No Rest for the Wicked

by Krystal Jane Ruin

  I turn my attention to the man. “Why are you here?”

  “You get right down to business,” he says with an easy smile. “I like that.”

  I hate small talk more than I hate anything else in existence.

  “Do you read tarot cards?” the woman asks.

  “I can.”

  She looks at me expectantly.

  “But I won’t.”

  “Oh.” The woman looks to her companion.

  “That’s fine,” the man says. “What do you prefer?”

  I reach into their minds, both at once, something I wasn’t even aware that I was capable of.

  They’re in their late twenties. Newlyweds. They want to know how many kids to have. They don’t want to have too many and stretch themselves too thin.

  “I see you’re shooting blanks,” I say without preamble.

  “What?” they ask in unison.

  The woman’s eyes go wide. “How did you—”

  “Motorcycle accident when you were twenty, Charlie?”

  The woman twists around to face him. “Do you know her?”

  “No, uh…” He shakes his head. “I-I did have an accident. Yes...”

  I push ahead into their future.

  She’s pregnant. In-vitro. And they definitely have the money for it.

  “Great. So, it’ll need to be in-vitro, of course, as I’m sure you know. It’ll take a few tries. Four to be exact. Then you’ll have a healthy pregnancy. Is that all?”

  The woman stumbles over her words for a moment. “Well, ah, that’s…okay. But how many?”

  “Two. You’ll have twins. You won’t want any more after that.”

  “Twins! Identical?” Her face lights up.

  Oh, gross. “Yes. Identical boys. Congratulations. Bye.”

  The woman stands up and throws her arms around her husband’s neck. “Honey, can you believe it? We’re going to have twins!”

  Now I do roll my eyes. I move over to the curtain and all but push them out.

  “Thank you so much,” the man says. “I don’t know how you did that, but you seriously just saved us a lot of stress.”

  “That’s great.”

  Gretchen hurries over to me and stares after the happy couple. “Uh, setting records today?” She gives me a pained smile.

  Sighing, I pull her into my room and shut the curtain behind us. “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did—”

  “Listen. No. You didn’t do anything. It’s me. I can’t do this right now. There’s too much in my head.”

  And there is. The last couple’s life is still swirling around in my brain in a sickeningly sweet montage. I can also still see the teenage boy coughing up blood when he’s sixty.

  I pushed into their minds too fast. Slipping into my past and putting all the fragmented pieces together has burned away a veil over my abilities that I didn’t even know was there. And it’s only adding to my agitation.

  “Can you cover for me?” I ask her.

  Gretchen starts shaking her head before I even get the question out. “No. I can’t. I’m not ready.”

  “You can and you are, and if you don’t, Kalin will have to do them all.”

  “But—”

  I take her by the shoulders. “I believe in you. I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

  “Tatum, please! What if I mess up?”

  “You never mess up. And it wouldn’t matter if you did. It’s not like anyone knows the difference. But to be honest, anyone who really wants help out there is better off getting it from you.”

  Fear and uncertainty shine in her eyes.

  “I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t trust you, Gretchen.”

  She bites down on her lip and nods. “Okay? But…are you okay?”

  “I just need to clear my head. Maybe I’ll go talk to Renali, if she’s free.”

  She nods again, but she doesn’t look any less scared.

  “You’ll do great. And think of it this way. It’ll be a great way to get back at your mom. She’ll flip a lid when she finds out, and there won’t be anything she can do about it.”

  A brief smile twitches across her face. “Fine. I’ll try. I’ll suck. And you’ll have to mop up the tears.” Now, she does smile, which brings a small smile to my own face.

  “Deal.”

  She takes a deep breath and pulls back the curtain. “I’m so uncomfortable right now.” She goes over to a woman of about fifty or so and whispers something to her. She points to my curtain, and the woman smiles and stands.

  I slip out into the front and find Tessandra. Her back is turned in the book section. Milly waves to me from the counter but doesn’t say anything as she’s in the middle of ringing someone up. The timing is perfect. I half run, half walk out of the store.

  As soon as I’m out in the blinding, mocking sunshine, I breathe out a heavy sigh of relief. Already the knots are loosening in my head, and my muscles start to unwind.

  The last images of a dying sixty year old and laughing children fade from my mind.

  I suck in a breath of fresh air and move over to the side of the building where no one will see me. I lean back against the warm bricks and stare off in the direction of the cemetery.

  I can’t believe Shepard is gone. Just like that.

  If Emmerick had just run off into the shadows and not mentioned a “something else,” I could relax and feel safe right now. Maybe. There would still be a “Gage” and a shadow to contend with. Somehow, putting Emmerick’s face to the shadow makes it less frightening. I did always think that there was a human quality to them. Or I guess a human-like quality.

  I look down at my hands like I’m expecting to find my phone in one of them, but I know I left that in my stone office.

  It’s not like I could call him anyway. I don’t know why I keep thinking I can. I wrap my arms around myself and let the sound of passing cars and rustling leaves fill my head.

  I spent so much time being afraid of the shadows, yet they were the last thing I needed to be afraid of. Until I remembered though, I didn’t know there was a difference between what killed my father, accidentally, I guess, and what killed my mother and sister. I couldn’t remember anything but darkness. And blood.

  Getting out of that room was definitely the right decision. This is the worst time of year for me to freak out, but I can’t deal with other people’s crap right now. Not when I still have so much of my own to deal with.

  Sharp knocking sounds come from the back of the building. I push myself off the wall and go around to investigate. I see Emmerick’s rusted truck in the parking lot before I see him, kneeling over a pothole that’s been there for almost two years.

  He’s sectioned the hole off and is now filling it in with cement. I watch him work. He pauses now and then to wipe the sweat from his brow, just like a real human. I wonder what would happen if I tried to read him. If I even could.

  My mind reaches towards his. When I get there, all I see is a green field. Just a field that goes on for miles and miles. There is no past. No future.

  As if he can sense me poking around, he suddenly lifts his head and looks directly at me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  He steps over the orange tape around the newly filled-in pothole and meets me halfway across the parking lot.

  “Tatum…” He shakes his head and drops his gaze to the pavement. “There’s so much I want to say.”

  “Do you have some time? I was hoping we could talk.”

  He meets my eyes. “Definitely. Yeah. I’m done. Well, I’m not done. It just needs to dry before the last step.” He looks over my head to the cemetery. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

  I nod and fall in step beside him as we head for the grassy hills. I wait a few minutes for him to start talking, but when he doesn’t, I ask the first thing that pops into my head.

  “So, is tracking down creatures what you do when you’re not fixing stuff for people?”

  “Tra
cking them down,” he says. “Keeping a low profile. Picking them off when I can.”

  I try not to think of the mess of blood and bifurcating bodies, but the images fill my head at once. A grimace passes over my face.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. For everything.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Where were they taking you last night? Do you know?” He fidgets around with his hands for a moment before stuffing them in his pockets.

  “There’s an old storage facility and an empty warehouse on the edge of town.”

  “Hollings Road. Yeah, I’m familiar with it.”

  Now it’s my turn to twist my hands into a knot. “They want me to look into people’s heads and find people who have run off. So they can…kill them.”

  He stops along the edge of the cemetery and sits down in the grass. I plop down beside him and rest my knotted hands in my lap.

  “Is that what my mother was doing for them? Do you know?”

  “Probably, but I don’t know. She wasn’t who we were trying to protect.”

  I narrow my eyes at the long blades of grass. “So you just let her die?”

  “No. I just meant that our priorities were killing them off and keeping them away from you. We only watched her when the two of you were together. What happened that night…they planned that.” He rips up a few blades of grass and rolls them between fingers stained with dirt and dried concrete. “They drew us away from the house that night. Captured probably twenty of my brothers. By the time we realized it was a distraction, it was too late.” He dumps the crushed blades and grabs a few more.

  I’m not thrilled to hear him speak so casually of watching me all the time, but it’s clearly normal for him, whatever he is, so I bite my tongue about it.

  “How old are you really?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” He watches the shop, a tiny board-game building from where we sit. “I think I was human once. I have these fuzzy memories that feel more like dreams. But I don’t have a clear memory of anything before this. All I know is once there were these creatures. They were called the devourers, eaters of souls and sons of some ancient African deity. They were made to rid Egypt of its enemies. But their population had gotten out of control. Which is strange because they can’t procreate. So my brothers and I were recruited and transformed into shadow men to get rid of them.”

  A smile crosses my face.

  “You think it’s crazy.”

  “I don’t know. It sounds like a twisted fairy tale.”

  He laughs a little. “Yeah…”

  “So you’re here to get rid of the…devourers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happens when they’re all gone?”

  He turns his head and looks at me. “I don’t know.”

  I think about that for a minute and remember what I saw in his mind—no past, no future, only now. “That’s scary.”

  “I try not to think about it,” he says. “I just know the world is a safer place without them in it.”

  “How do I play into all of this?”

  “The devourers realized early on that if they could keep a low enough profile, it would make it that much harder for us to find them. They started picking up psychics to bring them people who wouldn’t be missed. Or people with health problems. You know, people who could die without too many questions being asked. But good, reliable psychics are hard to find. Even more so is finding a strong enough psychic who also has a rather low moral compass. Most of the ones they found would run off on them.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  He laughs. “No offense. They’re targeting your family in particular because your genes show abilities other people like you don’t have.”

  “The curses.” I know this without him having to tell me. Shepard was most interested in that particular ability. I don’t know what they would do with it, but I’m positive it’s nothing good.

  “Exactly.” Emmerick sprinkles more crushed grass into the light breeze and rests his forearms on his knees. “We were thinking it was because the bottled souls that they sell on the black market are not very stable. They’ve been looking for a less volatile means of storage.”

  My stomach drops. “They sells souls on the black market?”

  “For centuries. In black markets all over the world. They sell mostly to others like them who live off the grid, but quite a few people buy it for other unknown reasons. We tried to infiltrate some over the years, but being in closed quarters like that with them didn’t bode too well for us.”

  “But they’re not killing you?”

  “No, they can’t.”

  I stretch my legs out and think about all the sketchy merchants skulking around in the shadows. Peddlers of souls? Goosebumps flare up along my arms.

  “You keep saying that they’re trapping your kind…how?”

  “I don’t know.” His fingers curl into claws. “One of them, we think the one who makes all of the decisions for them, he’s probably the oldest. He’s always slipped right out of our grasp. Some time ago, he found a way to pull us into some kind of vacuum, get us off the grid. He’s been single-handedly picking us off for centuries. Of course, knowing what we know now, we would have taken him out together, when our numbers were still strong. We had a habit of splitting up, just a couple of us taking on small groups of ten or so at a time. But with him, two isn’t enough. Ten wasn’t enough. Fifty wasn’t enough. By the time we realized it would take us all, we didn’t have enough men left.”

  “And now there’s just you?”

  The sun beats down on his solemn features. “As far as I know.”

  I’m starting to understand the weight of his burden. He’s running all over town, searching for his lost brothers and trying to protect my stupid ass at the same time.

  “What’s his name? This guy you’re looking for? Where is he from?”

  “They call him Gage.”

  The name sends a jolt through my bones.

  “No one knows where he’s from,” Emmerick continues. “And he’s hard to find because he doesn’t always look the same.”

  Okay, now that’s creepy. I give Emmerick’s profile a hard look. How do I know he’s not Gage? But the thought is quickly squelched. Emmerick doesn’t have the same cold, life-sucking energy that the rest of them have. His aura is calm and tranquil and even.

  He meets my eyes, and we stare at each other for a while, neither of us saying anything.

  “What makes you so sure that your brothers are here of all places?” I ask.

  “Because Gage is here. He can’t go too far without them. They’re baggage. He has to drag them around everywhere he goes. Before the last of us were caught, we narrowed it down to a fifty-mile radius.”

  “And that’s what you need my help with.”

  He gives me an apologetic smile.

  “Really, it’s okay. I want to help. If I can.”

  “You’re the only one who can help. You’re the only one who can reach inside the right minds and find them. I could have tried to find someone else, of course, and they might could have done something. But this isn’t light work, and no one is going to be more motivated than you—considering what he did to your family.”

  In an instant, I’m back inside the bungalow, in the hallway, watching my sister fall to the floor like a rag doll.

  Don’t be afraid, darling. Don’t cry.

  “We’re the only ones who can kill him, but it’s going to take all of us.”

  My throat tightens. I can’t speak, so I just nod.

  Gage…

  “You’re one of the strongest psychics that I’ve ever come across. This is why protecting you and finding you again was so important. If there’s anyone else left like me, they’re hiding so deep in the earth I can’t find them. We can’t afford to wait another thousand years for someone else like you to come along.”

  His voice buzzes in my ears, barely audible.

/>   “You may not know this, but Renali and your mother went out with them together.”

  My ears snap to attention. “What?”

  “That’s why I hang around the shop so much. For you, but also because I suspect Renali might still be in contact with him. It’s why I hang around her so much, despite the not so subtle...”

  “The shameless flirting?” I say.

  He smiles. “Whatever it’s called. I needed her to trust me. In case I had to continue going at this alone.”

  My blood runs cold. Renali working with Gage? Why would she do that?

  “Well, you don’t,” I say. “Have to do this alone, I mean. We both have a stake in this, and honestly, I’m relieved to have some help.”

  “I feel like you’re the one who’s helping me.”

  I match his smile with one of my own. “So, you want me to poke around in Renali’s head?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. I’ll do it today. She’s been dying to talk to me.” I lock my gaze on the old building.

  He’s quiet for a moment. “Thank you,” he says, his voice soft.

  “For what?”

  He gestures toward himself. “Dealing with all this.”

  I shift my eyes to the shadows branching off the trees around us. Now that I know nothing’s there, they seem so empty.

  “I’ve dealt with worse,” I say. And if he’s right about anything, there’s more worse to come.

  Chapter Twenty

  I wait in Renali’s office with all of the patience of a three year old who has to go to the bathroom. My knee bounces up and down as I stare at the stupid lotus flower.

  Why is this even here? It doesn’t fit her personality at all. It looks like something that should be in the yoga studio upstairs.

  No one else is in the room. But her office door is closed and the white-noise machine on, so I’m assuming she’s with someone. She really needs a secretary or something.

  The longer I wait, the more my resolve melts away. I’ve known Renali a whole lot longer than I’ve known Emmerick, but it goes without saying that he deserves some amount of trust. He blew his cover by coming to my aid last night. It might be why he didn’t come home. I’m assuming he didn’t come home. Everything in the basement apartment was exactly as I left it when I fell asleep on the couch. The bed still hadn’t been touched. The lamp was still on.