by A. J. Aalto
I stopped at the fence as Umayma offered a hand to help me climb back over. “What’s wrong?”
“Not a discussion for the phone,” he said. “Six. Got dinner plans?”
I thought he was too serious to be pulling my leg in regards to our argument about my shoddy nutritional habits a few hours ago, so I just said, “No.”
“I’ll bring something.”
Hood hung up, and I looked at Umayma with concern. “Something stinks, Maim.”
She nodded, and grabbed my left forearm while I stuck a boot tip in the chain link to throw a leg over the fence. When I hopped over, she made sure I was okay with a sweeping glance, and motioned the L on her forehead and then tapped her wrist. I glanced over her shoulder when a movement caught my eye, and spied Mrs. Swerdlow goggling at us from the back door, shielding her belly with her purse; I wondered how long she’d been standing there, and how much she’d seen or heard.
“What are you doing, Mrs. Swerdlow?” I called out.
“Helping, dear!” she said, clutching her purse tighter with hands gnarled by arthritis.
“Did she see me going all bitchcakes?” I murmured.
Umayma gave me an uncertain, one-shouldered shrug.
“Let’s don’t cancel anything, Maim,” I grumbled. “No two-bit ass-swatter is going to ruin our day.”
Umayma nodded once, curtly, mirroring my determined frown. I marched to the back door to check it over for signs of damage, and Mrs. Swerdlow wisely retreated back through the dim house to my office on her soft orthopedic shoes.
There were no marks on the door or the jamb, and there were no scratches in the metal lock housing. Clearly, he didn’t pick the lock, and had sauntered in through the front like a client, where Mrs. Swerdlow had met him. Ballsy.
“We should have someone go through the place with a different pair of eyes. There’s not much left in Batten’s area, but maybe Chapel will have insights. I’ll put in a call.”
I gave the back yard one last sweeping glance, not looking at the dead birds, and finally felt the cold March air snatching at my hair, cooling my sweaty brow. The bubble of adrenaline was starting to fade and a cool finger of goosebumps crept up my spine; I was pretty sure it just the wind. I bunched my shoulders and squeezed the feeling away as we went back inside.
If I had looked behind me, I might have noticed that my shadow had begun peeling in half, like bark sloughing off a rotten, lightning-struck tree.
Chapter 4
Two unfamiliar deputies from Hood’s department showed up about ten minutes later; the male cop dusted for prints, took some pictures, and got Maim’s written statement. I’d given the female cop, whose nametag said B. Rule, a good description of the intruder, working very hard to keep the snark factor to a minimum, as I knew that wouldn’t help. I also worked hard not to be envious of this cop’s name.
“If I ever start moonlighting, spinnin’ old school tunes for wedding gigs,” I told her, “’B. Rule’ is gonna be my DJ name.”
Her lips pinched away a smile and she nodded, putting her flip notebook away. “You’re gonna have to find another, that’s my DJ name.”
“If your first name isn’t BetterBeFollowingDa, I’m going to be mightily disappointed,” I said.
At this, she cracked a little. “Why do you think I got into law enforcement?”
“The glamorous fashion?” I asked, pointing at her standard issue cop shoes, the ones Golden always wore.
She shook her head, chuckling, and promised they’d look into the break-in for me. B. Rule’s banter needed some improvement, but she had potential. It’s never a bad idea to have lots of cop friends. I thanked her for coming so quickly, and excused myself to go deal with my client.
After dancing around the reason behind the kerfuffle, Mrs. Swerdlow only wanted a bit of encouragement as to mending fences with her sister after a disastrous conversation that had left them both prickly. She didn’t tell me what the subject of the phone call had been, but it was serious enough that the Blue Sense reported her disappointment with herself; she hadn’t been fair and was feeling guilty. I encouraged her to apologize. At her age, I would have thought that sort of thing came naturally. I was counting on the wisdom of age to hone my sub-par social skills, personally, but I guess that wasn’t a given. Maybe I needed to hang out with de Cabrera and work on my people skills some more, but I wasn't sure I could put up with his incessant perkiness without wanting to body-check him. That was probably a problem.
Between Mrs. Swerdlow's visit and my next client, I had a gap, so I settled my nerves by finding new homes for my witchcraft supplies, grouping things by purpose. It did not escape my notice that my categories were based on peace and healing and helping people. What I had just done outside… not the capital-R Right Thing to do, Marnie, more like capital-R Wrong one. In fact, it was the kind of thing Ruby Valli would have done; Ruby had been deeply into black magic and demonology, and she had once tried to feed my soul to a cellar-dwelling demon. Why hadn’t I just let the intruder go and call the cops? Because he was fucking with Batten's crap, I reminded myself. Nobody fucks with my dead guys.
When noon rolled around, I got up from my desk to seek out my next client, Ramona Ingermanson, in the waiting room. I tightened my braid while I crossed the hall, boots clumping, and stopped dead.
Special Agent Heather Golden sat in one of my leather chairs under a slanting beam of sunlight from the window, wearing her navy blazer and dress slacks, legs crossed, sipping an espresso and grimacing. Her strawberry blonde hair was tucked back in a tidy chignon that my own disobedient ghost hair would never have allowed.
“How can you drink this stuff?” she asked, setting the cup down beside the fan of magazines and an evergreen arrangement.
“Care to step into my office, Ramona?” I drawled, and felt my shoulders fall. I slumped back to my desk and let her follow at her leisure. “I take it you don’t need any psychic services today?”
“Wrong,” Golden said, closing the door and plunking into the seat across from me. “I need my tarot cards read.”
“I don’t do tarot.”
She reached into her jacket pocket and tossed me a pack. “You do now.”
I stared at the well-worn Rider-Waite deck on my wax-speckled desk blotter. Sighing in a prissy way that I mayyyyy have picked up from Harry, I leveled my tired gaze at her. I hadn’t seen her in about three weeks, since the night she tried to shake the grief out of me by dragging me to a dance club and getting me hammered. The evening had ended with me puking up a colorful blend of frou-frou drinks on the side of the road and her agreeing that it hadn’t been the best plan she’d ever concocted, since the only good thing that had come of it was that, by some miracle, I hadn't hurt myself trying to do the Safety Dance. Since then, I’d been dodging her calls and avoiding our usual haunts. The look on her face said she knew it.
“You look like something hell coughed up,” she said. “Wanna talk about it?”
I poked the tarot cards. “I’ve spent no time attuning to this deck, so today it’s just a bunch of paper with pictures on it.”
“Local cops are here out back with Umayma. What’s that all about?” she asked.
“It’ll have no power, is what I’m saying,” I replied. “The tarot deck.”
“I believe in you,” she said with bland sarcasm.
“We’re really doing this?”
She went into her inside pocket for her wallet, and I caught a glimpse of her holster and gun. The jacket was a great cut; it had hidden the bulk beautifully. She flipped three ten dollar bills out of her slim folder wallet and tossed them on the desk.
“Oh goody,” I deadpanned. “I can pay my electric bill this month.”
“If you’re not working for the money, why are you here?”
“Good will towards men,” I said with a reluctant, self-mocking smirk.
“Sure, that sounds like you. Peace on Earth, too? Wasn’t that December’s gift to humanity?”
I sa
ng for her in the key of break-your-crystal. “And I-yii-yii’m dreamin’ of a whiiiiiiiite Christmaaas.”
“You missed New Year’s resolutions. You were off gallivanting.”
“Questing,” I corrected, appreciating her dancing around the Batten issue. I expected her to mention him any minute, and was trying to brace myself for it. “I was on quests. And you were, what? Shacked up in that hotel, having some kind of Viking-Valkyrie gang-bang?”
She looked at me for a long minute then changed the subject. “Still got the yeti nail?”
“Ew,” I said. I did have it — Remy Dreppenstedt had sent it along with Harry for me to have as a keepsake, because undead people are freaks — but I hadn’t put the thing on a damn necklace or anything. Remy had also sent us home with the canopic jar, still glazed with some residue of mellified man, a balls-nasty human mummy confection. I’d set it inside my herb cabinet at first, but Ruby Valli’s black magic grimoire with the human leather cover had sprouted goosebumps. When the book started literally wriggling toward it across the shelf, I took The Offspring's advice and kept them separated (I might have done some air guitar action after getting over the heebie-jeebies). The jar now resided down in Harry’s bed chamber, next to his gaming consoles, like the world's nastiest gamer snack or weed stash.
Golden was assessing me with her cop eyes, now, seeing details; weight loss, bags under my eyes from lack of sleep, crooked bangs from careless hair chopping, the bandage on my right arm to protect the still-healing wound from where Gunther Folkenflik had bitten me, the gauze around my neck to hide the mottled scar where Asmodeus' tail had seared me like a brand of ownership. I looked like half a plate of rat-asshole enchiladas, and she knew it.
“Okay, cut the shit,” she said. “How are you doing?”
I went for honesty. “I headbutted a stranger in the junk today.”
“So, just a regular Monday in Marnieland?” she asked. “Celtic Cross spread.”
I rolled my eyes and took the cards out of their battered sleeve. “Did you Google that just before you came?” I shuffled the cards and was dismayed by the easy snap of psi crackling under my fingertips; my own powers were trying to connect to this new avenue without my effort. Since I’d returned from Felstein and the seat of House Dreppenstedt, I’d been extra-attuned to the Blue Sense; I had hoped it would wear off with time and distance, but the Bond was stronger than ever, and my connection to the bloodline was relentless, throbbing in the background like a heart reawakened in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. By the time I felt the tarot cards were shuffled well, I was firmly connected to the deck. I could have told you without looking where each card was in the pile, as well as the private, personal issues of the person who owned the deck, one Special Agent Heather Golden herself.
I said, “Think of a question and cut the goddamn cards into three equal piles, freak.”
“Question, question, hmmm…” she said, as though she really had to think about it. She cut them into piles and then stacked them in a different order, as though she’d done this a hundred times. “Oh, hey, I’ve got one. Will my friend Marnie be attending Mark Batten’s funeral?”
I hated her for a minute, but it passed quickly. I let my eyes fall shut so I wouldn’t glare at her. “I don’t have to flip cards to answer that one.”
“I think it’ll be good for you.”
“Flipping cards?”
“The funeral,” she clarified.
I moved the cards to one side, aborting the read. “Um, no. No, it won’t, cuz it’s not happening.”
“We’ll do brunch afterward, make a day of it,” she suggested lightly, like it was an average afternoon for us, just two gals on the town. She swung one foot up on my desk and then the other, crossing her feet at the ankles. She had brand new shoes on, standard issue black with rubber soles, very sensible. She stared at me steadily with her zero-bullshit gaze, and I controlled the stream of bitch frenzy that wanted to erupt on her for making light of the funeral.
“I know you’re trying to help,” I said evenly, “but I would not be able to maintain my cool at said event. Therefore, I shall pass.” I'd told her about accidentally awakening a ghoul at the last funeral I'd attended. Apparently, she thought getting back on that particular hearse was a good idea.
“Are you currently ‘maintaining your cool’?” she asked, making air quotes. “Is this your cool, right here? Not eating, binge drinking every night—“
“Not every night,” I objected lamely.
“Pills and more pills?”
“I’m having trouble sleeping.” And it’s the only way to avoid the nightmares.
“Using black magic?”
“How’d you know about that?” I yelped. “It just happened!”
Golden shot me her gotcha look. “Lucky guess. I know you. Your grasp on the difference between right and wrong was pretty shady to begin with. And I know how you handle stress, and how much he meant to you,” she said, skirting his name on purpose.
I swallowed hard and felt my lips twist up to the side. “Yeah, well, not anymore.”
“This is a hard time,” she said. “It will pass. Accepting the loss is important. I don’t expect you to go alone. I’ll be there. We’ll all be there.”
I wrestled with my feelings. “I’m too mad at him to go.”
“I’m angry, too. You must be furious. I can't believe he was that stupid. I mean, I knew he was on a stupid mission or something, but... Goddamn,” she agreed.
“That brainless, hot-assed fuckstump,” I said. “Like, holy balls, I still can’t comprehend how someone could even think of trying something so dumb.”
“Chapel says the same thing,” Golden admitted. I knew Gary. He wouldn't have said anything of the kind, much less done so colorfully. He'd probably just made disappointed noises, straightened his tie, and cleared his throat. “We’re all shaking our heads. It ended badly. It cost him dearly. It cost us dearly.” Her voice got rough for a second but she pulled it together. “Now we’re going to go on without him. And you’re...”
“We weren’t…” I interrupted, meshing my fingers together to indicate some kind of a real relationship, but she frowned it away.
“Don’t give me that shit about not having feelings just because you two didn’t have a spoken thing or a ring or whatever. It doesn’t work that way, Marnie. You don’t need a piece of paper or be Facebook official to mean something to one another. As far as anyone could tell, you were the only person who got close to him. That is something. And your feelings of loss are valid.” Her eyes had gained a sheen that made her squirm a bit in the chair. I felt her discomfort. “Let’s start the healing process. Step one: face the funeral.”
“It’s been too long. Two months,” I said. “Why have a funeral now? We’ve got nothing to bury. The revenant court isn’t going to release a body to us, are you kidding? Admit that he died there? Nobody has bothered setting up a memorial. He’s got no family. He had no friends.”
“Just us,” Golden said with a sad smile. “We were his family, Marnie. The job was his life. He didn’t make time for anything else. He had the job... and you.”
And in the end, the job trumped me. I remembered some of Batten’s last words to me. Don’t over-romanticize me. And, don’t fuck everything up, Snickerdoodle.
Bossy, I thought. I’ll over-romanticize and fuck up whatever I damn well want.
Golden took a deep breath and said carefully, “Besides, they are shipping the body.”
I felt my heart slam hard in my chest and I knew my face crumpled before I could wrest control of it. “I don’t believe it. Remy is actually letting us have it? They didn’t… do anything to it, did they?”
Golden’s hands jumped up in front of her. “I know zero details, and frankly, I think that’s for the best. We should just mentally prepare ourselves for a closed casket. Chapel has his final wishes,” she said, still not saying Batten’s name, “and has put himself in charge of the arrangements. That’s for the best, right?”
She was looking at me like she wanted permission. “Well, I don’t have any say. I wasn’t his, you know…”
“Do you want a say? Chapel would be happy to—“
“No,” I said firmly. “Is that why you’re really here? Did Gary send you?”
She tipped one hand back and forth as if to say I was half-right. “He’s concerned, is all. Chapel wants to make sure he’s not stepping on toes. If you have any input, I’m sure he’d be happy to hear your ideas. But I came on my own. I’m worried about you.”
“Oh sweet Dark Lady, would everyone stop worrying about me? I’m fine. And even if I’m not, what could anyone do?” I needed to move, so I got up to pace. I realized I was cupping my wounded forearm and set my hands on my hips instead. “I’m going to start worrying about you people worrying all the time. You’re going to give yourselves a bunch of ulcers. Should I start fake-smiling my way through life to get you all off my back? I can’t manage that just yet, but I assure you, it’s coming, okay?”
“We don’t want you to fake-smile,” she said. “Besides, you suck at it. You look like a chimp trying to stare down a hyena while eating a wad of horseradish.”
That almost earned her a real smile, but I squelched it with a scowl. “Well, they sure as hell aren’t going to be real fucking smiles,” I informed her seriously. “How could they be?”
She tucked her lips inside her mouth for a moment like she was trying not to say something, and then huffed. “Fuck it. Here goes.” She braced for my reply and then said, “Are you going to spend the rest of your life unhappy because Mark fucking Batten got himself killed?”
I blinked rapidly in the face of that, not knowing what to say. I settled on an uncertain, “No?”
“You’re never going to smile again,” she clarified, “because some dickhead who chose killing monsters over you bit off more than he could chew and died in the process?”
That sounded insane. “No?” I said again.