“There is fish in his food,” Tabby said. “Besides, he knows better.” She said the last part looking at the damn cat.
Said cat mrowred in response.
“That’s it. I’m losing my mind,” I said.
Tabby laughed. “Nope. You lost it a long time ago.”
“So you say.” I watched Lucy. She was back to staring at the TV, and Isaac looked like he was trying to sleep.
My phone started ringing. I looked at the screen. I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”
###
Vespa wanted to meet us at a Southwestern restaurant outside of town. I didn’t really care, but the farther he was from where we were staying the more comfortable I felt. I didn’t want him getting close to Lucy anymore than I could help it. It was just too dangerous.
It was tough driving around an unfamiliar place. I just hoped the GPS wouldn’t lead us to some odd destination. I once had a unit that led me around and around a store in Ohio. But at least this time I had Tabby riding shotgun. She, I knew, had a decent sense of direction.
“Any way you can ward our hotel room?” I asked Tabby. Not exactly great driving conversation, but I tended to spit stuff out the moment I thought about it. But, this time, I didn’t have a bad idea. If there was a safe place for Lucy to stay, maybe I could convince her to stay there instead of sticking to me like glue. As far as I knew, it wasn’t like there was a thread connecting us. It was more like I was her marker, so I was her usual caretaker.
“I don’t know. It’s not a normal dwelling either, but I can try,” she said.
“It would be a good idea, though, right? I mean, we don’t need anyone or anything coming in without an invite.”
Tabby sighed. “Yes, Jimmy. I know.”
It was time for me to shut up. I was pushing her too far. I know sometimes I rambled on and on, not letting her speak, but I wasn’t sure I was being all that bad. Though her annoyance was probably proof enough. Maybe I needed to not be such a smartass, but it wasn’t like I was trying to offend her.
“Are we there yet?” Lucy asked from the backseat.
I looked at her through the rear-view mirror. She was smiling. “Smartass.”
She giggled.
Tabby turned around in the seat. “Lucy, why don’t you stay in the car? I don’t think it will be a good idea for you to be around the demon.”
Thank God for Tabby. I had been more wrapped up in the warding of the room than what to do about things immediately. I swear, if I had a brain…I should have thought of it. I probably would have thought of it right about the time it would be too late. I was good like that.
I looked over at Tabby. “Thanks.”
She smiled. “Anytime.”
“I hope you get him gone soon,” Lucy said.
I could hear the fear in her voice. Poor kid. She’d been through enough. I needed to step up my game. No sense in putting her through more crap than I had to. “I do too, Lucy. I do too.”
###
By the time Tabby and I got inside, Vespa was sitting at a table toward the front of the restaurant. The restaurant was your usual Mexican place. It was dark with wooden tables and chairs. The walls were painted in murals all over the place. On each table was a clay pot with a lit candle in it. I guess it was supposed to give the place some atmosphere, but I was thinking more about what could happen with a klutz and an open flame.
“Thank you for doing this,” Vespa said when we approached the table. He stood up, nodded his head at us, then sat back down.
I sat down in a chair. Tabby followed suit.
“It isn’t just for you we are doing this, just so you know,” I said.
It wasn’t that I was trying to be a dick or anything, but I wanted to be honest. I didn’t trust Vespa, and at this point, I’m not sure if I trusted the Order since they seemed to want this to happen. Still, I had a hard time believing that they would knowingly put Lucy in danger. So, perhaps the only thing they knew about Vespa was that he was possessed.
If this exorcism didn’t go right, I wasn’t sure if I could handle Vespa’s spirit bugging me for who knows how long. Plus, he was kind of creepy—I’m talking child molester kind of creepy. It wasn’t as if I knew for sure he’d do something like that, but just looking at him, that was the first thought that came to mind. He was not a good guy.
“Still, I welcome the help,” Vespa said. He seemed to curl into himself. It would take a lot for someone to accept hostile help. Interesting.
Tabby leaned forward. “How did you get yourself into this mess?”
Vespa took a sip of water and stared into the flame of the candle on the table. “I wanted the power that my great-grandfather had. Stupid, I know.”
I stared at him for a minute. “Why was the power so important to you?”
“You would have to understand the way my family is. Spiritualism is their religion. Since I was born, I was made to study, to make contact with the dead. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at it. To my family, that was a blight on their good name.”
He reached up and began picking at his face. I had flashbacks of that scene from Nightbreed where the guy peels his face off. But this wasn’t real. It was fake. The latex pulled off in patches. When he finally took off the white wig, I found myself facing a kid that couldn’t even have been twenty years old. Now I was really confused.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. Blowing up in a restaurant would be a bad move. “Now would be the time to come completely clean. I hate lies. And, I swear, one more lie out of you and I’ll walk away.”
I looked around. A few people were looking in our direction, and when they noticed that I’d noticed, they turned away. I turned back to Vespa.
The kid’s eyes welled up. It was strange seeing a young kid with close cropped dark hair staring back at me where an elderly man had been. They did share the same facial features, but without the wig and the latex, he was just a boy. “I thought…I thought you’d ignore me if you knew how old I was.”
“Is your name at least Nicholas Vespa?” I asked. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if his name were Tom Smith or something. Jesus Christ.
He nodded. “I was named after my great-grandfather.”
“All right. Let’s start this again.” At least I really did have his name. Shit. What a mess.
The waitress came over. She stared at Vespa for a minute, noticed the wig on the table, and slightly shook her head.
“What can I get you folks?” she asked.
I had to admire her professionalism. I probably would have looked at him and asked him why the hell he did that. “I’ll take a coke.”
Tabby asked for one too. “Nicholas” stuck with water. After the waitress stepped away, he looked at me.
“Well, get on with it,” I said. My patience was really wearing thin. I wanted to know the story and get the hell out of there. I had better things to do than listen to lies, and that seemed to be the one thing Vespa was good at.
“I was supposed to be the one,” he said. His eyes took on a far away look.
Tabby blinked. “The one what?”
“The one who could channel great-grandpa’s powers. He was the one with the real gift. The others had to resort to tricks to get similar effects, but my grandfather was the real thing.”
Of course there wasn’t anything to prove that. Too much was left for me to just believe, and I wasn’t crazy about that. I closed my eyes for a minute. Not to mention the fact that he just told me he had a demon possess him so he could hopefully pull off the parlor tricks his great grandfather did. Was this kid really that stupid? Yes, he was. “So, you collared a demon to take up residence so you could have ‘powers’?”
“Yeah. I know it sounds bad, but my family…we’re broke.”
Plenty of people went and got jobs to deal with their debt. This was the first time I ever heard of anyone asking a demon to possess him to get rid of bills. It was probably a good thing he didn’t have a giant student loan hanging
over his head—he’d have invoked the Devil then. I guess you would either call this kid lazy or obsessed. I wasn’t sure which yet. Either way, what he’d done was abnormal, stupid, and ridiculous. Evidently, the kid never learned to grow a set and tell his family to fuck off. If that was really the issue here, that is. I didn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth. Not now.
“Why did they think you’d be the one?” Tabby asked.
“Because I looked like him,” Vespa said. “They have all these old photos of grandpa from the time he was about twelve until he died.”
“So, just because genetics decided to make you look like him, they decided you needed to have his ‘gifts’?” This part kind of rang true, I had to admit. I’d seen families this fucked up before.
The waitress came back with our drinks. Poor girl was dressed in some sort of serape thing. With it being over eighty outside, I could imagine how miserable it was to work there dressed like that. She couldn’t have been comfortable. I would have had heat stroke within half an hour.
“What can I get you folks?” she asked.
I ordered something with lots of chorizo. Gotta have my spice fix. Tabby got tacos, and the kid ordered some chicken platter.
The waitress seemed to be trying to cheer us all up with her smiles, but crap was too frustrating for it to work. She picked up the menus a little sadly.
“Thanks,” I said to her. I got a smile in return, and she left. I kind of felt for her. She was here, working her ass off, and we weren’t even playing along and trying to make this “dining experience” fun. Not much I could do about that. Present company kind of put a damper on things.
“So, you channeled a demon? Invoked a demon? What?” Tabby asked Vespa.
“I found a spell on the Internet that was supposed to bring me a demon guide.”
I couldn’t stop my eyes from rolling. I snorted. I couldn’t help it. Vespa stared down at the table, and I could feel Tabby’s eyes boring into me. She couldn’t expect me not to laugh at that. Shit. You gotta be kidding me? “And it worked?”
“No. I ended up using an Ouija board.”
That made sense. I knew Tabby didn’t mess with them. And given her own experience with it, I didn’t blame her. Bad things happened with those things.
“What did it promise you?” I asked.
“Power beyond my wildest dreams, stuff like that. I allowed it in. Now I can’t get rid of it.”
I exhaled. I wanted to give him a set of crayons and some paper and make him write lines like a child. Nobody did this. And with him agreeing to specific abilities, this meant there was a verbal contract of sorts. Damn. I knew nothing about this side of it. I’d never dealt with a demon contract before. It wasn’t like I knew a warrior who could help me fight for people’s souls or anything. Though, if they did exist, it would be damn cool.
“Can you get it out?” he asked.
Good question. It depended on what the contract actually said. “Maybe. You doing an agreement with this thing or whatever it was, I just don’t know.”
“Could you mark him?” Tabby asked.
That was a very good question. I had marked Lucy’s soul, and that’s what kept her around. But Nicholas wasn’t dead, and this demon seemed to be getting nothing out of living in the body. Not to mention, I really didn’t want to mark him if I could keep from it. I did not want him hanging around my house. Sorry.
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t. Of course, I wasn’t exactly going out of my way to find out either.
“What? Mark what?” Nicholas asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “One more question though. What’s with all the connections to my ancestor?”
He looked straight into my eyes. “Grandfather used to channel him all the time.”
I blinked. At least I sort of had an answer now. This whole thing was getting worse and worse. So, we’d seen Holliday’s ghost in the saloon. If Vespa’s grandfather had somehow trapped my ancestor’s soul here, I needed to take care of that too. Not like I didn’t have a crap load on my plate or anything. “All I can tell you is that I’m going to have to research it. I don’t know enough about demon contracts to know if we can even exorcise you.”
He exhaled slowly. “O’Malley said you could help.”
Yeah, twist my guts why don’t you? I missed my mentor. At least he died normally. A heart attack took him right after he performed his final baptism. He went out doing what he loved. But I still missed him. “I’m going to try.”
###
After we all got back to the hotel, Tabby took Lucy around the complex. I guess there was this gift shop. Poor kid needed something to do. TV wasn’t exactly going to keep her entertained forever, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to educate her either. I mean hell, the kid, if she does get reunited with her body, is going to be so behind in school that it will be ridiculous. If she were my kid, I’d home school her anyway. The last thing she needed was for someone to ask her about her scars or something, and then all the mess would begin.
I, however, sat on the bed with Isaac laying against my leg. Having a cat that liked me enough to use me as a pillow felt kind of nice. Every so often, I’d give him a scratch behind the ears. I had the “Holy iPad” in my hands. It wasn’t like they expected me to know anything. They’d said something about training after all, but I still felt bad for contacting them. I shouldn’t, I suppose, but it was like I wasn’t capable to do the job. At least, that’s how it felt. Still, it was better to look like an idiot and ask instead of majorly fucking something up.
I jotted off an email letting them know about the contract, the possible trapped soul, and what I should do about either one. I set the machine down and looked at Isaac. “You should be helping me.”
Isaac snorted, got up, walked over to the pile of brochures Tabby had brought back this afternoon, and dug at them until he uncovered the one he wanted. Then, he walked away and sat back down.
Heh. Who knew? Maybe I should ask him for help more often. I was going to have to tell Tabby about this.
I picked up the pamphlet. It was one about a ghost tour of Tombstone. Interesting.
“You saying I should go on this?”
Isaac mrowred at me and laid his head down to go to sleep.
I shook my head. Who knew what would be in that ghost tour? It was at least a lead of some sort, and, until I heard from the organization, it was the only lead I had. Plus, I couldn’t exactly ignore a suggestion from a witch’s familiar. That is what he was no matter what type of spin Tabby tried to put on it. I don’t know of any normal cat who could have done what he just did.
CHAPTER SIX
CREEP
“We’re going on what?” Tabby asked when I tried to tell her about Isaac. She didn’t seem to register or care about the fact that the cat told me about the tour in the first place. She seemed stressed out, and I had no idea why.
“There’s a ghost tour of Tombstone,” I reiterated. It was a hell of a lead. Maybe I could learn something about my ancestor at the very least.
Lucy kept looking at Isaac like she was talking to him with her mind. I knew I sounded crazy, but if it got me the information I needed…
Tabby sat a bag down on the table. It was from the gift shop. Her shoulders were slumped as if all the wind had gone out of her sails. I still didn’t know what I was doing wrong.
“When does this thing start?”
Okay, maybe she’s just tired. I could deal with that. I picked up the pamphlet. “Says here that tours start after dark.”
Tabby closed her eyes. I could swear she was counting. “All right. Let me get my coat. It gets chilly at night in the desert.”
“Better stay here, Lucy,” I said. “Don’t want to accidentally scare people.”
Tabby turned around. “He got in here once before, and you want to leave her here alone? I haven’t tried to ward the room yet.”
Eek. I’d gotten way ahead of myself. Hell, she’d been with me the whole t
ime. What the hell was I thinking? “Crap. I forgot. Why haven’t you done it yet?”
That did it. She put her hands on her hips, her eyes flashing. I swear, she was about to catch me on fire with flames shooting out of her eyes. “All day it’s been ‘Tabby go get this, Tabby do that.’ What about Tabby is fucking tired, it’s almost ten, and you want to go to a goddamn ghost tour?”
I’d done it. Big time. Sometimes I was so stupid. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
“Let’s.” She stomped into the bathroom.
I was so totally screwed. The last time I’d seen her this pissed was the day she left me. Not good. “Too bad you aren’t a dog, I could borrow your house then,” I said to Isaac.
He glared at me and then closed his eyes. Great. I’d pissed him off too.
“What about you, Lucy?” I asked.
“You aren’t very smart.” She sat down in front of the TV.
That was putting it mildly. The best thing I could do was keep my damn mouth shut until I knew that Tabby had calmed down. “I know, Lucy. I know.”
###
The next morning, Tabby wasn’t talking to me, so I went out after pastries for breakfast. The less she had to do at this point, the better. Plus, I was hoping that chocolate might improve her mood. It was worth a shot. I knew I wasn’t going to get out of this that easy, but maybe, if I made an effort, she’d forgive me a little more quickly.
I headed for the front desk of the hotel. The lobby was this completely white room with a big white concert-style piano in front of a large curved window. It was kind of fancy looking. After a minute, the guy at the desk turned his attention to me.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
I swallowed the spit that collected in my throat. I hated being nervous. Too bad my nervousness had to do with Tabby, and this dude at the desk was probably thinking I was strange. “Is there a bakery or something nearby?” I asked.
“There’s a Walmart outside of town a ways.”
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