by Eli Constant
He nods. “That was lucky of you. How could you tell the body was there?”
“The ground looked disturbed.” I don’t know what else to say. I’m not ready to tell Terrance or Kyle the truth.
“Ah. Reasonable.” Kyle sounds nonchalant—I can tell it’s an act. He turns away and starts fussing over the liquor bottles, pulling out ones that are nearly empty. “The last person left about two hours ago and no others are going to come in with the cops crawling over everything.”
“I wondered about that. You might have fresh paint and a juke box, but this is still Jim’s place. He… catered to a certain type of client.”
Kyle turns and uses the sink to rinse out a rum bottle that’s only got a drop or two left in it and then he tosses the cap in the trash and the glass bottle into the recycling bin. “I don’t want to change dad’s place.” He leans against the bar and looks around. “It’s like his memory still lives in the walls.” Kyle sighs and then smiles; it lacks the usual mischievousness. “But I wouldn’t mind bringing in a few reputable customers now and then.”
“What am I? Mincemeat?” I reach out and tug on his shirt sleeve. He’s wearing a royal blue button up shirt and a pair of dark wash jeans. It’s fancier than his normal attire, but I like it. His hair is pulled back from his face into one of those man buns that I used to think was utterly ridiculous. Until I saw it on him. A strand of hair has come loose and it’s curling against his forehead and trailing down his cheek.
Kyle isn’t looking at me; he’s looking down at the counter, at those marks again. He’s playing his fingers over them lightly, as if he’s trying to make out their meaning. When he speaks, his voice is low, different than his normal tone. “Tori, I love you. You don’t have to say it back. I know we’ve not been together long enough for me to say it, but if I didn’t say it, I’d keep holding it inside until it ate at me. I like to speak my mind. I like to be honest.”
“I know you do, Kyle. I… love that about you.”
He looks up then, a soft smile on his face. Still, the impishness is gone. He is solemn and changed. “Let me finish what I need to say. I can’t love someone who doesn’t trust me and I know you’re holding back, that there’s something you feel you can’t tell me. You can though. I want to take care of you. I want to protect you. I want to know you. Every part of you.”
I stay quiet, making sure he’s finished and then I speak. “What if I can’t be honest with you?”
“I don’t know. I love you, but I don’t know.”
My heart freefalls into my stomach. A six month relationship shouldn’t come with ultimatums, but I could understand his point. I could understand where he was coming from and where Terrance was coming from.
I was stuck between a rock and a damn hard place. Shit.
“Will you come to my place tonight?” I sound hopeful.
“No, I think I’ll go to Dad’s. I’ll never get used to calling it my house. I haven’t even considered changing the bar’s name.” He moves away from me and continues to clean up the bar.
“Come over tomorrow then?”
“After church.”
“Okay.” I feel deflated, like a balloon that’s floated too long against the ceiling and has finally come floating down to earth. Soon, I’ll be popped by a needle, someone putting me out of my misery. I was so lucky with Adam, lucky enough that I shouldn’t expect to find a love like that again. Yet I do think that I love Kyle. Maybe not in a ‘put a ring on it and keep me’ way, but the love is there. It’s definitely there.
“Want me to pick up food on the way?”
If he’s coming over and he’s offering to bring food, then we aren’t broken yet. And if we aren’t broken, then we can still find our way through. If I can pay the passage, which is my honesty.
It’ll be lonely in my bed though. We’ve spent more nights sleeping side by side lately than we have apart. I’ve gotten used to having his warmth beside me.
“No, don’t. Leslie gave me enough fish to feed the multitudes on the mountain. Assuming you know how to prep it for cooking? I sure as hell don’t.”
“Sure. I’ll teach you.”
“I’ve no desire to learn how to gut a fish, but thanks.” I give a half-laugh that dies so quickly that it barely has lived.
I sit on the stool and Kyle keeps himself busy. We are only a few feet from one another, but we might as well be miles apart. Strangers across oceans.
“I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
He doesn’t respond.
The needle is hovering above my skin, poised to strike.
As I walk out of the bar and towards my Bronco, I block out the bones and the soil. I block out the police chatter and the flashing lights. I block out everything except the needle’s point. And when I sit down in the car and start the engine, it breaches the surface. It pops me with a sound like a gunshot.
I cry all the way home. I’m so tired of the dead ruling my life. I fear I will never really live.
Chapter Six
I don’t sleep much and when I wake up, I’m sad to find that I don’t smell coffee. When Kyle spends the night, he always gets up before me and starts a pot. His side of the bed is still perfectly made too, the top sheet tucked between mattress and box spring.
The lack of the roasted, heady scent of brewing coffee floating through the air is a reminder of his words last night. His ultimatum. And I’m so unsure about what to do. It takes me longer than it should to pull myself away from the warm coziness of bed—not the least of reasons is because it’s cold in the apartment—and get dressed.
I’ve gotten much too used to having him around.
It’s not good to depend on someone. My family are all gone, save for a psychotic half-brother. Adam is gone. Jim is gone. I worry about attaching myself to people. I worry about Terrance and Mei and Kyle. Will they die too?
Will everyone that I love die? My grandmother used to say that our gift was also our curse. I always thought she meant because of the rising, because of what would happen to me if I was found out by the wrong person.
Now though, I wonder if she meant that we are doomed to lives dominated by sadness. Grandmother had to leave her home country, leave Italy. Grandfather Pietro had died soon after I was born and she never pursued love again. She gave the rest of her life to helping the dead.
When I’m sitting with a mug of dark coffee cradled in my hands, I stare out the window again. To the lake. It hits me once more that there’s something different about it, a coloring that has never existed before—save for when the suicide spoke to me as I stood in the gazebo so long ago. Her family thought it was an accident. I know better.
Standing, cup still in hand, I move to the window and press my right palm against the glass. It feels like death, but… not. It is something different. Almost like how a body feels after I’ve embalmed it and not before. There is a lack of life fluids. My powers are so much stronger now, for all I know I might be finally feeling the true, underlying essence of Lake Moultrie. There is always some degree of death within creation. Here, it is likely fish trapped beneath the ice, slowly fading away under the trappings of winter.
After I’ve finished my coffee and my musings over the water outside my home, I go to my hiding spot in the basement of the Victorian and I take out Grandmother Sophia’s notebooks and the ones I have recently filled with teachings from Liam. There’s still so much to learn and now I am something that even grandmother had no knowledge of. I will find no secrets about how to manage being both necromancer and Blood Queen within the pages of her writings.
But perhaps, reading them again will help me control the reach of my new powers. Perhaps I can apply the same principles. And I’ve forgotten so very much. Dad taught me everything when my gift first surfaced. I use it actively now, but not in a way that pushes me forward.
Taking the books upstairs—my grandmother’s leather-bound tattered things and my new findings contained in basic composition notebooks—I cuddle on the sofa, my many throw pillows tucked
around my body protectively, and I read.
Grandmother was the tender age of three when her gift surfaced. Her mother had been watching for it, challenging her mind to accept the impossible so that she would be open to the powers when they came. When she saw her first apparition, she’d not met it with fear, but with purpose in her heart. She’d set it to rest. I feel her three-year-old self could rival me, sitting here huddled in a cool apartment, twenty-five (nearly twenty-six) and still so much a novice.
But then again, grandmother had been trained by someone with the gift. She had been prepared from the start. My father did his best, but he knew everything as book learning, not as truth and practice. I am alone in the world, the memory of the rising and what happened to necromancers always on my mind, and it becomes easier and easier to use my gifts to the extent I’m comfortable, but not explore them.
For some reason, Blackthorn comes into my mind then. The sight of him as I felt his heart in my hands and I squeezed and squeezed until he was nearly ruined. I would have killed him then and there if Sausage Fingers had not interrupted, crashing down on me like a vengeful fog.
At the back of grandmother’s second diary—I’m skipping around, remembering things as I read—I find where she talks about working in the funeral home with grandfather. She describes how the bodies feel before and after they’ve been embalmed.
It’s interesting, how she describes the absence of blood and bodily fluids and how it changes the aura around the deceased. It’s interesting…
A knock on my door pulls me out of my thoughts. Quickly, I close the diary I’m reading and I shove all of them under the sofa cushions, spreading them out so they won’t be noticeable if someone sits down.
“Coming!” I skip to the door, willing my heartbeat to slow. The journals are hidden. There’s nothing to be worried about. When I open the door, I’m surprised to see Terrance’s face.
“Hey, Tori.”
I move to the side so he can enter and I close the door behind him, confusion plain on my face. “Hey. What’s going on? You don’t normally make house calls and when you do, there’s usually a phone call to give warning.”
“I did try to call. You didn’t answer.”
“Oh, shit. My cell must have died. I didn’t plug it in last night when I came home.” I turn and find my purse hanging on the wall mounted rack next to the door. Digging for a minute, I find my phone, which is in fact dead. “Yep, dead.” I wave it at him and then walk to the kitchen where I have a charger plugged into the outlet by the bread box.
“I’m sorry to bug you on a Sunday, but I was wondering if you could come down to the morgue and take a look at that body you found.”
“Sure, I can, but why?”
“There’s something… unusual about it. We’re not sure what to make of it.”
“The coroner doesn’t have an idea?”
“No, he does, but I want to hear what you think too.”
I nod. “Okay… you’ve got my attention. Give me five.” I walk to the closet where I keep my boots and coat and I put them on slowly, my brain going through possibilities, although I know blind speculation is stupid. “Ready.” I grab my purse and open the front door again.
“Great.”
As I close the apartment door and look down the stairs at Terrance’s already descending form, I realize something. “Hey, how did you get in?”
“You really shouldn’t put a key in such an obvious spot.” He says, digging into his jacket and holding up a little brass key that glints in the stairwell light.
“I’ll take that back.” I quipped.
“Nah, I think I’ll keep it. For your own good. You’ll be dumb and put it back and then all sorts of people will be able to just stroll in uninvited.”
“Terrance, give me back my key.”
“Nope.” He pushes through the door that leads to my carport.
I decide not to keep arguing. Let him have a key. Someday, the Bonneau chief of police walking around with my house key in his pocket might prove a good thing. “Fine, suit yourself. I’ll just change the locks.” It’s an empty threat. I’m way too lazy to deal with that. Besides, the only locksmith in town is a total perv. Last time I had him over—to fix the door to the basement which had to be replaced after I’d kicked it open to get to a reanimated body downstairs—he’d grunted lustfully while given me the up-and-down slow gaze.
Talk about skeevy.
I follow Terrance to the morgue. It’s only a couple blocks away from the station. I take it as a good sign that he lets me drive the Bronco behind him. It means I’m not a suspect. Probably. I’m pretty sure they can’t accuse me of a murder that occurred when I was still a little kid. I mean, some kids are sick and twisted, taking knives to their families in the middle of the night. But that wasn’t me.
I just see dead people, I don’t make them.
Chapter Seven
When I shift the Bronco to park, I pull out my phone—that is hovering right around ten percent charged since I hadn’t had it plugged in for long and didn’t own a car charger—and text Kyle that I had to leave the house and didn’t know when I’d be back.
He replies simply with. ‘Maybe dinner then.’
I want to immediately message back and tell him to go over to my apartment after church still and just relax until I came back, but I resisted. He needs space. And I need time to decide whether or not I can be honest with him. I wonder how he’ll spend his free time today. He doesn’t open the bar on Sundays. Jim always did, but then again, I don’t think Jim was ever a God-fearing church-goer.
That’s another thing that makes me hesitate when it comes to telling Kyle the truth. Jim said he’d understand and that I could trust him. I wasn’t so sure. Religions have condemned necromancy for hundreds of years. Catholics were the worst, Episcopalians a close second. Kyle is Baptist, but I’m not sure if that would make a difference. Not in the scheme of things.
Christians might have stories about Jesus raising the dead, but they didn’t take too kindly to someone else following in their savior’s footsteps. I’m mixed up on the subject of religion myself.
Don’t get me wrong; I do believe in God. I always have. But I also believe that there’s truth in all things, in all cultural beliefs and the deities they worship. I believe it even stronger now that I know necromancers aren’t the only preternatural creatures to roam the world.
It’s like the old fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Liam said they were all, each and every one, based on truth. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for Hansel and Gretel to face the cannibalistic witch and be carried home on the back of a swan shifter or how the queen must have felt, facing the prospect of giving her baby to the impish Rumpel Stilzche. She had used her human ingenuity to defeat him. It’s all humans really had, in the end, to protect themselves.
Wit, strength of spirit, the few weapons that are actually effective against vampires and werewolves and fairies.
Part of me wants to refuse to accept that such things could have truly happened, but the other part of me knows what I am, what Liam is, what I experienced last year—fighting Blackthorn and his golem progeny.
Tap, tap.
I turn to my window and see Terrance’s face. His hand is just dropping from hitting the glass. “You ready, Tori?”
I’m surprised he doesn’t have some quip about me texting and taking too long. His favorite thing to do is jab me about my poor imitation of cop lingo. I distinctly remember him calling me ‘a little shit that knows jack about police work’. Granted, that’s not completely in context, but the sting was keen and he’d laughed. He’s got too much on his mind for joking right now I guess. That bothers me. If whatever I’m about to see has Terrance this reserved, then I’m sure I’m not going to enjoy it one bit.
Of course, who would enjoy a trip to the morgue? “Sure.” I tuck my phone into my purse and he steps back as I swing open the driver’s door. I leave the purse behind, only
opting to take my car keys with me. I don’t need the extra baggage for this. “Can you give me a little warning on what I’m about to see, Terrance?”
“No. I need you to see it with fresh eyes.” His hand grips the long steel handle of the morgue’s reinforced door and he pulls it towards himself.
I don’t respond to his answer. He wants me to experience the body untainted. He doesn’t understand that I’ve already held the bones within my mind, tasted them in my mouth, recreated her face in minute detail. I know Maggie Smythe. I know her intimately. I know she was a mother. I feel in my heart she was a good person.
And now she’s dead.
I cannot see her with fresh eyes.
We walk down a corridor, the fluorescent lights above our head flickering on and off like we’ve stepped onto the set of a horror movie. “That’s fucking disturbing,” I murmur, pointing up at the lights when Terrance glances back at me.
“I asked Doug about that. This building’s so old that the electrical work’s not up to code. This happens sometimes.”
We’re heading to a set of double swinging doors ahead. I can see through the two long, narrow windows that the county coroner is reading over a chart and I can just see Maggie’s bones set out in order along a cold steel table. I am glad that she is gone, that she has moved on, because even spirits feel sorrow. Anyone would feel sorrow at seeing themselves reduced to a reassembled skeleton against shiny steel.
The lights stop flickering and then it begins again, the electrical interruptions. I reach up with my power, feeling the lights and if it is indeed an issue of human manufacture.
As I suspect, it is not an issue with the electrical at all. The morgue is a ghost factory. They zoom about the crawlspace below and the roof access above. They do not feel like people anymore. Not spirits holding onto unfinished business. Yet, they are also not disintegrated into the basest instincts. They are not angry wraiths full of spite, holding onto the indistinct memories of a bad life.
They are bodies never claimed. Burials in unmarked graves. Jane and John Does.