She looked at me oddly for a moment. Her expression was ambiguous, but the love and pride rolling off her nearly bowled me over. “What?” I asked.
“You called me Mom.”
I groaned. “Don’t get used to it. It’s not like you ceased to be yourself and became this generic Mom person just because you pushed me out of your vag. You’re an individual, not a concept.”
She gave my shoulder an awkward squeeze. “But I like being your mom.”
“Go home,” I said with over-emoted tolerance. “You’re getting loopy.”
I herded her out to her car, kissed her on the forehead and shoved her behind the wheel. It wasn’t late-late by most people’s standards, but I felt like I’d been drinking all night, hooked up in the bathroom and then shot the shit till last call. But no. It was a quarter after eight.
I walked back toward the building and tapped out a smoke. As a new player in the retail game, I was painfully aware of the glut of Back to School ads coming at me from every angle. It was the first week of September. Heat radiated off the sidewalk but the nighttime air was cool now, and sunset came a little sooner each night. I lit up, leaned against the building, and wondered how it was possible to be so tired and so buzzed, all at once.
At my elbow, the door opened. Lydia, in jeans and a hoodie. “Heard lots of traffic on the stairs. Good day?”
“Haven’t counted out the drawer yet. But yeah. I think so.”
She pulled out her own smoke, propped herself against the wall beside me and glanced down at my hand. “You making some yoga gesture?”
I glanced down and noted that I’d been pressing my fingers into a mudra without giving it a moment’s thought. “Guess I’ll take my energy wherever I can get it.”
We stared out at traffic and we smoked together. While I lit a second cigarette, Lydia said, “You’ve changed. In a good way. Meditation, contemplation, maybe it’s not as exciting as nightclubs—”
“Nah, I’m more of a dive bar aficionado.”
“Anyway, I like it on you. It feels mature.”
“Heaven forbid.” I smiled to myself, vindicated. I hadn’t told her about Jacob’s parting remark, but hell, she was a precog. Maybe she’d heard it long before we finally parted ways. The weeks between then and now had flown by in the face of all the work I’d done—transitioning jobs, setting up the shop, and yeah, figuring out the whole meditation deal. I’d gone to Rainbow Dharma in hopes of drumming up business and ended up with a sitting practice. It cut into my precious drinking time, but I figured it was a price I’d have to pay if I wanted to run a metaphysical retail establishment. After all, I didn’t want to be like the sour old broad who’d sold me the smudge sticks. People turned to magic to improve their lives. No doubt they’d rather buy it from someone who could actually walk the walk.
“You haven’t asked my professional opinion about whether or not your shop will be successful, either.”
“Huh. That’s true.”
Lydia cut her eyes to me. “And you’re not going to.”
“Nope. I’ve made up my mind to do this thing, and I’m gonna do it. If you tell me I’ll be a wild success, I might get lazy and sabotage myself. And if it’s a huge flop, I’d rather not spend my time between now and then waiting to crash and burn.”
Chapter 37
Eventually, I settled into a groove. Setup was complete and I could run the show without Maxine’s help. It meant dealing with the public—and long days on my feet—but that was nothing new. Dare I say, I even enjoyed it.
Reviews began to trickle in. Four-star average on Yelp, and I’m guessing the one-star review dragging me down was just my competition trying to put me in my place. Even the wimp who freaked out over an intrepid daytime roach gave me a three for my scintillating customer service.
There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to the ebb and flow of customers. Some days, folks would be elbowing each other out of the way to get at the prayer candles or the incense burners, while others were just me and my lonesome watching the incense smoke dance in a sunbeam. Since I’m a people-person at heart, I used social media to fill the hole on those days when my customers ran thin. Why not? It was good exposure for the store. And if anyone gets off on filibustering a troll, it’s me.
The thing about naysayers is that I tend to see where they’re coming from. I was going back and forth with a guy on Twitter named BornSkeptic who claimed broadcast news was run by lobbyists, and found some of his points were actually valid, although the idealist in me refused to believe every last journalist is for sale. We were tweeting faster than my thumbs could keep up, and I’d retired to the old behemoth of a desktop in my office to out-type him. I was so deep in conversation that I almost missed the sway of the beaded curtain at my elbow that told me when the front door had been opened. A quick glance at my very own Buddha-cam image in the upper corner of my monitor showed Carolyn’s familiar blonde head as I finished my tweet.
“Crash?” she called out.
I added TTYL so my online buddy didn’t think he was getting in the last word, and stepped out into my store—my store—and razzed her for not having visited me since the opening. Except mostly I was taking in the surly guy who’d followed her in. His Vibe didn’t only scream out “Do me,” but “Do something nasty to me…I probably deserve it.”
He’d be tons of fun.
“This is my friend, Victor,” she told me. “We came to see you about healing.”
I’d been dabbling in energy work since I put my chakras in order. Still, I couldn’t legally call myself a healer, and she damn well knew it. But if mister tall, sulky and complicated was looking for a healer, I wasn’t about to correct her. His hair was black (natural, not bottle) and his eyes were a pale, cold blue. I’ve known plenty of posers in my time who put lots of effort into acting pouty and disaffected, but this guy wasn’t acting. Scared, angry, belligerent and sullen, and doing his best to look anywhere but at me. Because apparently he was pretty keen on what he saw…and he couldn’t afford the vulnerability of wanting anything.
I fired up a smoke and considered him. What a delightfully pungent melange of angst and need. If the subjects behind the acoustic dividers had been more like him, I would’ve scored that solid two. Hell, even a three or a four. I gestured for him to come closer and took stock of him. What would most non-empaths see, a guy with a frown line etched between his brows, which they’d interpret as anger? It was clear the feelings were nowhere near that simple.
Although there was a countertop between us, I held my hand up and stopped him before our energies mingled, and did my best to untangle the snarls as emotions rolled off him in great, churning clouds. It was like a home dye-job gone berserk, with neon oranges that wanted to be blond, and greens where the subtle brown lowlights should be. And I was the expert alchemist attempting to normalize the whole thing without leaving him a fried, broken mess.
“What is it?” Carolyn asked. “Do you see something?”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist, Little Miss PsyCop. I’m not in high gear all the time like you are.”
“Vic is psychic.”
Big newsflash. “Do you mind? I can do it myself.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
And I was trying to figure out where the hell to begin. I can’t see chakras, exactly. I’m not sure anyone actually sees a rainbow of spinning energy balls like they show in all the books. It’s just a visual representation of some other, less tangible sense. But clearing and balancing those energies would be the guy’s best start.
“He’s a medium,” Carolyn added.
I’d never met one in person, not that I knew of. But I’d read about them. “A big overblown TV antenna. Yeah. I get it.” Maybe that’s why I was feeling his feels so hard. You’d need a strong signal to breach the barrier of death itself. This Victor’s complexity went deeper than that, though. Carolyn took my silences as hesitation, but that wasn’t it. I couldn’t wait to jump in…just as soon as I figured out th
e lay of the land. “Okay, c’mere.” I grabbed him by the sleeve. His Vibe begged me to do more, to keep on pulling until I’d dragged him across the countertop and shoved my tongue in his mouth—but there’d be time for that later, once I figured out why he was practically spewing freakout. “Hold still. It’s not like I can see the problem written on your forehead.” Not exactly, anyway. His crown chakra was blazing. He squirmed in my grasp, and images blossomed in my mind’s eye: me holding him down, shoving his wrists into the narrow mattress while I had my wicked way with him. He’d struggle just like that. And he’d relish every second of it.
Carolyn would skin me alive for getting involved with another one of her friends, but even so, I couldn’t stop myself from flirting. “You’re not right,” I said, and was rewarded with a ramping up of his delicious discomfort as he pictured my tongue stud slithering down the side of his neck. How refreshing. The first thing most guys think about is their dick. I slid my fingers up the sleeve of his jacket, over the boniness of his wrist and the whisper of the hairs on his forearm. I was gearing up to make him an offer he couldn’t possibly refuse when I felt it: genuine distress. Something that went way beyond the delicate push-and-pull of seduction.
Well, fuck. I could hardly keep mashing on a guy who was truly upset. Not until I helped him get himself together, at least. His energies were as jumbled as a string of old Christmas tree lights. We’d have to deal with that before I could delve any deeper. “I’d do a gemstone cleanse first. And once that’s done, take a look at fine-tuning.”
He snorted, and an energetic wall slammed down between us. “That’s it?”
“I’m serious about the gemstone cleanse. If you really are a medium and not just a bullshit artist, it might even help you shield. Unless you live beneath high tension wires, in which case there’s nothing to do but move. It’s all energy: particles and electrons.”
“How can crystals help me shield?”
There were so many fun ways I could educate him—from the traditional uses of crystals in native ritual to the more recent findings on crystal structure in water responding to emotions—when the door banged open, and a certain unwelcome someone strode through in all his self-righteous glory.
And here my day had been going so well.
At the sight of Jacob, the playfulness inside me shriveled up and died. His jaw was grinding and he held himself so taut I could see a vein pulsing at his temple from across the fucking room. But was he angry or hurt? Did he miss me at all? Even a little? I took a jab at him to see what bled out. “Are you here to tell me you’re sorry, or are you just tagging along with Carolyn today?”
“I’m only the chauffeur,” he said dryly.
“How ridiculous, thinking an apology might come out of you, seeing as how you’re always right.”
“So can you help Victor, or is this just another waste of time?”
Oh, as if he was the only one who’d pissed away months of his life and had nothing to show for it. And the maddening part was, he didn’t really care. Carolyn was emanating waves of dread, while Victor seethed with discomfort. But Jacob? He was as still as the plaster effigy of Saint Anthony beside my front door, and just as cold.
Who knows why I thought he might have changed. I ignored his nasty looks as best I could, got the medium set up with a bag of rocks, and cleared them all out of the shop as quickly as humanly possible. Just as soon as the three of them were gone, I lit up a smudge stick. I walked up and down each aisle and aimed my sacred smoke at the four corners, and followed it up with a spritz from a house blessing aerosol can. It didn’t feel much different when I was done. Maybe the ritual would dispel nasty psychic juju. But the pall of seeing Jacob again? It would take a lot more than a smoldering twig to dispel.
Between the sage, the incense and a few Camels, the store was brimming with smoke, but maybe the rank energies reached a lot farther than its four walls. I was attempting to pry open a window that had been painted shut for at least as long as I’d been alive when my phone rang. Jacob. And I must’ve been in the mood to twist the knife, because I picked up. “What now?”
“You’d think that kid I found you with would be the worst part, but you know what I can’t wrap my head around? After everything we’d been through together, you still didn’t trust me.”
“Do I seem like an idiot to you? It doesn’t take a fifth-level empath to figure out you were all over me until I tanked in that fucking screening, and then suddenly you’re texting me flimsy excuses. You went from begging me to move in with you to blowing me off in the space of a weekend, and you know why? ’Cos you were never into me as a person to begin with. You had a hard-on for some idea of me you’d fabricated in your head.”
“Go check your empathy score before you start telling me how I feel.”
“Y’know what? I’m glad you texted your regrets that night instead of actually calling. Because over the phone, you do a plausible imitation of someone who actually gives a damn.”
He huffed at me like a bull pawing the ground, and hung up without another word. I took my frustration out on the window frame with a screwdriver. It looked like an axe murderer had gone at it, but eventually I gouged the fucking thing open. I sucked in a deep, cleansing breath. A gust of cooking grease filled my lungs, so rancid I literally gagged—and my gag reflex is minimal. As I dragged the window back down, I couldn’t help but ponder that maybe some things are better off left alone.
How disturbing that my wounds were still so fresh. It pissed me off, so I did what I always do when I need serious distraction, but I can’t go anywhere and I can’t start drinking yet: I poured myself into my work. Paperwork for Sticks and Stones multiplied faster than the vermin behind my medicine cabinet, so I parked myself in front of the desktop, regretfully closed my Twitter app, and set about determining why an elaborate claim form on a mangled delivery had been rejected.
I was deep into a mind-numbing field of checkboxes when I spied movement in my Buddha-cam. The walking ouija board was back, standing there at the counter staring at the crystals. And talking. I listened for a reply, hoping for Carolyn’s voice but dreading I’d hear Jacob’s. If either of them answered, I didn’t catch it. I enlarged the Buddha-cam window and checked all my aisles, but didn’t see anyone other than Victor. I waited a few moments more, then steeled myself against a surprise ambush from my pissy ex, and swept out to see what was what.
“Back for more?” I said.
Victor flinched and looked around. He appeared to be alone. He shuffled his feet, swallowed a few times, then said, “This crystal thing is new to me.”
Was he shitting me? “Carolyn said you were a Psych.”
“I’m certified, yeah.”
“And you can’t do a simple crystal cleanse?”
“They didn’t teach it where I trained.”
That was so implausible I would’ve figured he was just looking for an excuse to stop by for a quickie, except now his Vibe was reined in to a dull simmer. No doubt Jacob was cock blocking me, talking shit behind my back. Not blatantly, of course, that’s not his style. But a smooth insinuation that I was some kind of fraud would hardly show me in the best light. “Okay, fine. I’ll go through it with you step by step.”
“That’s all right.” He backed up and put some space between us. “Your assistant helped me figure it out.”
“Assistant?”
“The lady who works here,” he said. “I didn’t catch her name.”
Oh. I got it. This was all a test to see whether I was legit. “Don’t fuck around. I’m the only one who works here.”
“Whoever the woman in the flowered scarf is—her.”
Prior to that afternoon, I hadn’t met a real life psychic medium in the flesh, but I’d seen plenty of folks on TV talk shows playing up their ability to commune with the “other side.” They were no different from any other fake fortune-teller; they knew how to read people. I sense a female energy, they’d proclaim, and watch as their gullible subject got all chok
ed up. From there on, it was all guesswork. It feels like a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a friend. Casting the bait and waiting to reel the suckers in.
He ducked his head and said something under his breath. Maybe I hadn’t walked away with one of those coveted certificates like he had. But honestly. I wasn’t born yesterday.
He stopped muttering to himself and said, “Who’s Curtis?”
He had a flair for the dramatic. I’d give him that. “So Carolyn told you what my driver’s license says. Big fucking deal.”
“Who’s Miss Mattie, then?”
Mining info on me was one thing, but bringing Mattie into his ridiculous charade bordered on sacrilege. His recon was good—he’d figured out whose death to throw in my face. A less crafty charlatan would’ve trumped up an urgent message from my father, but this guy dredged up someone I actually missed. Acutely. Maybe Jacob wasn’t talking shit about me after all. Maybe he was setting me up to play the dupe. “Who told you that name?”
“The…um…full-figured African American woman told me. The one in the flowered scarf.”
Sure. “What color is her scarf?”
“I don’t know. Lots of colors.” He fumbled out an ancient flip-phone and pretended to get a text. “She went into your closet and I can’t see it anymore.”
I didn’t know which betrayal would sting worse, my ex’s or my friend’s. “Someone told you about her—who, Carolyn? Jacob? You’re all in this PsyCop bullshit together, aren’t you?”
“You could say that.” He turned and headed toward the door in response to his “urgent” missive.
“Where are you going?”
“Police business. Gotta go.”
“Oh, shit, you’re a cop, too?” My heart sank. “You don’t act like a cop—I thought you were just a consultant or something. Get the hell out here and leave me alone. I’ve had enough bacon to last me a lifetime. And tell Carolyn I don’t want to meet any more of her pig friends.”
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