The Mortal Touch

by Naomi Clark

  That didn’t make me feel any better. The silence in the house was thick and suffocating, and it scratched at my nerves. A house’s atmosphere hits you fast. From cozy to cold, from neat to chaotic, you sense it as soon as you step through the door, from the smells, the sounds, the décor...everything. The atmosphere in Saul Taylor’s house was distinct and disturbing.

  It was tomb-like.

  I moved cautiously into the hallway, wondering where I’d find him. Because I was pretty sure I would, and the anticipation made my heart race in an ugly way. I had two choices – move into the front room or head upstairs. I decided to start upstairs and work my back down and out. Either Saul was going to be here or not, and either way I figured I’d need to make a sharp exit once I knew.

  Upstairs, the cottage had two bedrooms separated by a short hallway. The first room was a guest room – one single bed, minimal décor and clutter. It was empty. The second room, at the end of the hall, had to be the master bedroom. Steeling myself, I pushed the door open.

  The nail-polish remover stink of vodka hit me as a I did. How much vodka did you have to drink, or spill, for the room to be so saturated with it like that? Saul had obviously intended to find out. I paused in the doorway, once again letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. It didn’t make the sight in the room any easier, even if it wasn’t that surprising.

  A man lay on the double bed. It was clear he’d been laying there for some time. The streetlight outside glowed on the empty bottles on his bedside table, sparking orange in the shadows. There were a lot of them. When I moved to the bedside, I saw he had one arm outstretched, his fingers curled loosely around a white packet. Painkillers.

  Sadness settled on me as I flicked on the bedside lamp. The light made the scene worse. Saul was a young, fit-looking guy, sandy-haired and conventionally handsome. His clothes were designer brands, the vodka expensive. He shouldn’t be dead. He should be hanging out in a fancy wine bar, hitting on other attractive people.

  I didn’t have much empathy for people who chose to work with vampires – although maybe that made me a hypocrite right now – but nobody should be pushed to suicide for the choices they’d made.

  That was, assuming his suicide was related to Hugo and Viviana’s deaths. Had he felt responsible in some way? Had he been responsible in some way? I realized I couldn’t just bolt like I’d planned. There might still be useful information in the house.

  Muttering curses, I left the bedroom and pulled out my phone. I found the number for Chi Lin Garden and asked the girl who answered for either Harmony or Ezra. I was a little irritated to get Ezra.

  “Saul’s dead,” I told him, staring at one of the pictures on the hallway wall. It was a black and white photo of the Eifel Tower. I wondered if Saul had ever been. “Overdose, by the looks of it.”

  “Okay?” Ezra sounded sleepy, like I’d just woken him up.

  “That’s not of interest to you at all?”

  “Only if he killed the vampires.”

  “Well, it’s going to be hard to ask him, unless you have a good necromancer on staff.”

  “He quit last year. Do you want something, Georgia? I get that this is sad and everything, but –”

  “I want to search the house, but I don’t really know what I’m looking for,” I cut in before he could say something awful, as he was clearly going to. “I was hoping either you or Harmony could come help me. If Saul is connected to the deaths, there might be proof here.”

  He gave an exaggerated sigh. “I’ll come, I guess. Harmony is too busy.”

  “That’s very big of you,” I said.

  “You owe me,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. He hung up before I could dispute it.

  That left me hanging around in a house with a corpse, something I hadn’t done for several years. It was exactly as uncomfortable as I remembered. I could start searching the place now, I guessed. It wasn’t a big house, and it wouldn’t take long to case it. But I’d been telling Ezra the truth – I didn’t know what to look for. If Saul had murdered his masters, what kind of evidence would he leave?

  Well, if he’d used magic, as Mr. Cold and I both suspected, he’d have tools of the trade. Warlocks didn’t just conjure sorcery up out of thin air.

  Remembering his neighbors’ complaints about the thin walls, I crept back downstairs as quietly as I could, and went into the front room. I didn’t want to start in the bedroom, with Saul’s corpse at my back.

  I wasn’t used to dealing with death anymore. Once it wouldn’t have fazed me at all. Just one more reason to resent Mr. Cold.

  The front room was a long, oblong space, with lamps on the walls providing the only light. I flipped on one of them, away from the window, casting a little pool of light over a stuffed bookcase and a knee-high ottoman that looked like it opened up.

  I knelt in front of the bookcase, scanning the titles. It didn’t take long to confirm that Saul exclusively read books called things like Disclosure: The Extraterrestrial Truth and Technology of the Gods, which made me think he’d been less interested in working for vampires and more hopeful of being abducted by aliens.

  There was certainly nothing here to hint at a magic practitioner. I moved onto the ottoman, and was just levering the lid open when someone knocked at the front door. I jumped, then felt stupid and went to carefully crack it open.

  Ezra was on the doorstep, looking twitchy and pissed off. “Found anything incriminating yet?”

  “Don’t you care at all that he’s dead?” I asked, genuinely curious. They had to move in the same circles, even if they weren’t close friends.

  He shrugged, stepping inside and closing the door. “I mean, it’s sad, yeah, but there’s nothing we can do now, is there? And I don’t see what you expect to find by going through his things.”

  “If he killed Hugo and Viviana, there might be evidence. If he didn’t, we can at least rule it out.”

  He gave me a scornful look. “Saul lived for those two. He would never have hurt them.”

  “Okay, well, what did he do for them?” I remembered my stray thought that Hugo and Viviana might have gone to Obsidian, like Beckett. “Did he keep track of their movements?”

  “Even if he did, he’s not going to tell you now.”

  I growled, wishing I hadn’t bothered calling him. “I don’t know! Maybe he kept a diary or something? I don’t fucking want to be here either, you know.”

  Ezra raked his hands through his hair with a theatrical moan. “He did do a lot of, like, events management stuff for them. Hugo and Viviana thought they were hot shit social butterflies. He probably has a calendar or something somewhere.”

  “Okay, so if we can find that, we can at least try to track their last movements. They didn’t just teleport into St Clement’s. They had to have been somewhere else first, and given how quickly Beckett died, I’m guessing whatever killed Hugo and Viviana happened to them that same night.”

  I opened the ottoman, feeling a little calmer now I had a plan, even a vague one. “I’ll start going through this. You go check the bedroom.”

  “Really?” Ezra gave me another scornful, knowing look. “Why don’t you go check the bedroom? You’ve already been up there once.”

  “Are you afraid of a dead body, Ezra?”

  “Are you, Georgia?”

  We glared at each other, neither of us needing telepathy to sense the other’s reluctance to be near Saul’s body. I was being petty and perhaps a tiny bit cowardly, I knew, but I was here against my will. Didn’t I have the right to be a bit petty?

  Of course, Ezra was here against his will too, if you wanted to split hairs. And something told me I’d seen a hell of a lot more dead bodies than him.

  With a sigh, I headed back upstairs, pretending I didn’t hear his soft hiss of triumph as I did. Maybe we were both entitled to be petty.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Seeing Saul’s body the second time wasn’t so bad. In the gentle glow of his bedroom lamp, his form softened by sha
dows, he could have been sleeping. Now that I was a little more numb to the sight, I took the time to study him properly.

  Dead humans were not my area of expertise, but I’d seen a few, and been responsible for some of them, so I’d picked up some things. There were no visible signs of decomposition – no bloating, no bloody foam from his nose of mouth, so I could guess that Saul had been dead less than seventy-two hours, maybe less than twenty-four. I felt a pang of sorrow. If I’d gotten his address yesterday, could I have found him before he killed himself?

  I’d never know.

  I went over the rest of the room properly. It was a small space, but he’d packed a lot in, with a tall chest of drawers, a bookcase, and an antique-looking desk cluttering it up. I started at the desk, pleased to find Saul had been a neat, organized vampire assistant. His in-tray was full of unopened letters and a few invoices. I flicked through those quickly but found nothing of note, except that Hugo and Viviana spent a lot on dry-cleaning. The desk was clear aside from that, but there were two drawers built into it.

  There was a diary in the top drawer. I flipped it open to last week and a couple of business cards fell out. One was for a seafood restaurant not far from here. The other, a slick, black rectangle had just a single word embossed on it in silver. Obsidian.

  I pocketed it and scanned the diary. There was no specific mention of Obsidian, but a note for Viviana’s birthday one night with new venue? written next to it. I put the diary back and headed downstairs.

  Ezra was in the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge.

  “What the hell, man?” I asked.

  He jumped and glanced back at me, a furtive expression on his face. “Can’t risk missing a clue, right?”

  “Jump in his fucking grave, why don’t you?”

  Ezra shrugged, closing the fridge. He had a can of beer in one hand. “I need it more than he does now. Did you find anything?”

  I stomped down on my disgust, reminding myself that I didn’t have to like Ezra. “Maybe. A business card for a club called Obsidian. Kinley mentioned he and Beckett were there the night Beckett died, too. You know it?”

  He scratched his head as he took a swig of beer. “I don’t do night clubs,” he said. “The restaurant is hard enough. Wait – when did you speak to Kinley?”

  There was a sudden suspicion in his voice, and I felt a faint pricking in my skull as he reached for my mind. I patted my jeans pocket absently, grateful for the kyanite. His attempts at reading me, along with his narrowed eyes and sharp tone, made me instinctively want to protect Kinley.

  “That night,” I said. “I overheard him and Beckett talking before Beckett died.”

  It was a clumsy lie, and Ezra probably didn’t need telepathy to know it, but gut feeling told me to keep Kinley out of it.

  “Huh,” Ezra said. “Well, if you see him again, let me or Harmony know, okay? Mr. Cold is looking for him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Ezra gave me a look of mild surprise. “You know he bricked your window, right? Mr. Cold doesn’t like his vampires taking matters into their own hands. The plan was to get you on our side, not antagonize you.”

  I stifled a sigh, deciding I was definitely keeping quiet on Kinley. The kid didn’t need Mr. Cold coming down on him for an ultimately harmless act of grief.

  “I’ll be sure to alert you immediately,” I lied. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I don’t think we’ll find anything else useful. Unless you want to raid the pantry for scraps?”

  He had the grace to look slightly ashamed. “I get bored of Chinese food all the time.”

  He followed me to the front door without taking anything else, though, and we slipped out quietly. The street was dark and empty, thankfully. No nosy neighbors to contend with. I hesitated as I carefully shut the door.

  “We should tell someone.”

  “Tell someone what? Someone will miss him sooner or later and call the cops. Don’t look at me like that. There’s nothing we can do by telling someone except fuck things up.”

  I rolled my shoulders, suddenly exhausted. I could make an anonymous call to the cops myself when I got home. It was so clearly a case of suicide that I couldn’t imagine the cops looking at the situation too hard.

  Then his mention of the cops jolted into my brain properly. “Wait. Do we need to worry about fingerprints?”

  Ezra signed dramatically. “I’ll tell Harmony and she’ll tell Mr. Cold and he’ll make sure it’s taken care of, okay? There’s a clean-up crew for this kind of thing.”

  Well that sounded ominous. Did I want to know how Mr. Cold’s clean-up crew took care of things?

  No, I decided.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m out of there, then.”

  “You done for the night? I don’t think Mr. Cold is paying you for a part-time effort.”

  “I don’t remember discussing the hours with him at all,” I said, heading for my bike.

  Ezra trailed after me, to my surprise. I figured he’d be pleased to get away. “So what now? You dragged me out here for nothing after all that.”

  “Yeah, my mistake,” I said. “I thought you’d be useful.”

  He glowered at me. In the glow of the streetlights, he looked sallow and sickly, and I’d swear he was shivering. The night had cooled off, especially this close to the sea, but I was still too warm. Maybe he was actually sick.

  “Go home,” I said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have called you out here.”

  “I’m not useless,” he said, a defensive edge in his voice that made me think I wasn’t the first person he’d heard that from. “And whether you like it or not, Mr. Cold is your boss until this shit is cleared up, so you’d better keep that in mind if you’re thinking of calling it quits for the night now.”

  “Go home, Ezra,” I said more forcefully. “Before someone hears us bickering and comes to check it out. You can tell Mr. Cold I’m earning his money, but I’m not submitting a fucking itemized invoice for it.”

  I hopped on my bike and pushed off before he could say anything else.

  IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN by the time I got home, and I was beat, mentally and physically. If Mr. Cold expected me to go anywhere else for him tonight, he was going to have to drag me there by the hair, and I was going to complain the whole way. Obsidian could wait until tomorrow.

  I was greeted by a sleepy, irritated caw as I wheeled my bike up the drive toward the house, and Elijah drifted down from the top of the bus to land on my shoulder. My heart softened as he began preening my messy braid, chattering to me as he did.

  “Hope you had a good day, at least,” I told him. “I think bounty hunting was actually easier. At least we were our own bosses.”

  A shadow detached itself from the house, triggering the security light. Kinley peered at me anxiously from under his unwashed hair. “I was starting to think something happened to you.”

  He sounded relieved, which made me uncomfortable.

  “Not yet,” I said. I resisted asking why are you still here? Parsing what Ezra had said, Kinley might be in trouble if he went back to his usual haunts, and I wasn’t surrendering anyone to a master vampire’s mercy, not even another vampire.

  Instead, I took the bike round to the back garden, sharply aware of Kinley trailing after me. My spine tingled, having a vampire at my back like that, but I didn’t think he was a threat. And I wanted his help anyway.

  “I’m going to Obsidian tomorrow night,” I said. “You wanna come?”

  “I guess.”

  I locked my bike up in its usual corner and glanced over at him, surprised at his hesitancy. He’d been non-committal last night too, I remembered, and suddenly I realized. “It’s probably a little too soon, huh?”

  In the dark, it was hard to read his expression, but he looked hunched up, as if I’d slugged him in the stomach. Definitely too soon.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll just see how you feel tomorrow.”

  “Are you gonna make me leave if I don’t help?” h
e asked, sounding so small and worried, I felt like a monster even though I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “No,” I said firmly. I had fewer doubts about it than last night. Did I want him here indefinitely? Absolutely not. Did I want him out of Mr. Cold’s way for now? Absolutely yes.

  “Okay.” He straightened up a little. “So I can sleep in the bus again tomorrow?”

  “Sure. And...” I paused, trying to think of a nice way to say it. “And, uh, if you need to use the shower before you call it quits for the night, I guess you can.”

  “Are you saying I stink?” he asked, a little defensively.

  I unlocked the back door and stepped aside to let him into the kitchen. “I never said that.”

  “You implied it,” he said.

  I didn’t answer, but Elijah made a rude noise as he passed. I smothered my smile and followed him in, heading straight for the kettle. I wanted comfort. I wanted soothing. I wanted tea.

  “Did you find anything out tonight?” Kinley asked, taking a seat at the table. “I guess not if you’re checking out Obsidian.”

  “I found Saul Taylor,” I said. “He killed himself. And I found this.” I slid the Obsidian business card across to him.

  Kinley picked it up, face somber. “That sucks. Saul was gunning to get turned eventually.”

  “Did you know him? Or Hugo and Viviana?” I asked.

  I was genuinely curious about the two dead vampires. I had no mental picture of them at all, and the blank space in my mind bothered me. Were they young lovers, like Kinley and Beckett? Old aristocrats? What did they do, where did they go, who did they know? The answer to any of those questions could lead me to a cause of death.

  “I met Saul like once or twice. Hugo and Viviana liked bringing him to places, you know? Like he was a pedigree dog or something. I think it’s kinda weird, the whole human servant thing, but Beckett says...Beckett said, he thinks it makes sense. But Hugo and Viviana, I think they just liked showing off that they had one. I guess Saul didn’t mind, because he’d been working for them for seven or eight years.”