal ball. “You won’t hurt her. I promise.”

Nick flinched, but climbed atop the bed, seemingly worried about putting any weight on the woman’s frail frame. He flipped and crab-walked over the woman, his hands and feet barely making dents in the hospital blankets, and then with a deep breath of nothing, he sank down into her.

Velvet sat back down and waited. The clock above the door ticked away in time with the hushing
shh
of the breathing machine. She’d trained a boy named Gregory a few months ago—she wasn’t sure what district he’d ended up Salvaging for—much younger than Nick, but fearless. That boy had plopped down into one of these coma patients, and not a second later their eyes snapped open and he sat them right up and winked at her.

If Nick couldn’t do that, she decided, she’d still have faith that he could be an undertaker. Operating a living body was totally different from getting a dead one up and moving. Plus, the fly production was the real skill there.

Velvet was beginning to hope.

If he did end up being her undertaker, they’d get to spend time together.

It might not be so bad to work with Nick. And the eye-candy fringe benefits were clearly epic.

A groan brought her attention back to Mrs. Renjette, and Velvet stood and raced to the woman’s side. Her eyes had crept open just a bit, and Velvet could see Nick moving inside, turning the glassy cataracts in her direction. The woman’s hand moved shakily to the bed rail, and Velvet patted it.

“Took you long enough,” she said.

Another groan, and the woman’s shoulders shrugged.

“All right,” Velvet said, and nodded. “I’ll give you this.”

Nick jutted up out of the woman, beaming. He twisted around to see that the woman’s face was just as placid as before, and that seemed to be okay with him. He leapt from the bed and stood next to Velvet, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“A ‘Congratulations’ is in order, for I believe
that
”—he pointed toward Mrs. Renjette—“was some masterful body thieving,” Nick said.

Velvet rolled her eyes. “If by ‘masterful’ you mean ‘sluggish’ or ‘inadequate,’ then, yeah. Masterful. You are the grand master of incompetent body thieves.”

“What? I was just getting comfy with my new friend Rita.”

Velvet glowered and sauntered out of the room.
Must not laugh
, she told herself. Though Nick’s cocky self was a far better companion than the mopey version.

“Velvet!” he called into the hall. “Wait up!”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said.

Nick came up beside her, and they walked back toward the lobby.

“That was amazing. Rita was so nice, too. Really helpful.”

Velvet stopped dead and spun toward him. “Hold everything. You talked to her?”

“Yeah, totally. She even helped me out.”

“You’re like the coma whisperer, then, because I’ve never heard of that happening.”

“She was really very helpful, told me what to do. She even apologized for being so atrophied. Crazy, right?”

Velvet wondered if, in some horrible way, that was what had happened when she’d entered Ron Simanski’s head. Maybe he’d communicated.

“Maybe no one’s ever told you,” he said.

“Maybe.” She wasn’t convinced.

“So what’s next?” he asked breathlessly.

Nick actually sounded excited again. The tests had distracted him from hounding her. Definitely a good thing.

Velvet led him through the nursing home halls and back to the ballroom crack.

S
he was dumped out into a hilly field. A barn was the home of her traveling crack, which was still shimmering as the passage sealed itself. A path stretched out to the left and right, and before her was a long berm fitted with rows of mounds, some heavy with dirt, others thin and lumpy with their rotty inhabitants.

When Nick hadn’t appeared by her side moments later, she remembered she hadn’t given him details for the passage. She slapped her leg and shook her head. “Stupid!” she chastised.

But then something astonishing happened. The crack in the old boards shimmered and Nick spilled out. He bounded up beside her with a broad smile and a wicked look in his eye. “Found ya,” he said, and reached out to push up Velvet’s jaw, which had dropped open in amazement.

“But how?” she asked. “I didn’t—”

“I thought of you,” he said, his tone misty and serious. “I could describe you in a hundred different ways. And I figured, as long as you were already here, that was all it would take.” He shrugged. “Guess I’m lucky it worked.”

It took a moment for Velvet to recover from this. She was left without words. If she’d been alive, her breath would have been sucked from her lungs. As it was, she felt a gentle vibration pass over her ethereal form.

“Where are we, anyway?”

“The body fields,” Velvet whispered, staring at him, uncertain whether he was something special or just so obsessed that he’d follow her anywhere. At that moment, she decided she’d be happy with either answer.

Nick’s eyes traveled over the tiny hills and valleys. “What are they?”

“You know how people give their bodies away for science or donate their organs and stuff?”

“Yeah?” Nick answered, his mouth left hanging open.

“Well, sometimes the whole body comes here. But it’s not so they can give a kidney to some poor kid that needs one. It’s so scientists can watch how the person rots, so they can tell things about how long they’ve been dead, or what it looks like if someone sprinkles Liquid-Plumr all over them, or how the flesh around a stab wound caves in over time.”

Nick clutched the spot over his phantom stomach. “That’s some
CSI
crap right there.”

“Totally.”

Velvet crossed the path and climbed the small hill, gesturing toward the nearest mound and a little sign stuck at the foot of it like a garden marker.

“See, this one’s already covered in maggots.” She squatted next to it. “Male. Thirty-four. Hear them?”

Nick squatted next to the grave, but he didn’t need to. You couldn’t help but hear the sound of something snapping, crackling, and popping, so clear and unmuffled. A bowl of Rice Krispies could have been sitting nearby. But there was none.

“What’s that sound?” he asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

She pressed on down the first row, reading each of the little signs, looking for the perfect one. A challenge. Something disgusting but mobile. There’d be no point in testing the boy in a body that was just going to fall apart.

Velvet stopped before a shallow hillock and brushed some spatter from the white metal marker. Nick peered over her shoulder. The gray nose and cheeks of a cadaver poked from freshly crumbled loam, as though the body were wrapped in a blanket instead of lying in a grave. Velvet turned in time to see the shiver tear through him. If he’d had flesh, the goose bumps would have covered it.

“Oh, man,” he said. “That’s creepy.”

“Subject number twenty-seven,” Velvet read. “A John Doe found prone on the banks of the Elk River. Multiple stab wounds, postmortem bloating.”

She looked up at Nick, raised an eyebrow.