Better Off Undead

by D. R. Perry

  "Your stupid hunches don't mean I'm wrong. You're not a Precog or a Scryer." Psychometry was Calvin's talent, one that only worked once he'd found physical evidence.

  "But Steph was too special to pass through a morgue unnoticed."

  "You know what, Cal? Do you know which of the patients in this damn hospital are special?"

  I tapped my foot, waiting for an answer. Cal gave me nothing but a shrug.

  "All of them are special! Every single person, human or extra, who rolls in here? They each matter. They're all someone's kid or parent or uncle or professor, and every single one of them is going to leave this world someday. Even ghosts move on, Cal."

  "We don't."

  "I know. And you know what? It sucks!"

  "So why do—" Cal waved his hand at the shelves, the sink, the door. "All this? Why bother then, Agnes, if you've got no hope? If this is how you feel?"

  "You keep your hope. Detectives need that. Doctors don't. All we need is a reason to fight. We do that for hopeless cases too, because everyone is special. As special as our completely mortal Dampyr daughter, no more, no less."

  "Jeez, Agnes." Cal stretched one hand toward me. "I'm sorry."

  "In all my centuries, I have never waited this long for an apology. But I'll accept it, Cal." I took his hand, squeezing. It felt freeing to touch another person whose skin was the same temperature as my own. "If you'll accept mine. I'm sorry, too."

  "Thank you." Cal squeezed back. "But it won't stop me from investigating. No matter what I find, it'll be worth it to me. I hope you understand."

  "I think maybe we understand each other better now than when we were married." I let my hand linger.

  "What took you so long to tell me? Is this is the way you always thought about practicing medicine?"

  "December is always slower than May, Cal." I gave him a grin. "It takes us longer than you younger vamps to get around to just about anything personal."

  "I'll keep that in mind during my investigation." He let go of my hand.

  "Good." I stepped aside, giving him a clear path to the door. "Keep it in mind afterward as well."

  "Okay!" His smile lit the tiny room. "I'll come back with anything I find."

  "Good." He held the door open for me. "Don't be a stranger."

  I turned down the hall, looking back over my shoulder as he headed in the opposite direction, toward the elevator. I entertained the thought that maybe coincidence had known what it was doing, putting us together. Moments later, I let that wishful thought slip into the depths of my long memory. I let Calvin take all of my hope with him as he went. He needed it more than I did, after all.

  Signs Point to Yes

  A Providence Paranormal College Short Story

  Jan Washburn sat behind the reception desk at Shady Acres. A resident sailed past, literally. Mr. Meyer had the power of levitation. Jan got up, leaving her post even though she technically wasn’t supposed to. There was no technicality about Mr. Meyer using his psychic abilities in the lobby or being off the dementia ward. She strode, stretching long legs now achy with her advancing age. Jan wasn’t sure exactly when or how she’d developed the ground-eating pace, but it sure came in handy when residents played Houdini.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d had to follow a Houdini from Dementia. Mrs. Perri had Mind magic, which let her convince half-asleep night-shift aides to open the door for her. Jan knew Mr. Meyer had gone it alone, however. His Telekinesis worked on mundane locks. The director would have to invest in some magipsychic deterrents in the future.

  “Wasn’t it nice to see Lane the other night?” Jan smiled at Mr. Meyer even though she couldn’t turn her head all the way in his direction without the risk of bumping a food or laundry cart.

  “Lane?” The old psychic shook his head. “I already told the wife she ain’t naming the baby after that cockamamie movie character. Teased is all a handle like that’ll get a kid.”

  “Oh.” Jan knew she had to travel back in time with Mr. Meyer. Arguing with a man capable of bringing the entire building down on their heads was not an option.

  “Anyway, I gotta get back. The nurse said it’ll be any time now, and I want to be there when the little kicker comes out.”

  “Sure, I understand.” Jan didn’t. She’d never had a child. “Let me walk with you.”

  “Fine.”

  Mr. Meyer maintained his blistering pace past the dark and empty dining room, the locked garden gate, and through the open double doors to the rehab ward. Jan stayed close, unsure of what the poor man’s reaction would be when he didn’t find a maternity room with his wife inside. He stopped abruptly in front of an old framed photograph. Jan’s sneakers squeaked on linoleum as she joined him.

  “Huh.” Mr. Meyer scratched his head. “I don’t remember seeing that guy before.”

  “Guy?” Jan’s fingertip pressed against her right temple and she blinked.

  “Yeah.” He jerked his chin at the upper left corner. “Guy in the Greek fisherman’s cap.”

  The photo was from one of Jan’s outings with the ladies from Shady Acres’ long-term ambulatory unit. They’d gone on a Trolley Tour in Providence and taken the snapshot in front of the Biltmore Hotel. It’d been a ladies-only trip, so what was that round-faced and bearded man doing in the back of their trolley?

  “I don’t remember him either,” said Jan. “And I was there.”

  “The mind plays more tricks than a Kitsune in a contest with a Tanuki.” Mr. Meyer folded his arms over his chest. “I bet he was always in that snapshot, and that fact just fell out of our heads like a penny from a holey pocket.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” Mr. Meyer shrugged. “I get the idea it’s something I’m used to. You aren’t.”

  “Aren’t what, Mr. Meyer?”

  “Used to the holes in your memory.” He peered at Jan. “You make a good show of not having them, but I know it when I see it. Takes one to know one, if you get my drift.”

  “Um, no. I’ve got a perfectly normal memory.” Jan didn’t dare move, and could barely breathe. Mr. Meyer was right. Retrograde amnesia wasn’t anything like normal. Jan wondered how one Telekinetic with Alzheimer’s could have guessed her weakness when Precognitive and Telepathic Psychics with the same condition hadn’t.

  Enough of Jan was missing to justify a picture of her brain on the side of a milk carton. The absent years were the whole reason she’d taken a job here at Shady Acres. The folk on the Dementia ward lost more of themselves each day, but Jan’s memory loss remained static, a zero-sum game.

  Her denial came without full understanding of why she made it, a knee-jerk reaction so automatic she’d never thought to question it before. She glanced at Mr. Meyer, forgetting again that she hadn’t remembered.

  “No.” He placed his hands on his hips, first the right, then the left. “Don’t look at me. Look at the other guy who shouldn’t be there.”

  Mr. Meyer’s lucidity was still common enough to be a relief instead of a red flag. Psychics with dementia got possessed or influenced on occasion, and too much lucidity at the wrong time could mean something else had taken up residence. She’d have to tell the nurse on his ward about that, of course.

  Jan turned her gaze back to that photo, meeting the eyes of the image of the man who shouldn’t be there. Something glinted on his left hand—a wedding band. She’d seen that before, and the man, too. Her eyes locked on his face and it melted her heart.

  “Edgar?” The name escaped her lips, leaving what felt like a chasm where her heart should be. Jan clenched her left hand, twisting it in the buttoned yoke on her standard-issue Shady Acres Staff polo shirt. “Is that my Edgar?”

  “That’s Edgar Watkins, brother of that professor down at the Paranormal College. Been missing for a pile of years.” Mr. Meyer’s brow wrinkled like slouching socks, the corners of his mouth tilted down as he grappled with his slippery recall. “Is he really yours?”

  The photo, frame and all, sailed off the wall a
nd hovered in front of Jan’s face. She couldn’t look away, but her right hand covered her left, feeling the empty space on her ring finger. Had she worn a ring like Edgar’s? Yes, she had, but Jan had no idea how she’d gained or lost it.

  “Reply hazy, try again.” Jan studied the photograph’s mystery man again. What little of his face was not covered by hat or beard was solitary, well-used, and careworn. Jan knew it had once been unlined and filled with hope, but her mind kept it dim and flickeringly lit by the tiniest flame of memory.

  “I know those Watkins brothers.” Mr. Meyer plucked the frame from where it hovered and turned it toward him. “Well, ‘knew’ is a better way to put it, I guess. They’re both psychics like me. Like you, too, Joyce.”

  “My name’s Jan.” A sense of the world tilting made her brace her feet and set her jaw. The sensation always came before a bout of future sight. “And my precognition’s been dormant for over five years.”

  “Nah. You think those things, but you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not the one with a room on the other side of this building.” Jan gripped her biceps and shuddered, teeth chattering enough to almost mask the tap of approaching footsteps.

  “And that’s why I can remember all this when you can’t.” Mr. Meyer chuckled. “They didn’t bother wiping my mind, you see.” He tapped his forehead. “No point, when my noggin’s scrambled up with more protein than an Atkins Diet omelet. But I have my lucid moments.”

  “No way to tell if this is one of them, though, old man.” A tattooed hand clapped Mr. Meyer on the shoulder. “Come on back with me, okay?”

  “Not now, Lane.” Mr. Meyer looked up at his son’s face, unfazed by the green hair that framed it. “This is maybe the most important thing I still have left to do.”

  “What? The conversation with Jan?”

  “Joyce, not Jan.” Mr. Meyer gave one sharp nod. “She has to hear the truth. I think she’s about to get the picture, that it’s time for her to remember.”

  “But Dad!”

  “It’s okay, Lane.” Jan hobbled over to the nearest bench, knees about to fold down and out from under her. “Let him stay for now. He’s onto something.”

  “Damn skippy, I am.” Mr. Meyer floated the picture over to Jan, tilting it as he did. It flipped from landscape to portrait until the group of smiling ladies and the shadowy man hiding in the trolley had turned on their heads.

  Something between the photo backing and the rear panel of the frame rattled, then hissed as it slid over the felt and paper. The whole contraption bounced three times, Mr. Meyer’s Telekinesis in as much control as hands.

  Something shiny bounced out and landed in Jan’s lap. It gleamed like a thin metallic snake with a silver hide and a round, golden head. She managed not to scream. Instead, she reached down and peered at it.

  The “head” was a simple gold band of the wedding variety, strung on a silver chain. Battered and scratched, the soft metal told a story if its life before its picture-frame hideaway, a story Jan thought she should have known. She didn’t.

  “I have a feeling.”

  “Well, duh,” said Lane. “You’re surrounded by psychics.”

  “She is one, kid.” Mr. Meyer sighed. “She just doesn’t remember.”

  “And you do?” Lane scratched his head. “You sure, old man?”

  “I’m lucid for now, and one of the things I know is that there ring’s a memory charm. She’ll remember what she is as sure as you do every night, Lane.”

  “What am I, then?” Lane put his hands on his hips. “You never remember when I come to visit.”

  “Vamp.” Mr. Meyer hung his head. “Summoner, too, like that lady friend of yours who’s been here with you the last few months.”

  “Geez, Dad.” Lane closed his eyes. “Wow.”

  Mr. Meyer clapped his son on the shoulder. Lane reached back, and in a New York minute, they were a tangle of arms and tears.

  Jan sat staring at the ring on the chain, wondering whether she should touch it. She looked at the vampire and then his father, the years a visible chasm between them, exactly as she knew the Alzheimer’s divided them further and in a less obvious way. But not now. Tonight was more magical than balls with glass slippers or a sleeping curse lifted.

  Tonight, Lane and his father truly recognized each other for the first time in years, a brief and shining moment more ephemeral than Camelot.

  Would touching her skin to the ring break this spell of lucidity? Should Jan play Mordred and break the Meyers’ fleeting ideal kingdom? Could she bring herself to turn their world upside-down in this rare moment, after it had managed to right itself for once?

  “Do I have to?” Jan’s voice escaped, squeaking and choked like a mouse in a trap.

  “Yeah.” Mr. Meyer gave his son one more pat on the back before pulling away. “You’ve got to. What you know might just save the world.”

  Jan looked at Lane.

  “My old man’s right.” The green-haired vampire gazed at the scuffed doodles on the toes of his sneakers. “You listen to him. I always did.”

  Jan reached for the ring, laid her hand on top of it, and curled her fingers to scoop it up.

  Unfastening the chain was easy. Jan tossed the silver strand at the wastebasket, then slipped that ring on the third finger of her left hand where it belonged.

  Mr. Meyer’s eyes went vacant, his brow a confused wrinkle. Lane’s shoulders drooped. Their world had turned turtle again, and hers had finally righted itself after twenty years. She wasn’t Jan Washburn.

  Her real name was Joyce Watkins, and she recalled that man in the Greek fisherman’s cap. She remembered everything.

  Ghost of a Chance

  The series continues with Ghost of a Chance, coming soon to Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

  Connect with the Author

  Find D.R. Perry Online

  Website: https://drperryauthor.com/

  Author Central: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00O6851HO

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drpperry/

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  Twitter: https://twitter.com/DRPerry22

  Also by D.R. Perry

  Providence Paranormal College

  Bearly Awake (Book 1)

  Fangs for the Memories (Book 2)

  Of Wolf and Peace (Book 3)

  Dragon My Heart Around (Book 4)

  Djinn and Bear It (Book 5)

  Roundtable Redcap (Book 6)

  Better Off Undead (Book 7)

  Ghost of a Chance (Book 8)

  Nine Lives (Book 9)

  Fan or Fan Knot (Book 10)

  Hawthorn Academy

  Familiar Strangers (Book 1)

  Gallows Hill Academy

  Year One: Sorrow and Joy (coming soon)

  For other books by DR Perry please see her Amazon author page.

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