Blightmare (The Marnie Baranuik Files Book 5)

by A. J. Aalto

  “Sure,” he said dazedly. He was looking at his hands like they were strangers who had betrayed him. He brought his fingertips to his lips unconsciously.

  “Solmes?” I had to repeat it three times to get his attention. “It’s going to be all right. We caught the Blight early. It’s very mild. Just a few spots and some skin damage.”

  “Did I give it to customers? To my partner? Rob’s going to be pissed,” he said with amazement. “He’s gonna be pissed.”

  “Not your fault,” I said, though really, if he hadn’t roughed Beau up, he wouldn’t be sick. Furthermore, what was Beau dabbling with? I recalled again the pimples on his face. Rash, more likely. Pestilence, indeed. “It’s really not your fault.”

  “Won’t matter,” he said, and he looked more like a scared kid than the dangerous ex-con Hood had warned me about. “I screwed up again. He’s gonna fucking kill me.”

  Since I had limited knowledge of what Rob Footer would or wouldn’t do when he was irritated, I didn’t know what to say, other than, “Well, good luck with all that.” My phone was ringing, and I pointed at the open/closed sign. “Lock up. Get your ass home.” The Blue Sense warned he was going to bolt, and I warned, “Do not make a run for it, Solmes. Be more afraid of the germs than Footer, yeah? You go around spreading one of the Blights with prior knowledge and somebody dies, they’ll slap you with a negligent homicide charge and throw you in a prison so deep, you’ll never see the sun again. I mean it, dude. Say bye-bye to your pretty hobbies until you get clear of the Frankenstank.”

  Anger flashed across his face. He didn’t care if this wasn’t my fault; I was the bearer of bad news, he was frustrated, and he needed to regain control. He took a step towards the counter partition, and un-subtly dropped his hands behind it, where I had no doubt they kept whatever arsenal of “robbing us was your last mistake” gear.

  “Don’t even think about it, Solmes. People know I’m with you.”

  “See any of those people here?” His brown eyes rapidly lost their warmth.

  I made a great show of putting my phone away in my jacket like I didn’t need to call for help, while my inner warning system screamed call for help, call for help!

  I squared my shoulders at him and gave him my let’s-do-this face. “Will it make you feel better? Maybe the question you should be asking yourself is: will this cocky bitch make me feel even worse? I can answer that for ya.” My fake smile blossomed, and I started mentally preparing myself for taking him down. “Yes. Yes, she will. But if you’d like to explore that, I’m right here.”

  I waited. He calculated. I worried for a minute that my poker face wasn’t going to hold; I tried to decide if I would shoot him if he lunged and my training failed me.

  “Nothing more to say, tough guy?” I challenged, and Hood’s warning was a whisper, fading fast, almost inaudible. I decided I would shoot.

  He saw it in my face. “I wasn’t going to hurt you,” he lied, scoffing. “Crazy fucking bitch.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Good. I wasn’t going to hurt you, either.”

  His warmth rebounded, and so returned the seductive mask that unknotted my belly and invited closeness. “Yes you were,” he purred.

  “Maybe a little,” I admitted.

  He smiled, and it wrapped up his inner ugliness in silk and sex. “Maybe you’ll come see me again.”

  No, Jimmy boy. I will not forget this, and I will never set foot in Footer & Solmes' Fine Goods alone again. “Sure. Who knows when I might need a new doodad or knickknack?” I shot my thumb at the door and backed up a few steps. “Close up. Straight home.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Until next time. It’s been a real treat, Solmes.” I grabbed my backpack and shot him a nod before marching out into the sweet-smelling town air and freedom and sunshine; I refused to look back to check if he was right on my tail, but the bulk of my focus was on what might be happening behind me.

  Thus, confident in my chosen course, I walked straight into an unmoving body in a tan uniform. When I glanced up, the good-natured, red-headed country boy look didn’t soften the impression Sheriff Hood made. He was not amused.

  “Oh, hey,” I said, smiling. “I was just about to call you.”

  “Knock it off, Mars. I told you not to see him alone.”

  “Yeah, I can see why,” I grumbled. “He’s a real gem.”

  “How’d you survive to adulthood with such bad decision making skills?”

  “Hey, who are you calling an adult?” I scoffed. “But, hey, I got answers that I didn’t even know I was looking for.”

  “Great,” Hood said, his voice rising. “Next time, get answers with back-up.”

  Point: Hood. “It worked out okay,” I soothed.

  “This time,” he said. “What do I have to do, put a tracer on your car?”

  I took a deep breath and braced myself. “This might be hard for you to hear, Robin Hood, but you listen up good. It is not your place to protect me. I have a job to do. Sometimes, that job is going to require shady, questionable actions with shady, questionable people. I do not need a bodyguard. I do not need a personal escort. Do you follow all your citizens around to make sure they’re only doing perfectly safe things?”

  He opened his mouth and then shut it with a low, unhappy hum. He rocked back on his heels and crammed both hands in his pockets.

  My eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Did Batten tell you to check up on me?”

  He blinked with surprise and then his mouth worked again.

  “You suck at lying, dude, don’t even try it,” I said with a horrified gasp. “The nerve of that guy. Was that in his letter to you? Was that in everyone’s letter? Do I have to check with Chapel and Golden and de Cabrera to make sure Batten didn’t set up a network of babysitters for me?” Might explain why Harry and Wes didn’t get them, my mind whispered. They’re already overprotective. I exhaled hard. “So, let me get this straight: Batten asks you to keep an eye on me, and your first thought isn’t ‘Marnie can take care of herself,’ because you think, what? That I can’t?”

  “Mars—”

  “Because I haven’t learned anything from you in the past few years? I haven’t picked up a thing or two in training? I’m not armed and comfortable with a weapon? Seriously?” It was my turn to glare. “You know what, screw you both. I am a grown-ass woman. Yes, I’ve done some stupid things in the past, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve made radical changes in my life. I can take care of myself. Maybe you think it’s a kindness, what you’re doing. But it feels like I have a goddamn warden.”

  “Batten didn’t mean—”

  “You don’t know what he meant,” I said, trying to keep my cool, and doing an absolutely amazing job of not doing anything like it. “I’ll tell you what he meant. Kill-Notch meant that I’m a walking disaster. He called me Doom Chasm. Well, guess what? He can rot in his own doom chasm in some dank corner of hell.”

  I got in my car, heart thudding, cheeks burning, and pulled out of the angle parking without another glance at him, stewing at both him and Batten, and stupid Dunlop, and my Liar McPantsonfire client, and creepy douchebag, Jim Solmes.

  I’d show them all. I’d figure out what the hell this spyglass did, I’d find the missing woman, I’d sort out what the hell my client was screwing around with, and if I had to kick some asses on the way, those asses would get a swift kicking.

  I hit every light just as it turned red as I drove away. Because of course I did.

  Chapter 15

  The first of the sunset glow had begun to slant through the home office blinds by the time I settled my nerves enough to sit at my desk and scribble. First, I tackled updating my To Do list. It was depressing how little I’d accomplished on such a stressful, stupid day. Beau was using black magic to stalk this ex-girlfriend and then hired me when his black magic obviously wasn’t good enough; what I needed to know was why he was so damned focused on the trumpet and what the spyglass did, if anything. Beau’s clumsy dabblin
g on the left-hand path had given him an illness which Jim Solmes had caught during an act of violent contact. Since Beau had told me in our initial meeting that “the Horseman,” his ex-girlfriend, was sick, this made me wonder if there had been violent or intimate contact, hopefully just the latter without the former, between them.

  Out of curiosity, I investigated spells for Beau’s trumpet entrapment, suspecting that he’d tried some easily-found spells online. There were plenty of ways to steal a person’s soul and place it in an item – a jar or fetish or something of that sort – but most of them required serious sacrifices. Would a musical instrument work to hold a soul as well? The internet was fairly silent about that, though YouTube had a surprising number of “possessed instrument” videos, which were almost entirely bogus, but at least provided an amusing soundtrack while I kept working. Searching for trumpets and seals and horses turned up numerous Bible passages and predictions about Armageddon... and a lot of videos of animals with musical talent. I removed horses from my search and found there were still a fair number of links between trumpets and seals, and lots of links between seals and demons. I Googled demons and seals and came up with an image of a demonic-looking sea lion with red-eye from the flash, which was unhelpful but kind of cute. I made it my desktop background picture. The research was helping to calm me down, so I trundled deeper into the internet and jotted notes in my Moleskine as I went.

  A deeply-researched study of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse debated whether or not they were demons, angels, or neutral spirits just doing their job; several mentions of a minor demon named Merihem popped up when I searched for demonic influences regarding pestilence. A quick scan of the Blights indicated that necromancy, specifically the type that John Spicer had employed, often resulted in a paying the price of corpsepox, which spread through close, continued contact. Other types of dark magic, like demonology, exacted other costs, such as Ruby Valli's habit of feeding fingers to the demon with whom she was in cahoots. Most of the Blights on the list were a consequence of fucking (heh-heh) around with lust demons, or, worse, Abbadon the Destroyer, King of a Plague of Locusts. He didn’t sound like much fun at parties... or garden supply stores, either.

  A Satanist site opined that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse were excellent symbols for the greed and corruption, which in turn led to world wars and the resulting poverty, illness, and citizen revolt in a cycle that was bound to repeat again and again, but not actual beings per se. I didn’t see how that was helpful to my case, but it caught my interest enough to read the whole thing. A very popular, hybrid Christian Witchcraft site insisted that trumpets were commonly used by demons, so orchestras should ditch them in order to stay “pure.” Sounded a lot like hooey to me, but I found it repeated on several other witchcraft sites as well, including the reputable Seven Sisters in the Sun, a resource I had come to depend upon quite often.

  I doodled for a bit, deep in thought, and accidentally snapped the tip off my pencil. Since I was already at Seven Sisters, I researched my own shadow-splitting situation to see if that was a thing. It didn’t seem to be. All that came up were references to Peter Pan. I began to write them a quick email on the off chance that anyone would have a clue what was happening, and if so, how I could fix it. I didn't think duct tape was going to be enough for the job.

  I heard the papery whisper of Ruby Valli’s grimoire calling me, and wondered if I should mention it in the email, or if I should destroy the grimoire once and for all. If I was never going to open it, and it was tempting and unsafe, then what the hell was I keeping it for? A cool voice inside my head argued, it contains a century’s knowledge on the dark arts. Irreplaceable. But I didn’t feel comfortable offering it to a library or museum, either. It was sure to contain some dangerous spells and incantations; if they fell into the wrong hands, it would be on my head. Who are you to say what’s dangerous? Are you the arbiter of what’s allowed in witchcraft these days? That voice was distinctly not mine; it was the grimoire’s sickening, whispery paper-voice. Burn the stupid thing. That was Batten’s, blunt and to the point, but not wrong.

  In the end, I didn’t mention it in the email to Seven Sisters, but I did point out I’d been slipping off the right hand path and wondered if, in their opinion, that could have torn my shadow. I also didn't mention anything about books or dead ex-lovers arguing what to do about each other in my head. There was enough going on in that letter that I didn't need to get greedy. Or weird. Okay, too weird.

  Feeling the weight of my dumb blow-out with Hood, I gave up on the research and slouched to my room to hide. Harry would be getting up soon, and he’d know I was feeling guilty and ashamed about something, and I’d have to tell him about yelling at Hood, and he’d give me The Look. Again.

  I had just settled under my bed for a good swig of wine or twelve when Agent Golden’s sensible, FBI-issue black shoes appeared on my rag rug. Soon after, her knees came into view as she crouched smoothly, and strawberry blonde hair dangled and then her upside down head.

  “Hi, freak,” she said.

  “Soon-to-be-drunk freak,” I corrected. “How’d you get in?”

  “The door is unlocked,” she said. “Why are you under the bed?”

  “I live under the bed now,” I told her matter-of-factly.

  She made a thoughtful noise. “That’s a real downgrade from your customary living conditions.”

  “Yeah, well, stuff happened and I gave up.”

  “You can’t.”

  I choked on my dismay. “Why the hell not?”

  “We need you.”

  “How is that my problem?”

  She shifted tactics. “Can I give up with you?”

  “Sure, there’s room.” I moved the bottle of merlot and shoved my bum over until I was pressed against the wall, while Golden belly-crawled under the bed and rolled until she was facing me. There was a dust bunny in her hair and the old metal frame of the bed had left a smear of grease on her hand from where Harry had oiled a squeaky spring for me.

  “Now what’s the procedure?” she asked.

  “We drink merlot and enjoy the view.”

  She looked up at the underside of the bed, where I’d taped a picture of Nathan Fillion as Captain Reynolds from Firefly. Golden attempted to drink from the bottle, but she didn’t have a lot of experience in under-bed boozing and didn’t manage to tilt much of it into her mouth. I showed her how to get around the metal slats and prop the bottle against the box spring for maximum wine drainage. I could tell she was impressed.

  “I remember the first time I saw you,” she said between sips, “standing there in that unclaimed office, drenched and looking like a wet hobo—”

  “Hobo is offensive. You’re not allowed to say it.”

  “Looking like a drowned rat—”

  “Drowned rat is offensive to me, for obvious reasons.”

  “Soaked from the rain and looking lost and clueless and out of place. I tried to remove you. You held your ground. If I recall correctly, you assaulted me.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I tapped your hand.”

  “You’ve been impossible to get rid of,” she said. “A colossal pain in the ass.”

  “And you’ve been a joy,” I drawled. “A real blessing in my life.”

  “You’re missing my point, but you’re doing it on purpose.” In the dim, dusty space under my bed, she faced me and her eyes softened. “You say you give up, but you never do. I believe in you, if it matters. Come on. You’re the Great White Shark of Psychic Investigations. You’ve got this.”

  Something she said triggered a vague feeling low in my belly. “You’re right.”

  “I am?” She looked startled. “About which part?”

  “I’m psychic.”

  “Is this the part where I say, ‘duh’?”

  I smiled, and it felt truly devious on my face. Before I could reach to clap my bare hand on her, she squealed and log-rolled out from under the bed, springing to her feet.

  She warned playfully,
“Don’t touch me, witch-woman!”

  I set the wine bottle near the night table and dragged myself out after her using just my arms, not unlike a certain ghoul I'd had nightmares of doing exactly the same thing. “You wanted me out. I’m out.”

  She made ready to defend herself from a truly un-FBI-like slap fight, should one occur. I pounced to my feet and took a faux Kung Fu stance. Hands still up, she MC-Hammer-walked out of the room, at which point I busted a gut laughing.

  “You don’t have the right pants for that move,” I informed her.

  “But I am dope on the floor and magic on the mic,” she pointed out, putting on a pair of sunglasses.

  “What is all this fuss and kerfuffle?” Harry asked from the pantry, coming up from his chambers, smoothing the mother-of-pearl buttons on his shirt front. “Ladies, good evening. Playful tonight, are we?” He set about pulling shots of espresso and foaming milk.

  “Marnie had a big fight with Sheriff Hood and I’m here to get the story,” Golden reported with a nauseating degree of perkiness. She sat at the kitchen table, ignoring my gaping mouth.

  “Did she, now?” Harry said, thrice-pierced brow rising. “How very unlike her.”

  “How did you know about the fight?” I demanded.

  “He called me for advice on how to deal with you.”

  “You don’t know how to deal with me,” I assured her with a hearty harrumph.

  Harry patted my head and set a cup of espresso in front of me, whisking away the wine bottle. “For certain, you are impossible for anyone to deal with, but I admire the man for persisting.”

  “Nobody likes a smartass, Harry.”

  “He does.” She jerked her thumb at Harry, who was drawing off a demitasse cup of espresso for her, but paused long enough to cast a knowing smirk at us over his shoulder. “Well,” Golden prompted, looking over the rims of her aviators, “what happened?”

  “I, for one, cannot imagine what could have prompted you to bellow at the poor sheriff, of all people,” Harry admonished. They both stared at me for an answer while I squirmed.